A Sunny Sunday

Last night was when the time changed here so we lost an hour of sleep and woke up to a blue and white day – the sky was blue but the ground was still all white. It was quite stunning, really. We went to church at Filadelfia this morning and had no time for chit-chat afterwards because we were invited to Sunday dinner by Kory’s mom’s cousin, Terje Solevåg, who lives across the fjord in Sykkelven. He picked us up at the ferry (see photo I took out the window) so we didn’t have to pay for the car toll across the fjord (it’s not cheap), and we spent the entire afternoon and evening with him and his wife Lilia, all their kids and grandkids. Terje is very good at making us feel welcome and inviting his whole family over to greet the “American relatives” is all part of his routine. We like it a lot as it’s fun to watch his grandkids grow up. His oldest granddaughter, Matilda, is just a few months younger than Kaleb so the first time we were there, they shared a playpen together. She’s now nearly a head taller than him, as she’s growing up a little faster than Kaleb. Her younger brother, Jorgen, is slim so I’ve been passing all of Kaleb’s clothes on to him. I was so hoping Kaleb would play with them today, but he was shy for some reason. On past visits he’s never been able to speak with them, but now that he can, he just sat and watched TV all day (I guess that’s what happens when we don’t have a TV at home.) Terje is the family history buff and he loves doing ancestral research as much as I do. One time when we were here visiting he took us around to all the farms on Kory’s mom’s side of the family. He’s a good resource for me and for once, I was able to understand him and talk back to him without having to use Kory as a translator. I guess the Norwegian lessons are making a difference on some level, even if my grammar stinks.

Matilda’s dad, Lars, works on an off-shore oil platform so I asked him a bit about it. He’s been doing that job for 19 years now and he works for two weeks straight, 12 hour shifts, then gets four weeks off. The company he works for flies him to wherever he is working, then takes him in a helicopter out to sea. He works with a guy from Montana who flies to Norway every four weeks for work, then flies home again. Lars said that’s normal. One guy he knows lives in Thailand and works in Norway on an oil platform. It’s good money too – more than the average wage for most workers in Norway, but I think it’s tough on marriages. Most the women I go to school with have husbands that work on oil platforms, and all their husbands are divorced and most found their new wives via the internet. Lars says life on the platform is pretty good as they have a movie theatre, internet café, the best food, laundry service, maid service, everything – and it’s all free. He said there’s more going on out there than there is in Aalesund at any given time. There are about a hundred people working on the platform he’s at right now, just off shore from Bergen. They are doing some test drilling to see if they can find oil, and if they find it, they set the pipes in for production, then move on to the next location (it’s a floating platform built just for exploration).

The oil industry is HUGE business here in Norway and it’s what makes this country so darn rich. Norway is the second largest producer of oil, just behind Saudi Arabia. They have so much money from the oil industry they don’t know what to do with it all. I think they have recently lost a lot of it in all the investments going sour around the world, but a few years ago they had enough in profit to give every person in the whole country five thousand dollars (they didn’t do it however.) Three years later that number jumped to forty thousand dollars and last year it was over a hundred thousand dollars, per person. As in America, the politicians keep trying to get their hands on the money to use for different things, but there is a special governing board that decides how the money will be used. Right now they say it’s just to guarantee the pension for all the workers in the nation, so they are investing it in different things for the long haul. I'm sure they could buy Iceland if they wanted to. I think their goal is to not use it though – it’s so typical Norwegian. I’m sure Kory still has the first dollar he ever earned stuffed in a shoe somewhere.…

Kory’s left wrist swelled up today from arthritis. He’s been moaning and rubbing it quite a bit so tonight he went over to see “Dr. Odd” –his cousin. Odd told him not to go to work tomorrow and to wrap it up and keep it warm and immobile. Kory thinks it will be better by morning. I hate when he gets these little bouts because I can see he is in a lot of pain and there’s not much I can do – or him for that matter. He usually just sits and groans. I think he likes the pain sometimes because it goes with his default mode of thinking that “life shouldn’t be too good.” And we have it pretty good.