vogwurk + werdwurk
glimpsed: [] melbourne time

dear diary
it is now nearly 8am and i'm just finishing breakfast at cafe opus at oslo central station. i got a voucher to eat here as part of my ticket for the overnight bergen - oslo train. on a whim i turned on my airport card (tend to leave it off if i'm not actually using it, for battery and also don't want any plane i'm on to misjudge where it thinks it is) and there is a network. called tsunami which makes you think someone is a mac user in there somewhere. anyway, got on line but it's a public trial so unless i have an account through what appears to be a local isp i can only see a very basic web page. i could use this page to log in to their email system which rather nicely let me put in my own pop server, and i could read email, but not write any.

to date my three main public wireless networks i've found have been less than successful. heathrow i couldn't find login information which it seemed to need, copenhagen airport wanted to charge me, and oslo central doesn't let me actually do anything useful. i'm pretty sure intermedia oslo has wireless . . .

oh, [cough], i've got the tibook out at breakfast because i'm finishing the notes i need for today's seminar. (of course.)

well, after yet another 3 crashes in eudora i decided to see if i could upgrade and somehow eudora has managed to automatically upgrade me to the current version but of course i'm not entitled to that one so i'm now in sponsored mode which i hate. and i am unimpressed that it did this and apparently wrote over my previous installation without asking (and without needing my admin password). i can downgrade again, but, well, i'm unimpressed.

crossing roads, at pedestrian crossings, in my experience is something worthy of at least a phd for some budding ethnographer. take, for instance, the experience of someone from melbourne (australia, not florida), in bergen, norway. that's me.

in melbourne as a pedestrian approaches a pedestrian crossing you can pretty reasonably expect traffic to slow and to anticipate that you're crossing, and it is the exception that you would be about to cross and you'd have to wait for a car, bus, truck, whatever to get through before you could actually start crossing (and if you did you would feel entitled to complain and gesticulate to said driver). it is, if you like, as if the 'safe' zone around the crossing extends back towards the footpath some indeterminate but socially recognised distance.

so as a driver in melbourne if there are people approaching a crossing (and so within or about to enter this indeterminate but to me perfectly obvious zone) you would slow and be ready to stop if in fact they were wanting to cross. of course this is sometimes ambiguous, as for instance if you were standing talking in this zone (you basically shouldn't and probably wouldn't in melbourne), and though of course you should always make sure traffic is stopping for you it seems pretty straightforward that approaching the crossing, and the crossing itself, is protected territory.

in bergen this is a bit different. there doesn't seem to be a zone prior to the crossing which is sort of part of the crossing, and so as a pedestrian you have no authority in relation to the traffic (ie it must stop for you) until it is very obvious that you are wanting to cross, and this usually requires you to be standing more or less with a toe on the white line. now 9 times out of 10 you can just walk and it is fine, but there is a zone of indetermination here which is the reverse of melbourne's. as far as i can work out it goes something like this. if you are driving and you are approaching a crossing and there are pedestrians approaching, and if you calculate that you'll probably both reach the crossing at the same time if you continue at the same speed, then you do.

the effect of this for the melbourne australian is that as you more or less step into your zone of indetermination which is of course where you start to have authority over the cars, a car goes shooting past at apparently normal speed and clearly with no intention of stopping. this also applies to crossings where there may be a traffic island in the middle, so you can be walking across, and as you enter the traffic island you may as well be on the footpath and the same rules apply. if the driver thinks they will get to your side of the crossing before you're actually physically there (even though you're already on the crossing at the traffic island and clearly walking) they will continue.

now this is not a game of chicken. if you're on the crossing it is yours and everybody and everything will slow for you. but just as drivers calculate if they have to stop by a rule of collision rather than intention to cross, they also calculate this while you're crossing. in other words if you are on a crossing and, well, crossing, and a driver is approaching, they also calculate how much they need to slow down without actually having to stop so that you often have the experience of just stepping off the crossing to have a car zoom past immediately behind you. this can be rather daunting, as for instance the icy morning when i (being a foreigner to iced paths) gingerly picked my way across a crossing with ice on it, and this rather large truck was approaching. now it was obvious to me that he wasn't slowing to stop, rather he was slowing according to the rule of collision so that the driver was assuming i would continue at my current speed and this would mean that if he slowed that much, then when he got to the crossing i'd be out of the way. from my point of view all i thought was "it is ice, if i slip i am going under that truck". i think the difference is simply that in bergen they slow for you, in melbourne they stop. of course other parts of australia do this completely differently.

i think this is why children are taught to hold their arms out in a sort of horizontal salute at crossings to tell drivers they intend to cross. i imagine it is also to make sure the drivers see the kids, and it is a good idea, but the difference i guess is that in melbourne the driver is expected to always assume that you're going to cross, and it is up to the driver to make sure they can stop if that is in fact what is going to happen (which is probably why in bergen you will see people standing and talking by a crossing in that area that in melbourne is the zone of indetermination where you have the authority to stop the traffic).

this probably also relates to what you do in roundabouts as a driver in bergen, but that's another story.

norway has an awesomely impressive notion of social equality. this is evident in all sorts of ways, but the basic point is that norwegians really don't think that anyone is any better than anyone else. it is not australia's tall poppy syndrome, it is more like they don't even see the tall poppies! for instance the impression i have (by way of example) is that it would be very difficult in norway to have a school for gifted kids simply because this would be to acknowledge that some are better than others.

this equality is expressed in the very low rate of difference between the highest and lowest salaries in norway, and just in the way people dress. the manager of a new airline was happy to appear in an extended tv news story, at work, in casual trousers and an open shirt, not because he's richard branson but because he's an honest norwegian businessman.

the equality is also sort of evident in the housing, at least in bergen, as there really aren't any what you would think of as ostentatious displays of wealth in houses, on the outside anyway. there are some grand homes, yes, and location means a lot, but you need local knowledge to read wealth amongst all the little wooden houses.

as i was considering today's entry in my ethnographic study of being an australian in norway i realised that, of course, these carefully articulated field notes would also be of value for the norwegian intending to travel to australia...

today's note is about may 17th. quite a specific one that. may 17th is the norwegian national day (i'm unfamiliar with the history so am unsure if this is the day the state was inaugurated or a document signed) and it is a public holiday and a day of some significance.

every village, town, city will be festooned in flags, there are parades, marching bands, and then probably a carnival in some nearby public park. the parade is lead through the civic streets by the town burghers, and for the one may 17th i've seen they are dressed more formally than the members enclosure at flemington on melbourne cup day. morning suits, impossibly tall top hats, enormous red white and blue ribbons pinned to their chest reaching almost to the ground. (it was explained to me, half tongue in cheek, that the longer the ribbon the more important you were, or more accurately thought you were.)

after the burghers comes just a collection of, well, schools, veterans groups, graduating high school students, university departments, police, fire, marching bands and any other cultural, sporting and/or civic group that wants to be there.

now, the etiquette. you are (and i mean really are) expected to dress properly for the parade, even if you're just watching. if you have national costume, and happen to have it with you, then it is very appreciated if you wear this. i don't mean norwegian i mean from your own country. so at the parade i watched there was a young man over the road in his norwegian national dress, and his girlfriend resplendent in a glorious silk kimono, bamboo sandals, and silk fan because she was, of course, japanese. it did look impressive.

now as an anglo saxon middle class australian the nearest national costume really are those sad clichés of ozkultcha - perhaps thongs, shorts, and a mambo t shirt (preferably with the farting dog on the back), but this really will not do. i was told, so as not to offend, that i didn't have to wear a suit, but i did need to dress more or less like i was going to an expensive restaurant, what some owners of teen age children would probably think of as smart casual. no open shoes. no shorts. no t-shirts (though a t-shirt with a suit jacket would be fine).

so if you're back packing and the best you've got are grotty levi's, that refashionable miller shirt, and the nikes, sit in a pub and watch out the window. or if you really want to stand in the crowd, so as not to bring shame on your nation sound british.

there will be hundreds of flags, and norwegians are very proud and serious about their flag, so please don't do anything silly with a flag, it really would offend.

now, we don't really have anything like this in australia. australia day (january 25th) is heading this way but in my younger days the parade on this day was heading into obscurity and irrelevance. the revival in nationalism that has happened over the last few years has seen the australia parade in melbourne certainly become much more, well, nationalist - as a child we never had little australian flags on sticks to wave, but it just isn't or doesn't have the cultural importance of may 17. like in australia you simply wouldn't made sure your 5 year old had their best clothes on to go and watch the parade, if you actually did that rather than enjoy the public holiday with a trip to the beach or a b-b-que, though it is probably significant that january 25th is slap bang in australia's summer holidays, and like norwegians we take our holidays very seriously.