Travel Tips

In an article entitled "So, This is Heaven: Norway", the US newspaper Los Angeles Times sings the praises of Norway and the Norwegians:

"Imagine a world so shielded from modern dangers that children accept candy from strangers.

Think about a place where lifelong financial security is guaranteed, no matter how many layoffs, stock market crashes or catastrophic illnesses come your way."

And Carol J. Williams, the Times staff writer continues her report from Oslo:

-Consider the psychological well-being of belonging to a country where no one is homeless or hungry, where women and men are equal, where a pristine environment is reverentially protected and where sharing the wealth with the world's less fortunate is a moral obligation. Norway is not utopia--after all, it does suffer the occasional incursions of the cruel outside world. But most Norwegians admit that in terms of uplifting ideals and earthly comforts, life in this country is as good as it gets.

Williams has made a note of this year's U.N. Human Development Report which ranks Norway the No. 1 place in the world to live, based on a list of indicators about health, wealth and social outlook.

She then goes on to state that this report does not take into account that "darkness falls by 3 pm half the year (a "slight" inaccuracy according to most Norwegian news media reporting on the article). Also escaping the statisticians' notice are new social strains created by a sudden influx of immigrants into a long-homogenous nation, she writes.

And although she has registered much muttering over high taxes, she finds many Norwegians contend that they should be giving even more of their money to solve the rest of the world's problems.

She quotes media magnate Ingebrigt Steen Jensen: "We could easily give five times as much as we do in foreign assistance. We have this huge cake, but we can't eat it all, so isn't it better to share it with this room full of hungry people than to put it in the freezer for later?"

Williams also notes that Norway is one of the few countries that donates millions more in foreign aid than the U.N. target of 0.7% of a nation's gross domestic product.

The LA Times reporter also spoke to Jan Erik Hansen, cultural editor for the influential daily newspaper Aftenposten. He believes Norwegians also are committed to their outsize role in foreign development because it elevates an otherwise powerless country into the ranks of global players.

"Norway is a very small country--something we don't like to recognize, and we don't have to when we occupy a fair number of important international positions," Hansen says.

One factor that helped lift Norway to the top life-quality rung, as Williams sees it, was its success in achieving gender equality. Although there are no official quotas, as there are in neighboring Sweden, she notes that women in Norway occupy half the Cabinet and parliament seats and fill more than 40% of judicial and academic posts.

Carol J.Williams has found Norway "-a land of striking beauty, with its coastal tracery of fiords and snowcapped mountains, a country that has remained untouched by pollution as it has evolved from a fishing and farming society into high-tech and white-collar business without an intervening phase of heavy industry. To take advantage of the abundant natural splendor, she has registered that "almost every family has at least one weekend home in the mountains or on the sea."

Williams quotes Statistics Norway, the national profiling agency, which reports that the average Norwegian spends more than 26% of his or her income on leisure-time comforts. And in sharp contrast with other countries in densely populated Europe, 80% of the households are single-family homes or spacious apartments in small-unit clusters.

(Ms Williams may be forgiven for thinking that all Norwegians enjoy 8 weeks of vacation. It is usually 4 weeks, with 5 weeks for those over 60.)

(This was borrowed from <a href="http://www.norwaypost.no">The Norway Post</a>)