A new motto (Tromsø, Norway)

"There's no such thing as bad weather, only bad clothing."

If I told you that I had spent 1554 Norwegian kroner -- that's $265 -- on two pairs of long underwear, two undershirts, and three pairs of socks, you might guffaw in disbelief or, worse, hit me repeatedly over the head with any heavy, blunt object within your reach, screaming, "Think of the starving children! Think how much food you could buy for them with that money! Think of the medication you could buy for the sick!" until I cracked and fell to my knees, sobbing in guilt.

That's why it's good that you, reader, are so far away from me, and I am in Norway, where it is normal to wear a "second skin" that costs more than a plane ticket. The box in which my long underwear came claimed that they might become my "new best friend." Wenche, with whom I stayed in Oslo, and I thought that that was kind of pathetic -- clearly they were meant for misanthropes who used Norway's snowy wilderness as a retreat from pesky humanity and who had no breathing, warm-blooded friends.

WE WERE WRONG. I LOVE my long underwear. I'm seriously considering naming both pairs, so that my future housemate can say, "Irene, don't forget to bring Otto/Bruno with you when you go outside!" and mean, "Irene, wear your long underwear, forgetful non-Norwegian fool!" My legs owe their continued existence to Otto and Bruno, just as I owe my life to Wenche, who gave me (yes, gifted me with) an old winter coat of hers. These cost more than all of my underclothes combined, and I nearly hyperventilated when I first tried to go shopping for one. When I told Wenche what a traumatic experience I'd had ("They're so EXPENSIVE. I just can't believe that they're so EXPENSIVE. I didn't know things could be so EXPENSIVE." -- sometimes I fixate), she said, "Irene, I have a coat that I don't use anymore. If it fits you, it's yours." Can you imagine?!

Wenche, if you are reading this, thank you again . . . and again and again and again. You win the 2009 Generosity Award -- a most difficult prize to get, considering the wonderfully giving people I've met during this trip.

Now that I'm on the topic of nice people: When I was in Oslo, everyone I met was thrilled when I said that I was going to be living in Tromsø. "People there are so open!" "The Northerners are the friendliest!" "You'll see -- everyone will want to give you something." In the day and a half that I've been here, I've confirmed these claims. Exhibit A: My CouchSurfing host, Brynjulv, who is letting me stay in his and his girlfriend's apartment for three weeks while they are on vacation in the Netherlands and Spain. He has given me the long version of the newbie orientation session, complete with marked map, photos, and handy vocabulary. Thanks to him, I know what food is cheap (mainly fish), at what grocery stores it's cheapest, and where I should go if I need, e.g., a cheap monthly bus pass. (Do you notice a pattern? I am a bit anxious about the cost of living in Norway.) He is also a very pleasant fellow and who reads sci-fi and enjoys a good bar of chocolate.

Exhibit B: People on the street. I have asked several strangers for directions or about buildings, and they always stop to give me detailed answers. One man didn't know the street I was looking for, and pointed me towards some other people a ways away. After they had told me which way to go, I looked back, and the man was still standing there, half a block away, to make sure I had been able to figure it out! I nodded and waved to him, and he went along his way.

Exhibit C: People off the street. Today, in the Tromsø public library, which I will rave about in the next paragraph, a man sitting at a computer using the internet noticed that I was looking at the internet sign and stood up, saying, "You want to use computer?" I can't for the life of me imagine the same situation in the United States. Nobody would offer to give their place at a public computer to a stranger before they had finished whatever they were doing (important things like watching YouTube videos of people slipping on banana peels). Such an act would be beyond considerate and go into the realm of self-sacrificing; here it is the norm.

So: There's no dearth of kindliness in Tromsø. There's also no dearth of books, movies and music. As I was exploring today, I passed by a beautiful, large building with a double arched roof and glass walls -- it was the bibliotek! And what a bibliotek it is. Four floors of books in all sorts of exotic languages (like Norwegian and Finnish); the entire bottom floor is for children, full of color and games and pictures on the walls. It was on this floor that I found "Harry Potter og de Vises Stein" in both book AND CD formats. My master plan is to listen and read simultaneously until I am fluent in Norwegian. I estimate that this will take about a week.

But back to the library: It is so easy to get a library card in Tromsø that I was not surprised that the library was bustling with (quiet, considerate) activity. All I had to present was a student ID and an address. I warned the attendant that my address would be changing in three weeks; she smiled and said, "Oh, no problem! Just come and change the address in your file when you move." No fee, no processing time -- I checked "Harry Potter" out minutes after I had entered the library for the first time. This is how public services should be! Accessible and well-maintained, with a helpful staff and a comfortable environment. I plan to spend many an hour at the public library. Maybe I will make some geeky bookish friends.

The rest of Tromsø is just as beautiful as the library. It is a small city, full of nice shops and restaurants, sparkling with Christmas lights and the lit-up windows of houses. A big bridge connects the island to the mainland, and the view from the center of the bridge is stunning -- towards the mainland, you can see the faint outlines of snow-covered mountains looming over the yellow lights of streets and buildings, and, in the other direction, Tromsø looks like an illuminated electric blanket warming up the hillside. (They don't make long underwear for hillsides; it needs some warming up.)

The only bone I have to pick with Tromsø is that it is Too Dark. Latitude is no excuse -- there's no reason for it to be nighttime twenty hours a day. I woke up this morning at 8:30 and had one of the severest internal struggles of my life: to get up and dressed and go outside IN THE DARK? Or to stay in bed, in pajamas, trying to sleep until the sky told me that I should do otherwise? In the end, my better half won, and I was out the door by 11:00 (after eating breakfast with Brynjulv), even though it was still dawn. I walked until the sun was setting again -- actually, it never goes above the horizon, but a suggestion of the sun rises and sets -- at 1:00 pm, came back to the apartment to have lunch, and wandered for another few hours in the dark, feeling wild and daring.

It's not just me who is thrown off by the darkness! I spoke with Brynjulv and one of his friends about it today, and they said that their sleep schedules become irregular in the winter; they just don't know when they are supposed to get into and out of bed, since it always looks like sleepy-weepy time (my words, not theirs). Brynjulv's friend works odd hours (5:00 am - 11:00 am), so not even his job helps keep him synchronized with the rest of the population, which is more or less active between 9:00 and 5:00 (and later, of course, in the bars). Wenche in Oslo said that she sleeps much more in the winter than in the summer -- up to two hours more in the winter! She doesn't need as much sleep in the summer. Her body functions without it. I, obsessive recorder of banal events, almost always write down my wake-up hour in my agenda. I wonder if I will notice that I'm sleeping more in the next few weeks than I did in Mexico, and I wonder if I will start sleeping less after late January, when the sun reappears.

In any case, I will henceforth force myself to get out of bed as soon as my eyes open, lest my weaker half look out the window and try to convince me to stay put, and my long underwear, Otto and Bruno, will have lots of fun traipsing around town with me. We (Otto, Bruno and I) almost forgot: Happy winter solstice! Welcome, waxing days!