Getting Into the Larger Companies in Norway as an Immigrant

I am just ending a contact at a medium sized company and am in the process of interviews and so on to get into hopefull a larger company.

As a foreigner the large employers usually offer most international opportunities where your native language could be of use, especially English,  or if you are otherwise very proficient in English this is a large plus point. However these large employers seem to present barriers by their size and beaurocratic registration and application processes.

Norway is quite peculiar in the EU for having a few huge employers and then having many small companies- a kind of biploar national spread of companies. On the one hand you have of course then Statoil (including Hyrdo's oil production), Aker, El Chem and of course the NHS and otherwise the state here. Under this is a layer of fast growing companies, like National Oil Well-Varco (NOV), who established in Norway to supply these large drilling and production firms with equipment and services and have been able to grow internationally as Norwegian entities, based on advanced engineering that by in large, the Texans couldn't be bothered investing in before.

On the otherside of the coin are a myriad of small companies, biased by one-man-bands who often take early pension and then hire themselves into the self same very large employers at a high hourly rate. Outside retail there are very few medium sized businesses, but they are there to be found and the best source is the Gazelle listings for your local area. ( gaseller as norsk key word).

SME's Versus Larger Employees

Working for sub 20 employee companies has its' charms in terms of team and family feel, or the reverse in being established and possibly sceptical on average to immigration. You are most of all though at the mercy of the owner-director and often foriegners are seen as a resource to be exploited in terms of overtime, holiday allocation, scope of tasks and most of all, economic expendability. I have worked in small companies below 20-30 employees and I do not personally recommend planning your career around them, unless you see a very good fit where your skills are worth more to them than their company are to you.

 Large employers on the other hand, offer larger opportunities to you as a foreigner, in terms of getting a foot in the door for other jobs, promotion, training and financial or project responsibility. Norwegians know this only too well, and many graduates will only apply to the top handful of  companies in their skill area.

Applying to the Mega Companies In Norway

How do you then apply to these megalyths ? They seem to be very impersonal. They often advertise in English, but then at some point the communication goes over to Norwegian- have you made a mistake?

Firstly there is a very big difference between being an experienced international project manager, a qualified engineer, a global sales person,  or a hot IT worker and being a general administration worker or at first job trainee level.  In the latter, the daily language will have to be Norwegian and that means written and oral.

For non technical jobs, my advice is to always apply in Norwegian unless it states expressly that you should apply in English. Further to this get your CV and letter checked by a native speaker, and also get some practice in interview conversation and follow up communications.

Getting in the door though even with good Norwegian seems an issue, a great big brick wall infront of you: My advice is to not think of these companies as huge megalyths, but see the people: you are being recruited most often to a specific team which works pretty much like an SME. As a foreigner it always makes the difference if you contact the person named in the advert. If they are personnel it is best to be positive and speak generally about your intereset, breifly about your suitability and then ask if it is possible to speak to the manager for the position. This shows positivity and it is the way Norwegians often make open applications or network their way to jobs. You have to practice at this or be very comfortable with your language.

I would say that in general e-mail communications outside the actual application are interpreted negatively: that is just my opinion based on my experiences. It can though be worth using e-mail to request a telephone conversation.

This approach, using the phone,  has secured me nearly all my jobs here and was completely necessary.Why? Because they want to work with people who can speak Norwegian in those positions! Also it shows interest and motivation, and actually very few people bother to phone up at all. I have also been down to the last few at 2nd interview level,  at both Statoil and Aker for positions with more than 60 applicants.

Another thing is to keep on applying and apply for related positions in these larger employers. As long as you are qualified a and /or experienced for the positions, apply and keep on applying. My application for three or four positions at one company actually lead to me getting the best possible one!

Open applications are worth while but only in the right context: you need to use networking to establish who may be a manager to talk to. "On File" as an immigrant outside engineering and IT, means in the bin in my opinion. You need to make a targetted approach, kind of a courting and sniffing out if they are recruiting in your area. The key here is to define need, and strike before they contact the recruitment companies or advertise the job.

Bemanning and Rectuitment Companies as A Route In

One way into large companies is through rectuiters and bemanners. Beware though, because large companies often want to have a percentage of temp staff who can be cut back given a bad quarterly result. Companies I have worked in recently had a policy of having 10-20% of their pay roll hired in. The new laws make it harder to avoid permanency, but they dont care especially with immigrants. You can like a freind of mine who was very competent in document control, be locked in actually to being a temp, by the mutual interest of personnel dept and bemanner with monthly fee,  and held out from the permanent position whereas they actually recruit a poorer candidate!  Here she was in a position of stregnth and should have moved to direct, but actually she sought a new education which she got a place in suddenly in the summer.

How do you address the bemanning situation? Well it is a win-win if you get training and experience which makes you more attractive in the job market or internally a valuable resource. You may be a temp for someone with quite a lot of responsibility or be able to develope the role and get recognised in the company and therefore rectuited. There are positive here if you also are still learning the language and need to use it daily in the workplace, or are just trying to get a first foothold into semi skilled work.

However to continue at your own level or go down, I would try and turn a bemmaning opportunity into a direct hire with a recruitment consultancy fee. Another way is to avoid  the middle man altogether, identifying the employer from a short conversation with the recruiter,  and contacting them directly with an "open" application as a pure coincidence.

Your Local Job Market

I still haven't been able to crack my local job market, large or small. I even did a work-fair / work-experience for 9 months to get in to the right type of job in a local company, which did me a world of good, but in fact this is a typical issue for government funding - it should have been a temporary position! If I had not come with a state cheque book they would have hired me. I then am faced with a nasty winter commute of often over an hour when it is snowing on twisty roads, in fact the worst section of the trunk road in this region!
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What i do hear works with SMEs in your local market is shoe leather: turning up at the door with your CV is seen as a very positive thing and quite often you will be in a conversation with the manager in a position to employ you.

Be Dynamic? Speaking to your Hosts....

These type of dynamic go getter job skills are necessary to get employed, this may seem a bit unfortunate for the shy type. On the other hand, the shy type may get a kinder reception at a company and be right for the position in the long term, you never know!

I see what ever that language skills are often a must, yet you should resort to English if you are strong in that when you are out of your water, always. One issue I have is that I have polished my CV and application letters and take the application process with a lot of fore thought and concentration, and in fact my Norsk language on a day to day basis is not as good as it is under the recruitment phase.

Modesty in norway is a good thing an part of the culture, to a frustrating extent, but know that you will quite likely never be even 90% as comprehendable as a norwegian and also that some are a little strange and "fall off" in conversations when the grammar wains. You have to be aware of this, This is a bad habit I find here anyway between norwegians- in presentations and talks I think I often have a bigger take out that the average norwegian because I am so focused on understanding!

British Perspective on Norwegian Election 2014 (Storting , Valget 2014)

Rather than going straight to the recycling bin with the election magazine from FrP (progress party, "far " right here in Norway) I decided to read it.

I have met quite a lot of Frp members here and they are a little split into two camps: small business bourgeois types and generally anyone who doesn't like taxes and tolls on roads as a way of financing an egalitarian society.

In Britain then they correspond to a far earlier epoch, the post war middle middle class who were fed up with rationing and high taxation. That is where the 'Grocer's Daughter' and her hand bag home economics came from, Magaret Thatcher, the witch whose policies allowed British industry to close down or move to China.

In the last election FrP had an aggressive agenda and both them and the conservative Høyre rattled sabres about working conditions being unsustainable and damaging business. Oil barell prives went up and we got guaranteed summer holiday of three weeks. The right were pandering to their pay masters in business and the population returned the red-greens with a sustained majority.

Now the blue side of the house have not just tamed their message, they have returned with a liberal and largely socialist agenda.  Spend more money! Build infrastructure!

This is a bit of an ananthema for uk conservatives. We had almost twenty years of save and cut back, which was a bit illusionary because public spending shifted to infrastructure mostly in tory counties, metrics beaurocracy in the nhs and education and paying the dole for people trapped in industrial ghost towns.

The norsk labour party has rendered the old style blue rinse parties, with the strings pulled only by the bourgieos, unelectable because the economy can support the liberal labour laws. People here know there is no excuse for lower pay, short term contracts and the bosses determining your workng hours. There is little need to pander to businesses in the uk either but that is where the balance of power lies. Now enter new whiter than white blue parties with a personal liberalising message of road building, choice of school and legal jet ski driving.

They will face legal and interrnational resistance to forcing the oil fund, the state pension investment fund, into investing in road projects which will be motorist toll free. They will have resistance to privatisation in the nhs here. They will face large problems with free school choice and the general grading of primary school kids, mainly because the two a large new beaurocratic load and benefit only a minority while actually threatening average quality of schooling by being devisive, leading to dump schools and stigmatisation for pupils and teaching staff. With norwegians hate of commuting, it is only the few right wing parents who will choose this to begin
Now they open the door for a wider working class support as people percieve they have more money in their pockets and team leader and lower management start to be lured into the benefits for them of privatisation.  So it really isnt the first blue governemnet anyone has to worry about, apart from the economists. It is the second possible term which would really make negative changes to the workers lot .

Norwegian General Election Looms but not in A Threatening Way

It is the Norwegian general election in a little over two weeks time, and I'd say that it is no thriller and most people are switching off the candidates debates.

One good thing is that the election is centered on the issues, and not really the failings of the current, two term regime. The issues are really only the things which government tickle now: roads, rail a little education, privatisation round the fringes of health care.

The fact is that the failed right wing government of the early naughties have left a worse legacy, of failed privatisations like the rail network maintenance, and in the after math of an ineffective government riddled with internal power struggle,  the Labour movement left to accelerate road building and address infrastructure for schools and hospitals.

Now the labour lead, green-red government will leave a lasting legacy- people may want better roads and a little less tax, but they are not prepared to work harder for it. The main topics on the lips of the opposition are all about MORE public spending, an anathema for the right wing in most EU countries and particularly England. More on roads in particular, and more to pensioners. Less to immigrants and less to assylum seekers - these are the current scape goat and easy target given the state has a duty of provision for them, and the usual comparison is to the mimimum pensioner- but who dares actually pay for people who were largely economically inactive through much of their lives ?

While on pensions then , the state pension fund aka the Oil Fund is one of the best managed fund portfolios in the world, managed by state appointed economists incidentally who show the caution and objectivity clearing lacking in most derivative  traders and fund managers in the period 2005 to 2008!

Labour here have a very conservative policy on the oil fund- and incidentally are legally constrained by national and international laws in how much can be spent on public projects. In effect it acts as a private bank in a PFI type of way. The more thatcherite Fremskritt party want to unlock this fund for infrastructural renewal, with the key being a dual carriage way from Oslo to Stavanger - a patchy set up so far. This of course with as few new toll stations as possible if not completely free. So basically a Keynsian policy but one in a country where road projects are by virtue of topology and labour costs, amongst the most expensive.

The right are not keen on rail or any talk of rail, and that is clearly because they made a pigs ear of privatisation. They monopolised the management and lost droves of skilled workers in the cut backs which followed. Subsequent funding has been squandered on an Oslo-centric management black hole of strategic analysis  planning and project management  without any budget to manage anything in particular. The company has soaked up hundreds of millions of euros into this money pit and into an artificial internal inflation as they compete for engineering skills with the oil industry and the continuing Oslo property boom.

Also road projects are a mess here: the E18 in particular- a garing gap right passed Oslos second (or third) Airport near Sandefjord, which is there due to quarrels amongst right wing ruled councils - the stretches south and west of this were way over budget and again, disjointed- the ones which came in on budget prove to have scimped on materials - road surface on the new route Grimstad to Kristiansand, and tunneling north of Sandefjord. Foriegn competitors have had their fingers burned off with the main contractor from Germany on the Grimstad west stretch going under due to penalties and outright law breaking from sub suppliers.

I sit an listen to Radio Scotland about the A9 ironically enough. The A9 is topologically not unlike the E39 K'sand to Stavanger. It has the much hated and quoted as dangerous, partial dual carriageway. It has slush and snow in the winter, and storms over the summits. It has a lot of crashes: mostly caused by excessive speed and dodgey overtaking. What it replaced, as with the E39 as it is today, was a horrendous string of mixed quality road. The costs of making it all dual carriageway are too big for anyone to swallow.

Swallow must some people: the Skye bridge was a thatcher scheme to connect Skye-the-Brand to the mainland in a successful PFI which was soon voted away and paid off from the government purse. Kristiansand - Stavanger will be hugely expensive and with the very low speed limits relative to the rest of Europe, save less than an hour for cars but maybe around an hour for lorries. It will be safer, but so would "A" road upgrading and safer crawler lanes which continue over summits with speed cameras strategically placed.

Having been on the road around "peak" times in the morning,  afternoon  and early evening I hardly think the E39 warrants dual carriageway status given the volume of traffic I saw. However someone will counter argue that with stats' no doubt, and of course K'sand, Adger and West Fold all have major oil equipment manufacturers, who are just begining to see the life-cycle servicing turn over coming in the door. This is highly profitable business and is time related so Norway can compete in terms of capacity and costs as we go beyond 2020.

The Green Red got stung on thinking big: the CO2 being pumped back into the depleted oil reservoirs was a failure of politics, and the visionary deep tunnel super fast train was also a waste of feasbility study cash. Investment in motor-rail between all the major cities? Well you can move your car, but not at the same time you do. Also freight has gone over to rail but the private rail companies are very pleased to be at 100% capactiy and don't want to or cannot invest in more rolling stock.

Anyways, road is the big thing in this election while in fact the big fight ahead will be privatisation of health services and the suprises that a likely double term right wing government could bring with them in terms of labour laws.

Whatever else happens, the new blue-blue government  will vote for a big rise in MPs salaries, cut the tax for their super rich and bourgoise funders, and then also cut tax for ordinary middle income first standard deviation below average folk: and promptly take it back off them in allowing for private inflation in public provision like pre school, MIRAS, minimum payment for doctors etc.

I am for dual carriageway Oslo- Kristiansand and a mixed A class road on the E39 westwards from there

Norsk Labour Party Bows Out

The "red green" reign over Norway is bowing out this year almost without doubt. Like most two termers of any political shade, their custodial term picks up enough bugs along the way as to lead the public to want something else.

From another stand point however, the last 8 years have reversed some attitudes that poorer labour conditions are a necessary evil for us all to have jobs: the reverse is true, good labour conditions makes for higher standard of living, higher employment as people move up the socio-economic ladder with high average wages relative to house prices.

And there have been failures. The latest is the railway budget: they have indeed vastly increased the budget in the last 7 years, but 1.2 Bn NOK have been sucked up into central administration and planning. You can't avoid the fact though that it was the failed Bondevik government which privatised the maintenance sector, which then disastrously cut out quality, delivery end labour which they never won back.

Now however, the "jernbanverket" have become an Oslo parasite of project management and quality and safety strategy. Just like much of the centralised Oslo beaurocracies, private or public, the rest of Norway delivers while the parasitic pontificators in Oslo plan and strategise. All the place-men and women-who-lunch on their million krone a year (about the london equivalent of 90£K) to theorise and write reports and go to endless meetings, but never actually achieve very much.

Labour here also had a series of failed projects due to this Oslo theoretical "richest country on earth" approach. Firstly the gas plant at Mongstad: pumping CO2 back into the oil wells under pressure in sea water where it may become lime stone one day. However the R&D write off evapourated - they were very naive to think they could get away with this in the european electricity grid and global carbon-trading.

The next and most blatant fail for a "Green" government was the lunatic plan to have deep underground 300km/h trains between the major southern half cities. SO while the railway around Oslo resembles something by in large from 1973 on many commuter routes, and even longer back in time as you trundle down to the towns either side of the "oslo fjord", they aimed high, and came crashing back to earth twice - first when the tunneling costs and geological survey costs showed themselves to be many time higher than "guestimates" in the national plan

Crazy idea, more crazy than the "ferry free" journey with four lanes to Stavanger. Okay it makes things faster but there just isn't the volume of traffic North of Bergen for bridges over the finer fjords there, and between Kristiansand and Stavanger the population is sparse, and a lot of freight goes straight to international shipping or supply vessels from both harbours.

However, that said the FRP  (semi thatcherite, populist "progress" party)  they do have a good point, in linking many communities closer together, reducing delivery times, opening up labour markets, expanding the commuter zones and boosting rural and small town property markets. They could probably achieve as much by decentralising Oslo beaurocracy and encouraging major companies to open regional head quarters in mid and north norway as the oil exploration moves north.

It is ironic then that the slowest and most ridiculous gap in  Norway's limited Motorway network is passed a site well known to visitors by air, Torp Sandefjord airport. Some miles north, the motorway abruptly becomes a rather silly extra wide A road with lots of yokal traffic including the odd tractor. Then a while later, hey presto, the new section past Sandefjord to Larvik and another new section west of there opens before localy political arguements were a memory and turf wad broken north and south of Torp to make for joined up writing, All held up by arguements between right wing local councils and the state road directorate.  Finally there will be four lanes from Oslo to Larvik within the next year or so.

Back to Labour's failures here: the Utøya massacre has I think managed to go full circle and reflect badly on the labour movement: the core support is with working class and middle class public sector service employees. Labour now looks like a shambles of minority pandering: immigrants and homosexuals.

Finally we come to the root of both Norwegian Socialist attitudes and also a good deal of enterprise here. People are now a bit fed up that the rich get a fair bit more than they can : "you are getting something I am not" is the root of popular vote for the red-greens here. However that has run its course with most people actually not wanting to go down to a 35 hour week, or have any more holiday!  Just this last week the policy of national intervention on development in the "beach zone", somethign I by in large agree with, has revealed the truth behind the apparent egalitarianism in Norway: now you have to be pretty rich to afford a plot or to redevelope a prime site, or to pay a lawyer to get you out of the "Owner-occupier-convenant" (I am such a fan of as a Scot from the west, where white settlers and holiday home buyers are a plague driving depopulation and demands on the local health services when the old buggers retire without a family within 500 miles!) Two of my pals have been grumbling about access to buy plots: they have had it good and want a piece of the beach: the trouble is of course, that in south-land Norway there are a million locals and then there a couple million more who may look over the fence if plot prices were within second mortgage reach.

The beach, even privately owned, outwith 50 m of a house or established dock is actually free for access to all, so privatising the beach will of course lead to MORE exclusivity and the usual market of speculators and quick-buckers who will drive up prices.

However, the government has held back for a decade effectively, rampant development along the desirable stretches, and it will probably be replaced by some form of planning application and possibly actually more restrictions and awareness on the most accessible areas.

Failure however has to be measured against the quiet legacies of governments. The green reds have as I said, extended the belief that everyone should share and that labour conditions should improve over time, even if that is slowly. They teach us that you can have a successful economy based on not just national resources but global economic investment and ROI with Statoil and Hydro and the shipping lines, Aker Solutions, Ullsteinvik and so on being world leaders. You can have a socialist -capatilist paradise, it comes with some side effects, but many other countries HAVE as much wealth and economic activity per capita, it is just they do not believe in distribution of wealth: rather the rat-race and the american fake dream.

The leftist governance of the last 7 years or so, leaves another strong part of this legacy, much as the Thatcher years change the centre of gravity in English politics inextricably, so has the "wet" conservative governments before and the strong labour movement moved the ball into their side of the field. Now the population want to play with the ball in the right side of the field, and wo-betied them because new labour laws on longer hours and less pay are waiting in the wings, dressed up as "Postive privatisation" - privatise the management classes in Oslo first is my response.

However the greatest achievement in  last seven or eight years for Jens Stoltenberg is to have made the conservative party "Høyere" into a pussified centre right party, mostly to the left of the UK and German leftist parties who  have been dragged into the right side of the pitch by this centre of gravity effect. A cautious, boring Erna Solberg will reign for one or two terms and continue building the roads Jens started and generally not interfere with labour laws very much and rather concentrate on giving people a feeling of freedom, and probably making some parts of the health service more effective by privatisation, and maybe sorting out the rail maitenance structure maybe just maybe and all in a shade of political pink which Jens will be proud off.

The Awkward New Job For Wanderers-In..

I have likened Norway's people to a tropical reef where the colourful masses swim around in a veritable paradis, while the sharks hover actually overhead.

The sharks are bosses and companies with sharp practices, and politicians who want ever more money from middle earners to the state.

Once you land a decent job offer, you should then look out for the sharks. I fully recommend a stepping stone job, but get a permanent one otherwise you will be kind of back to square one in terms of negotiating pay and responsibilities.  It makes more than sense here to look a gift horse in the mouth from the priviledged position of a safe job because the other side of the 3 months notice is that a lot of monkeys can queu up to be thrown off the backs of your prospective colleagues.

Two things you have to swallow are then probably being a bit over qualified for the work you are given and also having some monkeys-off-the-back. In my case of late I really had to jump in because of the pay and the location...and sod them if they want me to do mindless admin on a manager's salary! However here comes the next thing to swallow:

A lesson which can apply to the UK, depending on the situation: in your first six months expect to have those monkeys to carry! And get on with it: bear them out the office of the boss and then beat them up and get on top of the bastards! However don't let your position be one big pile of monkeys!

This is where you want to "pirk" ie nit-pick when a job offer comes or you know you are in poll position: it is seen as constructive actually as long as you can be careful about how much of a job-snob you are on doing some tasks. I didn't do this and really I am now having to swallow more than I care to and start pushing back on the wrong end of my trial period!

There are also other issues like holidays and dont forget holiday pay: companies do not pay you in June, it is your last years holiday pay which is free-d up from where-ever you earned that.

The thing to be upon is that you need to put your back into it and be positive and "Be the best damn garbage man" as Ali once said. Then you gain respect and those monkeys will soon be yours to cast off, or turn into a systemised success to shine infront of higher management.

Managing Expectations or Being Managed by Them in Norway..

This is a kind of appendix to my "Norwegian social highway code"

I feel I have had to reluctantly change myself when living here, to tone myself down and to adapt to circumstances.

However, here's the crunch: I have been here a while, so would not that decade lived in the UK have taught me - an impulsive, boyish, egalitarian rebel - that the "grown up" western world of family life is just a road of conservative, conformist boredom?

I have toned myself down and taken some exercises in concentration and social etiquette which I needed to do regardless of culture and geography. In fact living here has been positive because work and social life highlighted my distract-ability, impatience and most of all my high expectations and presumptions placed on work and new friendship.

Moving to another country can amplify your abilities, but also it can greatly amplify your social foibles and emotional problems.

I noticed that my concentration was off mark, and that my ability to summarise data was shot. In fact it was a new type of analysis , kind of manual judgemental regression analysis and report writing for a pair of pedantic twats who were terrible at report writing themselves that put me on the road to some calamatous self discovery here. I think at home I would have ploughed on and maybe really done myself some financial and emotional damage!

So I went to my GP and then a local (no good) shrink about concentration problems and social anxiety: I should have thrived in two or three jobs here but I was held back by some critical stumbling blocks. On the social side I said I struggled to make friends in Norway outside our original fortuitous social circles which we moved away from for work. The GP or Shrink or both of them replied that really some of this lack of social life, was the function of becoming  a middle aged father of two.

Locally here, it is the sticks and people are tight. They really do look at you with quite a nasty look sometimes because they know you are an outsider and they want to show they don't approve. The place has always been a bit messed up because there were some closed-shops for work and social life. That is evaporating, but the white trash families who have scraped by resent that incomers come to the town with of course, better qualifications and prospects.

That is however, a way to just describe any town like where I live, a charming coast town with some industry and a heavy, affluent tourist influence in July. ( bit like the 'Hamptons or Cornwall perhaps) . I was giving up here socially after a few false starts when I got a job two hours away in a bigger smoke, and never really looked back.

In the bigger town in the bigger company, I found that I could get a decent social contact with nearly everyone I work with, and pick up a few of those necessary acquaintances, some of whom then go on to be good pals probably.

I found my past life in a more academic infiltrated industry, seems now a weird place, and my past life in sales and marketing was weirder. People weren't real there. Here they are real.

Norwegians do take their distance, but the best thing to do is to keep your pride and keep your own bit of distance. Feel which way the wind is blowing: avoid some conversations: pose personal or career history questions back in their faces in relaxed situations, to judge if they are inquisitive or genuinely are seeking a dialogue with you.

Most of all I would say down size your expectations and under communicate expectations of "escalation" to a dinner party etc. Take it slower. It is really one thing which is different here over many countries or cities or company cultures: you can't slide in and you certainly can't elbow your way into social circles or into private friendships. You have to stalk and be under stated. You pretty much well have to be the nice, undemanding person who eventually once you are known gets invited to something involving alcohol and sociability out of curiousity or plain pity.

 "Snowballing" social contacts is a big no-no here too: you can find that you burn your main bridge into a social circle if you become pals with one of their long standing friends or members in the circle, and find that to be awkward with your original, probably nearer first point of contact. Worse, you can get locked out  by that contact.

If you move in with any expectations and push to come in, then those expectations will manage you OUT of that situation. It is all very annoyingly, softly-softly-catch-a-monkey here i Norway

One big plus side of this for me is that I place a much higher value on shy people. I used to be uneasy around shy people, and find them irritating and boring. Shy girls I found dull and slow and difficult to read signals in. My friends were often brash, arrogant types when I was young. I grew out of them all by the age of 25. So unlike most people with my back ground, I have no real "ol' buddies".  Now I have learned to come in slowly to everyone, and it has enormous dividends with shy people. Usually shy people are plenty interesting, and a vaneer of unfriendliness is pure nerves with some girls in particular.  So thank you Norway, you have turned several aspects of my life around.

A final word on perspective and comparing like with like for new immigrants here: Many, many people who move here are like me, move to a Norsk spouse when pregnant or heading that way. Also many who are asylum seekers or the current Portugeuse / Spanish economic refugees come with families in fact: they can move and NEED to move to feed their families and have something of that middle class lifestyle their education promised them. So you have kids and you are over 30. Read paragraphs above and then downsize your expectations of sociability as you would have done back home: you are a parent, so are many other people your age. It fucks up your social life big time.

Skis 2014 ?

The season is over, the "lysløype" closed for business. Wrap a heavy cloth on the bell's clapper and keep the dog still and quiet with a bone. My red wax and clister are no more.

This year I had guessed that sports (training) skis would be my next move. I ponder on a nanotech future with two pairs of light, sports skis for "blue" and "red" conditions and no more waxing, ever. I think of buying a pair of Zero rubbing skis from a  racer dissatisfied with them, and tweaking them to work in our usual -6'c to plus 2 we tend to get. But then it comes down to next autumns slightly over priced ski-packages with dubious boots.

However the wise money, if I get a 2013 bonus payment, would not be on any of the above and here is why.

This season has been hard- rock hard! We had a mild period followed by snow in time for Christmas. More gradual snow came, but horror of horrors, there was a mild period which thawed the stuff back, not once but twice. So things got icey in January and early february. On the high mountain sides the mild whisked through, depositing only more snow and temperatures never over plus one or so.  Just when we thought it was all over we got 75cm of new snow, wet at sea level but even at 50m up it was very doable and lay on top of icey ground like a natural laid on super cooled ice rink.

Some areas had blow off an drifting making for incredibly awkward waxing: new snow, filled spor and then suddenly onto old snow and outright ice!

I discovered that my kick was not doing so well on weight transfer and glide so that actually is kind of the first thing against skinny-skis. I have not got my weight right on broader tour skis yet. But lighter skis may be an advantage....??

Icey conditions and old, corn snow perpetuated over many weeks until last night it became just a big old trail of birch flavoured slush puppy. And I found the UK anchoring technique involuntarily and on a couple of bail-outs due to complete lack of control!

So after this season and the last, and many before that I am the type who doesnt want to travel far for skiing, and want to tackle hilly courses and use the piste (skating side/middle lane) because it is really rewarding to downhill out the spor.

So having had a few "plough negative" situations too many this year, given I have been at this lark a while, i think that in fact steel edges are on the menu for next season.

You can now get really skinny steel edge skis which seem to be less than 5 cm broad. Maybe they dont do my legnth. But then there are plenty other "fell ski" which are light and have a more standrad XC pre-tension in the arch (rather than the longer classic mountain ski arch)

I see with steel edges I can perfect my technique a bit more and most importanly gain confidence. Also I can try telemarking, which I have only pulled off a couple of times on standard XC plastic edge skis. Then if I decide to opt for lighter skis, I have a pair of Fjell skis and icey-dicey course skis and just a pair for teaching the kids how to plough and towing their sledges.