Hei! fra Norge

We’ve seen more industry here than I’d ever think to pursue as a tourist.  The shipyard, plus a tour of Tinfos, a mining company in Kvinesdal on the outskirts of Flekkeford.  Watching molten metal being poured, cooled and stacked has a very MadMax feel to it, especially through safety goggles.

 Then there’s the leather tannery, which has existed in Flekkefjord since the 1800s.  I found the limits of my integrity there.  In the beginning of the tour, I vowed over the smelly, hairy hides that I’d be using fabric in the future; toward the end of the tour, I was grabbing the prettiest blue sample I could get my hands on.

But we’re enjoying the more touristy side of Flekkefjord, if one exists.  Harald, Steven’s host, took us out on the fjord in his 37′ boat.  Somehow I ended up designated driver, and I steered us past salmon farms, rocky cliffs, quaint summer houses, and even a pink castle.  The weather was perfect — sunny until a light sprinkle that generated a faint rainbow, almost too poetic to be real.

Yesterday we took a ferry to the island of Hidra, dotted with charming villages and one beautiful old church.  At any given fork in the road, Johann would say, “Steven, what does the map say?” which usually resulted in a lot of sputtering.  We took a tour of the church, then walked through the more picturesque villages before climbing to the top of the highest hill (”mountain” in American English), where an abandoned German fortress overlooked the North Sea.  Toha, one of our hosts, explained the size of the cannons and the use of various structures, and I hope I looked like I absorbed it as well as, say, Steven.  Of course, when he started to describe what our buffet lunch would offer, I perked right up.

We ate in a renovated ice house, where ice blocks would be harvested in winter and stored inside layers of sawdust.  Afterward, Anita (one of the Norwegian exchange team) took us back in her 19′ speedboat.  “I usually like to go like this,” she explained, bobbing her hand between her hip and shoulder, “but today I don’t want to.”  “Okay,” I said, accomodatingly.  Then she clipped on her keel switch and took the North Sea swells head on.  The North Sea is cold.

 I also have had a chance to meet a couple of librarians and visit two public libraries.  Anita arranged for me to meet her friend Elisabet, who is a librarian in the village of Fasund, about the same size as Flekkefjord.  They have many of the same youth titles in Norwegian as we do in English: Nancy Drew, Maurice Sendak books, Tolkien, and of course Harry Potter.  They don’t bother with Norwegian translations of English-language bestsellers, since the books are much cheaper in the original language.

Interestingly, public libraries are not allowed to use private funding.  They rely solely on state funding.  Not all librarians have any formal library science education.  They offer most of the services we do, including genealogical microfilm resources, although the Flekkefjord library has no storytime or adult programming, since it has only two librarians.  I get the feeling that libraries face pretty much the same problems across the Atlantic.

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