Lorelou Desjardins - A Frog in the Fjord: One Year in Norway

To my grandmother Arlette,

whose love brought me all the way to Norway

www.northpress.no

ISBN 978-82-303-4961-8

North Press 2022

3rd edition 2022

Book cover illustration: Rejenne Pavon

Layout and copy editing: Ionu Burchi

Author portrait picture: Anna-Julia Grandberg, Blunderbuss

Section Illustrations: Freepik.com

This book is a work of non-fiction based on the experiences and recollections of the author. Except for the author, all names of people and identifying details have been changed to protect the privacy of others.

This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publishers prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition, including this condition, being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

Authors blog: www.afroginthefjord.com

P REFACE

O ver the years, I have met many people who dream of discovering Norway. Some are from the United States, with their Norwegian names telling of their ancestry. They often carry pieces of Norwegian culture and language with them, 150 years after their family crossed the Atlantic Ocean. They dream of this land they have heard about but never set foot on.

Others are foreigners from Europe and beyond. They have seen pictures of the breathtaking Norwegian nature. The fjords, the northern lights or the Lofoten Islands make them want to travel here, if not move to Norway. When so many of us are caught up in our busy city lives, those pictures of red wooden huts by a lake, surrounded by snowy forests are just too hard to resist. Why cant I live there just for a few years and take a break from everything? Wouldnt my life be so much better?

United Nations reports and media articles show, year after year, that Norway has the happiest people in the world. High standard of living, low unemployment rate, high gender equality. Best country to be a mother. Recently the trend of so-called Scandi-living concepts, IKEA-sounding names like hygge, friluftsliv, and lagom have come to international fame . According to newspapers and glossy magazines, Scandinavians have all the tools we need to survive everything from winter depression to a pandemic. It seems too good to be true. Is Norway as beautiful as the travel magazines say, and as wonderful a society as the United Nations reports write?

This book shares my personal experience of moving to Norway and traveling all around the country: how I cycled alone across fjords and Sami festivals, learned the Norwegian language, cracked the unwritten codes of Norwegian working culture, navigated the dating scene to find a local partner, and adapted to everything Norwegian from skiing to Taco Friday. This book will not give you an answer as to whether Norway is perfect, because every person needs to live their experience and find out their own truth. All I can say is that I discovered a country with much more diversity than I expected, in terms of dialects, social codes, and eating habits. I will take you on my journey throughout Norway, and hope that you will laugh at all my mistakes, as well as learn from them. I hope to avoid stereotypes but cannot promise not to reflect on a few of them.

The people who end up living here are not just foreigners who have dreamed of moving to Norway. Sometimes life brings you here by coincidence. This is what happened to me. I had no intention of living here I knew almost nothing of Norway but found a very interesting short-term job. My plan was to stay for a short period of time and move on with my life somewhere else. Maybe a tropical island, maybe a European capital? Certainly not a country where the winter lasts for 6 months.

Many Norwegians are studying abroad, often bringing home a partner who is yet to discover all the quirkiness of the Norwegian way of life. I have met many of those partners, who fell in love with an extroverted Norwegian in Nairobi, Bangkok, or Caracas, and after some years decided to settle down and have kids. The Norwegian convinces their partner to move back to Norway often to the most conservative or the rainiest village in the whole of Norway just across the street from their Norwegian parents because it will be so much more practical this way. Well have a free babysitter (and sometimes free land to build a house on, a cabin nearby etc.).

Whatever your charming partner says about Norway, and whatever the travel magazines show you of fjords and Northern Lights, neither show the full picture: Norway is a much more complex country. At the beginning of my Norwegian journey, somebody told me, Norwegians are like a Thermos bottle. Hard and cold on the outside, and soft and warm on the inside. The key is to manage to open the lid!

I was born in France but my father is from Qubec in Canada. My mother is born in Morocco and I was partly raised in Australia and on beaches in Indonesia. You would think that I am used to adapting to different cultures. Yet I have never experienced such unbelievable culture shock as when I moved to Norway. I have lived in six different countries as an adult, including in the Philippines, Indonesia, Canada and the United Kingdom, and I never could have imagined that a small nation of five million souls stuck between Europe and the North Pole would be the toughest cultural nut to crack. It is to be expected that even for Western Europeans, understanding and adapting to Norwegian culture will be something totally new.

This book has a strange name. I am a frog in the fjord. Fjords are not a natural habitat for frogs. They should not be there, yet here I am, trying to hop from rock to rock and make it to a Norwegian life. Frogs are also a clich representation of French people, and even though I dont eat frog legs, I did feel like I was swimming against the current very often. A Frog in the Fjord is also the name of my blog about Norway, which I started in 2013 and which became widely read by foreigners and Norwegians. It landed me a column in Norways most read newspaper Verdens Gang where I still write regularly.

This book is for non-Norwegians who have an interest in Norway or Scandinavia in general: those who want to travel here, move here or just learn about Norwegian culture because of a friend, a Norwegian partner, boss, colleague, or family member. It is also a book for Norwegians to learn about how foreigners see their culture, and to gift their foreign friends, colleagues or partner to explain what Norway is all about.

Finally, it is also a book for those looking for a change of scenery, those seeking to travel without leaving their living room, wherever that might be.

It is a condensed tale of my first 5 years in Norway, scrambled into one (because lets face it, my life is not that intense that all these adventures happened to me over the course of 12 months).

In this new edition I showcase the trust Forbes has had in me when claiming this book is one of the 5 most revealing books about Scandinavia. The French version is coming out later this year, and I cannot wait!

Bonne lecture!

Oslo, June 2022

Lorelou Desjardins

I

W INTER

MOVING NORTH

T here was nothing I could do. I just gave up. No matter how hard I tried to sit on my suitcase, it would not close. Just when I was about to open it again to take some things out, my grandmother came with three bottles of wine (one red, one white, one ros), five different types of cheese and my favor ite homemade jam : the minimum requirements for a French person to survive abroad .