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Visitors to Norway are likely to come across a free brochure in English providing a few helpful tips about holidaying on the cheap in one of the most expensive countries in the world. It invites you, for example, to wander the banks of the Akers river which runs through the middle of Oslo "with an idyllic park on both sides". ["What they don't tell you," muttered my esteemed colleague, just back from Oslo, "is that under every bridge along that river there's a group of bloody junkies." This apparently disrupts the idyll.]
Page 23 of the brochure, which she kindly brought to my attention, contains a sidebar, which, in turn, contains an untruth. In full:
As I mentioned, but will stress again, this is less than true. You might almost say that every aspect of it is a lie. Personally I suspect the writer was a Swede. But the main thing to remember is that this tart slice of disaffected nonsense has sat unquestioned in a brochure seen by countless thousands of tourists for at least a year. This can't be good for a country that's already famously sensitive about how it's viewed overseas. (It's not impossible that a Norwegian newspaper might stumble across that very phrase from this journal and run an agonised article asking "Why do the British think we are famously sensitive about how we're viewed overseas?", or even "How can we improve Norway's image on Livejournal?".)*
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Page 23 of the brochure, which she kindly brought to my attention, contains a sidebar, which, in turn, contains an untruth. In full:
NO DOG SHIT!(I swear I am not making this up, for the benefit of any of my relatives who may be passing.)
In any European capital city other than Oslo, it's easy to find the Norwegians. You will recognise them by the smell. The thing is, people from Norway are not used to having to watch out for dog shit in the streets. In Oslo, you can just run around the streets at night without accidents happening, because there is no poo here. In Norway, even dogs respect the rules.
As I mentioned, but will stress again, this is less than true. You might almost say that every aspect of it is a lie. Personally I suspect the writer was a Swede. But the main thing to remember is that this tart slice of disaffected nonsense has sat unquestioned in a brochure seen by countless thousands of tourists for at least a year. This can't be good for a country that's already famously sensitive about how it's viewed overseas. (It's not impossible that a Norwegian newspaper might stumble across that very phrase from this journal and run an agonised article asking "Why do the British think we are famously sensitive about how we're viewed overseas?", or even "How can we improve Norway's image on Livejournal?".)*
— = * This insecurity seems to be a wider Scandinavian trait, rather than specifically Norwegian. After the episode of Friends aired where Phoebe's sister says she sold Phoebe's birth certificate to a "Swedish runaway", there were articles in the Swedish press asking why it was a Swedish runaway; were Swedish runaways really a problem in the States; what was wrong with Sweden's image, etc etc. All of this just renders Denmark's inflammatory role in sparking the Great War of the Silly Pictures even more ludicrous and unlikely.
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