Living in Norway

06-07

A BRIEF

GuIdE to

LIVING IN

NoRwAy.

www.StudyINNoRwAy.No

ASPIRE. INSPIRE.

coNtENtS

Society

Lifestyle

Culture

Dining

Climate

Foreign students about Norway

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Why Norway?

This booklet is for anyone who is thinking about living in Norway. A crash course in Norway,

if you like. It’s designed to give you a brief guide to Norwegian society and culture; lifestyle,

behaviour and opinions. We hope that this brochure will make it easier to make the decision,

easier to arrive in Norway and easier to fit in, since you’ll know a few things about what

to expect.

Which is a good thing, because Norway can be confusing at first - and Norwegians are a very

odd people - they are walking paradoxes! Norwegians consume more coffee per capita than

any other country on the planet, and read more papers than any other people in the world.

So on the one hand we’re a nation of wide-awake, extremely well informed people. On the

other hand, some Norwegians enjoy living in places where the sun doesn’t shine for months

at a time, and consider fish marinated in caustic soda or dried and blowtorched sheep’s head

a prime delicacy. This all points to something essential about Norway: a strange mixture of

down-to-earthness, curiosity, tradition and innovation in the people here, all combined with a

healthy dose of surrealism and madness. This, if nothing else, means that being a Norwegian

means you have to develop a keen sense of irony.

You’ll be here as part of your studies, so we’re sure you’ll be happy to hear that Norway has one

of the highest standards of general education in the world. We’re wide-awake, well informed

and well educated. Our egalitarian and freely available education system has led to a remarkable level of education, especially when it comes to women: over 60 percent of all higher

education students in Norway are women.

It has been often said that the average Norwegian is shy...