"Thank you for being a friend"

I find it a little difficult to make friends. This might come as a surprise as I lay out little blips of my life on the internet for all to read, and I spend my professional life standing in front of groups of people and often share things about myself to make a point. But it’s hard for me to open up and invest in a real friendship.

I suspect there are many reasons for this, but primarily because I am quite private and it takes me a while to warm up to folk. Conversely, it also takes others time to warm to me. I’m actually pretty shy, particularly in one-on-ones, and sometimes this gives people the impression I am standoff-ish, so I know when I find a real friend that it isn’t something to take lightly.

And here in Norway, I have been lucky to find quite a few real friends.

Making friends as an expat is a little different than in ‘real life’. It’s like going on a camping trip and bonding with a complete stranger based on your mutual experience of hardship*. Friendships are approached quickly, and sometimes you find yourself friends with people you might never have back home.

This is a tricky thing as, after a while, you realize that mutual nationality or shared expat woe is not enough of a foundation for a real relationship. There has to be some meat on the bones to sustain things. Some of those friendships naturally wane, but sometimes you get past the surface and realize there’s a real connection. I have made a lot of friends that I never would have back home – not because they are not wonderful people with a lot to offer, but because we might never have had occasion to cross paths in other circumstances. And I am thankful for those friendships.

This week marks the departure of another dear friend. I say ‘another’ as this is the third person that I am really close to who is bidding Stavanger adieu. I also know that there are more goodbyes to come in the near future. Part of this is due to the economy (expats, lovely though they may be, are expensive) and part to do with other life decisions.

I visited the soon departing friend yesterday to take some stuff off her hands, and I am ashamed to say I almost had a little cry while I was there. Even though I have had to say goodbye to many friends over the years, either because I was moving on or they were, it never really gets easier. I didn’t think my tears would help an already difficult situation, so I sucked it up and smiled. I waited til I got home to have a little weep**.

I would like to say I was weeping for altruistic reasons, but the truth is I was weeping just as much for myself as anything else. It hurts to be left behind. I know my friendships don’t end when someone boards a plane, but things do change. And part of what makes being an expat enjoyable is the people with whom you experience it. I am sure I would be singing a different hymn about the joys of living abroad if I had not been fortunate enough to make the acquaintance of so many amazing people.

I wish I had some poetry to throw at the situation, but the truth is, it just sucks.

So to the soon departing friend, the departures yet to come, those that have already left, and those that don't plan on going anywhere, thank you for being my friend. Thanks for bringing something to my life that wouldn’t have been there without you.

This is not goodbye, but merely ‘see you later’.
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* I know not everyone would buy into my camping example as hardship, but my idea of camping is a hotel without room service. We all have different scales.
** I am a crier. This surprises a lot of folk as I might appear to be quite, well, be-atchy, but I am actually a big old softie. Anyone who has had to witness one of my birthday or Thanksgiving speeches (painfully teary but thankfully brief) can attest to this.

23 minutes

So an American drives into a tunnel...

No, this isn’t the start of a bad joke, but rather an experience I had just this week. I left work at 4pm on Tuesday forgetting it was the start of Norwegian ‘rush hour’.

The four o’clock hour used to signal that the afternoon part of my workday was halfway over (I worked a lot, what can I say?), but in Norway it signals the revving of the engines for the journey home. It still feels like I am cheating someone if I leave at 4, but when in Rome and all that.

I live 3.2 kilometers from my office (yes, exactly - I tracked it), so it normally takes me less than ten minutes to jet between the two locations. But Tuesday… oh, Tuesday. On Tuesday, I lost 23 minutes (yes, I tracked that, too) of my life that I shall never get back.

I entered the aforementioned tunnel, which is just over a kilometer long, and realized immediately I had made a grave mistake. There is normally a bit of a back up, but as I was one car length in, it became apparent that there was something wrong. I sat in the same position for about 2 minutes, edged forward a car length, another two minutes… lather, rinse, repeat.

After about ten minutes of tunnel crawling, my seatbelt began to feel a little tighter, my forehead started to throb, my chest tighten. I swerved my head every which way to see what was holding up the line (I even tried to lean out of my sunroof, much to the amusement of nearby tailgaters and much to my shame in the recollection).

What was blocking the way?

How long would it take to get through?

Why was no one moving?

Why didn't I go to the bathroom before I left work?

Now I am not a laid-back person even at the best of times. But the gripping ambiguity of the situation was sending me over the edge quickly*. So why was this 23-minute experience so fraught with anxiety?

Dutch researcher and all around culture guru Geert Hofstede says that there are five dimensions to culture, with one being the concept of uncertainty avoidance. Hofstede describes uncertainty avoidance as the ability to handle vagueness and ambiguity and ultimately reflects an individual’s quest for Truth (with a capital T). My quest for Truth that day was really just to know how many minutes I was going to have to sit in my car before the sweet, sweet respite of gray daylight emerged from the other end.

According to Hofstede’s research, Americans tend to have a high tolerance for uncertainty and do not need to know the ‘what comes next’ in every situation in order to feel comfortable and secure. Clearly Hofstede did not ask me about this predilection. Norwegians also fall into this same category, meaning they do not believe in one ‘best way’ of finding Truth. Because I didn’t personally identify with either of those situations, I did a little digging to see with which country I was most closely aligned when it comes to uncertainty avoidance.

It would appear I share a philosophical kinship on this topic with China.

Who knew?

The bottom line is that I have learned my lesson and will no longer leave the office at the same time as every other Stavanger Sentrum employee. I will no longer enter a tunnel when I can see it is already backed up. And if I do enter said tunnel, I will not have a flat out panic attack if I don’t move along quicker than 3 kilometers an hour. Instead, I will think about Hofstede and the fact that a billion other Chinese people would likely be panic attacking right along with me. Even if it is 23 minutes I will never get back, it’s not the end of the world either.
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* I realize this makes me sound like a crazy person, but I promised to always tell the truth in this blog. And the truth is, I am a crazy person. I just usually do a better job of hiding it.

Death and taxes

Only two things are certain in life... there’s little we can do about the first but wait, but for the second… well, there’s little we can do there either.

A common complaint of expatriates living in Norway is the notion that income taxes are sky high. This is true, compared to say, Qatar, where there are no personal income taxes (PIT), or Paraguay, where PIT maxes out at 10%. But is Norway really much higher than other countries? Some nifty little wizards at KPMG have compiled a report addressing just that.

According to the 2009 Individual Income Tax and Social Security Rate Survey, Norway has a PIT rate* of 40%, the UK 40%, and the US 35%**. However, these are not the highest PIT rates. Denmark has a PIT rate of 62.3%, Sweden 56.7%***, Netherlands 52%, and Austria, Belgium, and Japan 50%. But that’s only part of the story.

When you consider a combination of the highest tax rates based both on personal income tax and social security tax, the highest-taxed locations might surprise you (well, it did me, but I am easily surprised). KPMG found that “When taking both the personal income tax rate and social security rates into account for employees earning 100,000USD, the countries with the highest rates were Slovenia (54.9 percent), Croatia (53.5 percent) and Hungary (48.1 percent).”

In fact, if you consider both PIT and social security tax, on 100,000USD of gross income, one would pay 32.9% in Norway and 25.3% in the US. While a difference of more than 7% might seem quite large, it is worth noting that I am getting a lot for that 7.6% differential in Norway. I am pretty sure that difference is worth inexpensive-to-free health care, subsidized-to-free childcare and schooling, and even a gratis university education from a public institution (how I wish I would have had this kind of benefit before Sallie Mae and I met).

There’s really nothing witty or clever to joke about regarding tax rates so I won’t bother trying (although please feel free to comment if you do have some humor to share about this). However, it’s good to know that I am not being gouged by the Norsk tax system quite as badly as I thought I was. Cheers, Norge!
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For some reason a discussion of taxes requires a lot of footnotes. Of course it does.
* Note that this is the highest tax rate in countries with graduated tax systems.
** This is the federal tax rate only and does not take into account state income taxes.
***The PIT rates for Denmark and Sweden include a social security component as this is rolled into the PIT rate. They get a lot of free stuff for their tax dollars so don't feel too sorry for them.

Kan du snakke norsk?

I've been a bit slack on the blogging for the last week, partly due to my lack of Nyquil and persistent illness (the hacking cough is starting to...umm... hack off those around me now). The main reason I've been lax, however, is because I have returned to work after the summer sabbatical. I am a professor at a business school, and, while the money is not great and the glamour even less so, it affords me summers off, which is worth more than a salary offers.*

This week marked the return of the students, and it meant this chick had to get back to work. It's a tough job sometimes as I feel I am quite low-brow most of the time, based solely on my love for tabloid newspapers and crappy gossip sites. I have had to get back into the swing of things and 'academic' myself up again. See you next summer, Perez Hilton!

Part of the back-to-school process involves meetings. Lots and lots of meetings. Usually by October I have reverted to my usual policy regarding meetings, which is to avoid whenever possible. But in my start-of-term exuberance, I try to show up for the biggies to be a team player. This week I have spent at least ten hours in meetings. That alone would normally be enough to make me tear my hair out, but added into the mix are the fact these meetings are all in Norwegian.

This would seem an obvious thing since I am, after all, in Norway.

But I have whiplash from transitioning from English to Norwegian, and have been ingesting headache tablets at an alarming rate as a result. Let me lay it on the table - I am rubbish with Norwegian. For the first year and a half I lived here, I avoided learning any Norwegian at all. It's so easy to do as 95% of Norwegians speak English beautifully. But when I took my new job, I felt a large chasm between me and the rest of the staff due to my self-imposed language barrier.

Don't get me wrong - everyone was and is so kind to me, always offering to translate the important things or help me when I look confused (which is more often than not). But I felt I was an outsider since there always had to be a break in the meeting for Boss to ask if I understood. I didn't want to be singled out and I didn't want to create any additional work for others, so I resolved to learn some Norsk.

I first signed up for a Norwegian course at a local learning center. It met for 3 hours one night a week. I made it through the first 45 minutes of session one and left, never to return. The problem was really ego. Those who teach are usually the worst at being taught.** So the following week I hired a private tutor and spent the next six months taking lessons twice a week.

Because it was one-on-one, I dictated what I wanted to learn. I spent hours with Tutor translating work emails, academic articles, and textbooks. The result is that I have a fairly large vocabulary of management-related words, but I have absolutely no idea how to string them into a sentence, as mundane things like grammar and tense bored me.

This means I can follow a meeting by picking up keywords and context, but I would be hard pressed to muster up much more conversation than a four year old Norwegian child (and that might even be over-estimating my abilities a bit). It also means that I am always five minutes behind and 50% off topic when in meetings as I take far too long translating things in my head.

Recently the Norwegian Directorate of Integration and Diversity (IMDi) published a study detailing integration results for foreigners living in Norway. In this report, they note that "Numerous studies... document the need for better Norwegian language skills among many immigrants who have been resident in Norway for some years. (p.19)"

I'm not surprised. I am pretty certain I am one of those immigrants they're talking about. In my own work as a cultural researcher and academic, whenever I speak about cultural integration in a business context, I always emphasize the importance of learning the local language, even if your own language is widely spoken. It's about understanding nuance and meaning and removing barriers to relationships. I am embarrassed to say I have not sufficiently done that.

This all boils down to the fact that I've got to sort it out and suck it up and find myself a classroom to sullenly skulk in to so I can learn properly. It won't be fun, nor easy, but I have to practice what I preach. Jeg må prøve, you know.
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* I stand by this statement. I have worked for a lot more money and gained an ulcer, so working for less money but more freedom reaps its own rewards in my book. I certainly spend less on antacids and therapy now.
** I just didn't think smacking on the CD that came with the textbook and playing it for 20 minutes straight was a teaching technique with which I could get on board. I'm fussy like that.

For the love of doxylamine succinate*

I have a secret. It’s a drawer in my bedroom filled with every American over-the-counter drug from Anacin to Zantac. Every time I return to the States, I buy bumper packs of pain relievers and cough drops, much to the amusement of the pharmacy checkout clerk. But I never really get sick so I don’t often open the drawer.

This past week, though, I have been ILL. Of course it’s nothing exotic like the swine flu, but just a plain old summer cold. It started in my chest and has now settled, days later, in my head, causing ferocious sneezing, hacking and wheezing.

I finally broke down today and wobbled to the local pharmacy, desperate for a fix of some OTC goodness. The pharmacist patiently explained the different potions, but the net result is she had something to make the cough stop, something to make the cough start, and some feeble saline nasal spray which I suspect does nothing more than wet an already soppy place. I kept asking, over and over, “But don’t you have anything that will help ALL my symptoms?” The blank look said it all.

Sensing her good humor might soon wane, I scooped up the ‘stop coughing’ cough syrup and went on my way. I figured between that and the contents of my secret drawer I could cobble together an approximation of what I wanted.

I am one of those annoying long-term expats who always spouts off lofty things to my fellow foreigners such as “You can find everything you need here in Norway!”, “There’s always a substitute!”, or “There’s nothing from the US I can’t live without!” Turns out I have been beaten and these sentiments are not true when it comes to cold medicine.

That being said, I came home with my second rate cough syrup and pulled out the recently emptied bottle of Nyquil I finished off two days ago. Reading each line of the ingredients of the Nyquil, I managed to scrounge a similar drug out of the secret drawer. After necking about 8 tablets of varying medications, slurping the Norwegian cough syrup, and topping it all off with a swig of Cognac** (hey, Nyquil is 10% alcohol, you know), I settled in and waited for sweet respite.

It didn’t come. Instead I ended up with a sore tummy, a fuzzy head, and the same sneezing, hacking, and wheezing as before.

So to every expat that I have every smugly rebuffed for bemoaning something they missed from home, I take it all back. While I do still think you can whip up biscuits and gravy or a Thanksgiving dinner with close Norwegian approximations, I have learned that there is, in fact, something I can’t recreate here. But I am receiving my just desserts as I lay in a pajama-ed heap on the couch listening to repeats of Murder She Wrote.

Perhaps I didn’t get the cocktail just right… another swig or three of whiskey might just do the trick!***
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* Doxylamine suucinate is the 'so you can rest' part of Nyquil. It's classified as a hypnotic, and since I never got into the hallucinogens during college, this is the cloeset I will likely come to a drug-induced state of bliss.

** Please note I have no medical expertise other than what I have read on Web MD, so I do not recommend this concoction.

*** To be fair, you can get cough syrup with codeine with a prescription from a doc here in Norway, but since I am allergic to codeine this is of little comfort. I am also allergic to visiting my doctor, incidentally.

What I like about Norway

I recently read a post on a message board from a new expat begging someone to tell him why he should stay in Norway. My short answer to that is this: if you don’t know yourself, you probably aren’t meant to be here.

But, as usual, there’s a longer answer as well. So I asked myself: Why do I like living in Norway?

1. Because my husband and dogs are here.
Sure, they could be anywhere, and I’d likely be happy in that anywhere as well. But the fact of the matter is that they are in Norway, so that’s where I want to be. When living as an expat it can be easy to feel isolated, and one of the most significant areas of discontent is often the loss of relationships ‘back home’. But if your most important relationships are with you, you realize you could be living in Norway, Namibia, or North Dakota and it wouldn’t really matter.

2. Because it’s safe.
I mean that in a small and big picture sort of way. For example, I never worry, no matter the time of day, about being out by myself walking my dogs. The worst thing that might happen is I get some boisterous shouts from a drunken reveler heading to a party. When I used to walk my dogs in the evening in Houston, I loaded up with pepper spray and an outward facing key in my fist and practically dragged the dogs around the block with the speed of an Olympic sprinter as I was so nervous*.

That’s not to say crime doesn’t occur here – it does. The figures are lower in Stavanger than Oslo (as makes sense based on population size), but when you compare Norwegian national averages to the US, the numbers are unsettling. Although Norway has more guns per capita than the US, the US has almost four times as many gun-related deaths**. I'm just sayin'...

3. Because there are stars.
Yeah, I know that the stars are up there no matter where I am down here, but I had never really seen them until I moved to Norway. My husband (who grew up in rural and therefore smogless England) looked at me in disbelief as I gleefully pointed out all the twinkling in the sky. Truth is, between the concrete and the pollution, I had never been able to see the stars so clearly. In general, the air quality here is amazing***.

4. Because I met myself.
That sounds pretty strange, but a lot of the trappings of my daily life back in the US prevented me from really being able to know who I was. I hid behind appointments and activities and politics. When I came here to Norway, one of the most difficult things was being alone with nothing else to distract me from myself. I realized that, at almost 30, I wasn’t entirely sure who I was – or who I wanted to be. It can be hard to have to meet yourself for the first time, especially when you are less than thrilled about what you see. But stripping away all the excess meant I could start to rebuild with a solid foundation. And, frankly, I was a bit of a pill before. Now at least I am a self-aware pill!

There are lots of other little things I like about Norway (like caviar in a tube, ferries, fjords, and May 17th, to name a few), but the bottom line is that Norway isn’t what’s holding me back or propping me up. I am responsible for my own happiness, not the place in which I live. Just remember the old saying:

“Everywhere you go… there you are.”

I’m stuck with me regardless of place, so I might as well make the best of it… and myself. So to the gent looking for someone to tell him why he should live in Norway, live here for the experience, for the stars, for the caviar in a tube. Live here because you WANT to live here instead of living here and always looking for that greener grass elsewhere. I can promise you’ll always find something wrong, but if you focus on everything this country has to offer, then you just might stumble across something right.

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* What I ever actually planned to do with the pepper spray and key I don’t know. Perhaps I could have just handed them off to my potential assailant as barter.
** I’m not making a political statement about gun control here but rather using these statistics to illustrate a point. It could be statistics related to any crime and you would note the same general trend, which is that there’s a lot in the US and a little in Norway, even when you look at it on a per-capita basis.
** Except when the fish food factory smell blows in from Hillevåg. If you live in Stavanger, you know what I mean!

The worst drivers in the world... well, at least in Norway

Stavanger’s Aftenbladet published an article today alleging that drivers in Rogaland are among the worst in Norway. And here, after I just berated the media for over-sensationalizing, comes a sliver of truth from the press. (You can read the article in English via Google Translate here. An imperfect translation, but you get the gist.)

Words like aggressive and impatient and uninformed were bandied about based on interviews with sociologists, insurance specialists and various other 'in the know' folk. And, frankly, I can’t say that I disagree.

Normal mild-mannered and gentle Norwegians become lotharios behind the wheel. They throw themselves in front of you at high speeds, fail to use their indicators (and mirrors, natch), and they cut you off with little to no notice.

I’m not judging my adopted countrymen too harshly as I have a wreck or two or nine in my checkered past. But after I paid out the gross domestic product of Swaziland* on insurance deductibles I had a ‘come to Jesus’ moment with myself and tried to sort out my bad driving.

I have had several scrapes in Norway, primarily to do with roundabouts. It would appear that no one ever taught my lovely Norwegian compadres how they work, so I am taking this chance to lay out the rules once and for all. (Hopefully this will absolve my need to shout at my fellow drivers when they break the rules of rundkjøringen from now on.)

1. You yield to the person on your left. It is not true that he who enters first, wins.

2. You do not wait in a roundabout. If there is not room for you to pass through the roundabout to your onward road, do not, for the love of cookies, enter the roundabout. If you do, you will just jam it up for everyone else.

3. Use your blinker to indicate where you will be exiting the roundabout. Whipping into the roundabout and careening off an exit with no notice is a recipe for a crash.

I know there are a lot more rules, but if we could just nail those first three, I’d be pretty chuffed. I know you can do better than this, Rogaland!
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*This is hyperbole. I do not know what the GDP of Swaziland is. Nor do I intend to look it up. Feel free to post if you stumble across the info though, and we can all learn something.