Pinse

19 May 2013

Today is Pentecost – the day the Holy Spirit came down from heaven and rested upon the disciples.  It’s a holy day in Norway so tomorrow everyone has the day free from work, since no one works Sundays anyway.  This is why it’s a four-day weekend.  Everyone has gone to their cabins because their “independence day” was Friday and even the stores were only open a few hours on Saturday to refuel, but otherwise it’s one quiet weekend in the city.

We stayed with Sigrunn and Bent last night (below) and had another lovely breakfast on the patio complete with sunshine and birds singing.  All the flowering trees have just exploded in the last two days as it looked like winter just a week ago.  Spring is late this year and all the talk is around how glad everyone is it’s finally here.

We picked Bent’s brain a bit more on details of Norwegian life and culture to see if there’s more ideas I can get for future articles.  The intricacies of Norwegian systems are very complicated and unique.  They have many political parties and a new one just started up which will be on the ballot in August for their next election.  It’s a Christian party, even though they already have a Christian party, this is a new one based on Biblical principals that want to bring back prayer in school, support only Israel and not both Israel and Palestine, restrict gay marriage and abortion.  The current Christian party is not very powerful and far too liberal for many as all those things mentioned happened on their watch and they did nothing to try and stop them.  Bent thinks it’s not good to have two parties that call themselves Christians because it will divide the vote and make them less effective.  We’ll see.

When we left Sigrunn’s house after a rousing political discussion there, we went and had lunch with her cousin, Bente and husband Geir.  Geir is a hopeful politician running in this new Christian party and according to him, the guy that started it was told by God they will win the election this August.  Oh how I pray that will happen, which would be a miracle because no one has really even heard of this new party and when they do, I’m sure they will think it’s to conservative for Norway’s lifestyle.  Geir gave me some pamphlets to pass out on our road trip to people we meet so they will learn about it.  Yes!  We’ll be part of the revolution!  (Ha – most parties here are so similar it’s laughable but there are some fringe elements and a few basic ones that are different.)  We’re happy to do what we can to help, though.

Geir is a ham radio operator so he turned on his equipment and let Kaleb talk to some radio boy scouts camping on an island off the coast of Denmark.  Kaleb thought it was pretty cool, especially since Geir uses the ionosphere to bounce his signals off of and that’s the area of physics Kaleb works with in his apprenticeship job back home.

We’d gone to Bente and Geir’s house because they wanted me to sample a Norwegian delicacy called ROKFISK so I could write about it in my column.  I didn’t know at the time it was raw trout, covered in salt and buried in the ground for a month or two while the meat literally rots.  The smell of their house proved that something had died there, but we just thought someone had been sitting on the toilet for a while before we got there.  It was a stink that surpassed any stink we had smelled and it didn’t smell like fish.  Fortunately, I was spared that tasty experience because Bente had it in the freezer and she said it tasted a little freezer burnt and how she could tell that, I don’t know, but thankfully we didn’t have to eat it.  Whew.  Instead we had coffee out on their patio and enjoyed another sun filled day, which actually caused us to be late to the next relatives house.

Tønsberg is an hour or so south of Oslo and is considered the oldest settlement in Norway with all kinds of Viking places and pre-viking places nearby.  Kory’s cousin Reidunn invited us down, so we had dinner out in her lovely yard with her sister and another cousin, both also down from Oslo for the night in order to spend time with us.  Before we could get half way through eating, a black cloud appeared and the rain really came down!  We scurried under the awning of her deck and finished up our dinner and conversation.  We talked about all kinds of things – from the number of Kory’s aunts that were mentally ill to all the different political parties and what they stand for.   It’s interesting to see just how varied people’s responses are to different hot topics.  Some have even said they feel they live in a police state as they feel they are not free to really express their opinions about certain things.  That’s kinda scary to hear.  There’s a lot of unrest in people that’s not being expressed because of all the social pressure to conform and agree with what the politicians are doing.  Oi. 

Reidunn’s house is full of old treasures – some coming from Slaatthaugen – Kory’s dad’s home.  She showed me a church book from 1816 that has been in the family all this time. 

In the old days, the church, which was the government also, published a book of sermons so that every church in the land would be taught the same thing at the same time – their take on what the scriptures meant.  Each family also had this book because if they couldn’t make it to church due to illness or bad weather, the father of the home had to read the same text to their family.  So this is the book that’s been handed down, and each owner of the book had to sign and date some statement in the back of it, so we saw the signature of Kaleb’s great great great grandfather, dated 1845 – which I thought was pretty darn cool.  There were other such treasures, too as her house is like a museum.  So my style.

So we had a nice evening with the three old ladies, who are close to Kory’s age – ha!, and they too are having a sleepover here as they take the train back to Oslo in the morning.  We stay on one more night before we head out to Slaatthaugen!