Sommerferie

SUMMER HOLIDAY WAHOOO!!!

So tomorrow my dear lady and I begin our three week Summer holiday, for the Americans out there I'm using the word holiday in the British sense, where you would say vacation, I'm not talking about some crazy Summer religious festival. Now I will talk all about the different places were going when we are back and instead here want to talk about general Norwegian Summer holiday period, known as Sommerferie. Now as I have mentioned more than once, Norwegians love there free time, these are a people that work to live and this is never more obvious than around the summer time.

Warning, some of the following information will cause major jealousy!!

Firstly, summer working hours. The usual working hours in Norway are 8-16 (4pm) which in my opinion already kicks the ass of the 9-5/6 in England. Being home by 16 is awesome and still leaves so much of the day. However in summer they go one further and nearly everyone as far as I can tell finishes one hour earlier. Thats right, while my friends and family are back in England slaving away until all hours, by 15:30 everyone in Norway is already half naked sunbathing in their gardens and heating up the barbecue. One thing I found really strange about Norway when arriving last summer was how tanned people were, especially those aged about 40 and up. This is because by that age they have gardens and as soon as its over 15 degrees, will be outside sunning themselves. Also it only needs to be about again that 15 degree mark before the idea of eating indoors becomes insane. This may just be my Norwegian family, but I'm under the impression its quite wide spread. Now the English love a barbecue as much as the next nation but Jesus I had no idea the Norwegians were so into it, although being massive carnivores and loving simple pure food (meat, potato veg) it should have hardly surprised me.

Now a lot of you will be asking the exact same question I did when I first discovered about summer working hours, do they get paid for that hour? Well I've only asked a few people and after knowing the culture so well after a year I was fairly unsurprised to discover they had no idea and didn't seem to even slightly care. A state of affairs that says so much about Norwegians really. Those who work hourly rates will almost certainly not get paid, and as so often they will probably need it the most and of course my heart goes out to all those who are probably losing 20 odd hours a month wages. But for the average Norwegian all they care about is more time to do the things that really matter in life, which is anything but working.

To go back a little, you may think that my taking a three week holiday is a little extreme, and I would agree with you. I have only been on two holidays longer than a week in my life that I recall. But once again this is common in Norway. Norwegians get 5 days more holiday a year than most other countries so they still have loads left after three weeks anyway and when the weather is at its best, its time to travel. This undoubtedly stretches back to when many people would travel to there cottages. If your going to make the trek and take everything with you, you might as well drag it out. The big change here now though is not everyone goes to cottages, a lot still do, but the most important thing is to head south. The Norwegians refer to the Spain and Portugal area as "Syden" which is where 90% of Norwegians (as far as I can tell) spend there holidays, mostly Spain though.

Ok so with everyone working an hour less and huge amounts of people taking weeks off at a time, there must be some knock on affects right? Now I'm half tempted to lie and just say "No Norway is so awesome that things just go on exactly as they normally do despite all this". That would be a stone cold lie, in fact everything is effected, massively! Ok lots of it may not seem that big, and in many ways it isnt, but I still find it shocking. Basically every company in the country weither its state or private is running on a skeleton crew so just don't expect anything to get done. The effected areas are so massive its difficult to truly explain so I will stick to the simple things I have encountered personally. Public transport is far less frequent so my 40 minute journey home from work is now at least an hour. Every job I have applied for in the last month has emailed me saying that now its "sommerferie" no further progress will be made until August. Finally almost no houses are up for sale.

As I say many of these are small things, but it can all get rather tedious, I'm starting to believe the whole country is in a catch 22 and everyone goes on long holidays because everyone else is and therefore nothing can get done. I should probably stop there though as I have spent most of this post being positive and I wouldn't like to ruin it, after all I so often use this blog as a place to vent frustration that its about time I stacked the deck in Norway's favour.