The Norwegian Arm

On good manners, and rats

I am back from two weeks, almost, in Norway. My trip involved an epic amount of travelling, which was my fault as I planned it. But there was so much schlepping, I actually began to keep a tally of my transportation. I calculated that in 12 days within Norway, my trips involved:

• 2 aeroplanes

• 25 buses

• 2 trains

• 2 ferries

• 8 trams

• 2 cars (actually one car but twice)

• 2 boats

It got to the point where my heart would sink when I’d realise that an appointment required me to travel to yet another headland or peninsula. Each of those trips above lasted at least 30 minutes, and usually an hour. I can’t read on buses so I spent a lot of time thinking and watching. I learned that Norwegian young men like the floppy hair look; that Norwegians have excellently stylish backpacks and two-tone walking trousers; that the bigger the town or city, the less likely it was that I would see good boots, but instead young people wore trainers or shoes that were entirely unsuited to the snowed-over pavements outside.

I’d been disappointed at the lack of snow in Bodø but the universe felt my ungrateful disappointment and made me pay for it. The snow came in abundance when I was in Namsos, then even more so on a tiny island near Hitra so that I had two frankly terrifying three hour drives on roads I couldn’t see. Never have I been more grateful for roadside snow poles.

My Air BNB host on the tiny island, John, was not pleased by the snow. “It was supposed to have gone. This isn’t supposed to be here. It’s supposed to be spring.” Instead he was shovelling and sweeping snow, digging out my rental car for me, taking his quad bike snow plough up the steep slope that led down to his beautiful little estate on the edge of the water. He has renovated an old farm, another house, and is now working on renovating a boat-house and building a bridge — but only on March 21 when the water will be low enough — to a tiny island he owns, where he is going to build glamping cottages. He also hires out boats to fishermen and has a company that hires out ROVs. Not only that, but he got a four-strong troupe of male goats to keep down the vegetation on his land, and to get them used to him, would sit near them for hours reading a book or talking to them. Now they will come when called, though not when it is snowing heavily, so heavily that “Bob! Komm!” gets no reaction from a goat standing in the doorway of his nice warm goat-house (which John also built). I will never go back to the city, said John. The noise of it.

It is too easy to make judgments of whole nations after a short stay there and I try not to, but there is one thing I think is true. Norwegians, by the standards of other countries, are rude. Or cold. Or distant. They would mystify friendly Yorkshire folk. They are not rude in a shop/service situation — except for you, Goth young man in the Rema 1000 who looked like he wanted to spit, you should not be in the service industry — or in an Air BNB situation: John was thoroughly charming, as was Hans the hotel manager in Bodø. But there’s no chatting with strangers. I have been waiting at a bus stop in a remote and deserted place with one other woman, who acted for the 20 minutes as if I wasn’t there and as if we weren’t the only two humans around. In Bergen, I went running up around a beautiful lake, in heavy snowfall. It was stunning, and as I am used to, I greeted everyone I passed, dog walkers, walkers, runners, because we are humans out in nature and sharing the elements and that is what we do. I got grudging greetings back, but never a smile and sometimes a deliberate lack of eye contact. If I hadn’t greeted people, no-one would have greeted me. It was disconcerting.

So I ran back to my rented apartment and googled “are Norwegians rude?”

And there are a lot of replies. It’s not a new question for Google.

Take the Norwegian Arm. This is when you are eating a meal with someone, and you need something and you don’t ask for it but reach for it, never mind whether someone’s face is in the way. I am slightly sympathetic to this: it’s efficient. But I know it would be shocking if I encountered it, and I would think it rude.

Obviously what is considered polite is relative. In China, I asked plenty of people why public toilets could still be found that had no doors, and nobody had an answer because nobody had ever thought there was anything wrong with it. It was like asking why walking involved putting one foot in front of the other .Spitting is acceptable in China; blowing your nose in public is not acceptable in Japan but is acceptable here. One of my favourite quotes in The Big Necessity came from a 16th-century Italian archbishop and diplomat named Giovanni della Casa. In 1558, he published Galateo, or The Rules of Polite Behaviour,” a useful guide to manners, in which he advised sternly that:

When you have blown your nose, do not open your handkerchief to glare upon your snot, as if pearls and rubies had fallen from your brains.

I think I would have liked the Archbishop.

I don’t know the Norwegian etiquette on nose-blowing, but a charitable interpretation of their refusal to greet strangers is that it is polite. It is courteous because you do not invade someone’s private space unless invited. Saying hello on a mountain path is apparently invading someone’s private space. In this guide to being polite in Norway, we learn that Norway and Germany and probably other Scandi countries are “coconut” cultures.

Fons Trompenaars and Charles Hampden-Turner and, more elegantly, Erin Meyer, refer to […] ‘peach cultures.’ In a peach culture, engaging in social interaction with  strangers is normal, ordinary and accepted. Polite.

In peach cultures, the communication style can be described as soft. Smiles come quickly, greetings are cheerful; but softness does not necessarily translate into close and lasting friendships. Erin Meyer shares this story, told by a German, in her article One Reason Cross-Cultural Small Talk is so Tricky:

“In Brazil people are so friendly – they are constantly inviting me over for coffee. I happily agree, but time and again they forget to tell me where they live.” 

In ‘coconut cultures’, like Germany (ibid.) or Norway, people may appear more closed off. Fewer smiles, less information shared, significantly more (uncomfortable?) silence.

[…

Perhaps unsurprisingly, people from peach cultures can find people from coconut cultures cold, uninterested – uninteresting, even – rude and difficult to get to know. Vice versa, the chatty peaches may appear a little manic for the average coconut, who just wants to sit on the bus in peace and quiet, scrolling through Insta, thank you.

My mother is the sort of person who would talk to checkout staff while the teenage me would cringe behind her. She still talks to checkout staff, and anyone else too. She is gregarious and talkative, and she almost always reaps a reward from her outward cheer. My mother is a peach. I am an introvert. I always thought I was a coconut. Except it seems that on mountain paths or deserted bus-stops in Hjallestad, looking out to the fjords and the snowy beauty of Norway, I am a peach.

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Animal hero of the week

Rats!

I love them. I have always loved rats. In fact I like most pests, as pests are successful at surviving, so I respect them. Seagulls, rats, crows. But not cockroaches, never cockroaches. Once I went partway into the inspection chamber of a sewer in New York and a great black mass on the wall suddenly scattered in all directions and it was nearly 20 years ago and I see it vividly still.

But rats are wonderful. They are so clever. Many years ago I sat next to a man called Bart at some breakfast function in South Africa and he said he worked with rats. His rats were called HeroRats because they detected landmines.

And with that, breakfast got a lot more interesting.

I’ve got a lot of the following information from Bart Weetjen’s organisation, APOPO, which trains HeroRats.

The giant pouched rat (cricetomys ansorgei) is a large rodent from sub-Saharan Africa, which is shit-hot at smelling TNT, an explosive used in land-mines. They are light enough that they don’t set the mines off, they are intelligent enough that they are easily trained, they are smart enough that they don’t mind if their human trainer changes to another human trainer. In short, they are brilliant.

A rat can sweep a minefield the size of a tennis court in 30 minutes. This would take a human four days. Here is what Sophea, a deminer in Cambodia, says about rats:

Before I came to APOPO I didn’t like rats. But I wanted to work with them because I had heard so many good things and I wanted to try something different. The first time I saw the HeroRATs though I was terrified!! They were so big!

But actually they are very nice and docile little animals. They have been through nine months of training in Tanzania and they are very used to people. They sniff you all over, looking for a snack! I have grown to really love them because they are so clever. Seeing them finding the landmines so quickly is a pleasure. We work on zones the size of a tennis court, and they take about 30 minutes to check it. This could take me up to four days with a metal detector because of all the false alarms from scrap metal, which of course we have to check in case they are actually landmines.

To find landmines, APOPO uses an ‘integrated approach’. First of all we use machines to prepare the land, get rid of scrub and brambles, and sometimes turn over the earth that can be very compacted, making it impossible to extract the landmines. Then a deminer creates ‘safe paths’ around the rectangular zones so the rat handlers can walk around safely. A guideline is strung across the zone and the rat is attached by a harness, and off they go. When a rat thinks it has found a landmine, it scratches on the ground and we mark that spot at the edge of the zone. Then a deminer comes to verify the spot, checking for landmines on his way there. If it is a landmine, he carefully excavates it and it is either destroyed where it is, or taken away if it is stable.

Sophea and her colleague

They can detect tuberculosis too. A rat can detect 100 sputum samples for TB in 20 minutes. This too would take a human four days.

APOPO researches detection rats as a “failsafe” - examining clinic tested human sputum samples delivered from partner clinics in Tanzania, Mozambique and Ethiopia. Any rat-suspect samples are rechecked using WHO endorsed methods and if TB is confirmed, APOPO notifies the clinic. Our research indicates that APOPO is improving clinic detection rates by 40%.

Rats are great.

APOPO is an excellent organisation doing a lot of good. If you can spare any money, you can adopt a rat such as Ronin, who loves a shoulder ride and whose day job is clearing landmines in Cambodia. And if for some reason rats aren’t your thing, APOPO trains landmine-detecting dogs too, which you can also adopt.