First impressions

People
All the indicators of happiness of life must be right, when placing Norway in such high ranking. People actually seem happy! Everyone is smiling at work and seem to be enjoying what they do.
They are also very kind, helpful and beautiful.

Landscape

Country side

I am located near Oslo, where the landscape is similar to Finnish landscapes; plant species and cultivated crops somehow seem familiar. So far I have only seen white/beige colored cows though, where as the idylic Finnish landscape would have black and white cows – at least in my memory.
There is though more open space and hills.
There aren't also that many lakes around.

Mostly red

Built up landscape

In a village

I just heard yesterday what is the national sport of Norwegians at summer time: painting their houses. The houses are in deed almost without any exception wooden. And it seems like many of my neighbours are actively participating on such activities. The houses are relatively small (if I compare to the Slovenian ones), but I guess normal sized when compared to Finnish ones. Two floor type building prevail.
Even the construction site barracks are wooden!

Also red

Cycling is made easy; there are sideways along the roads, at least around where I live, so you don't have to cycle on the roads. The side way might though be only on one side of the road, so extra care must be taken for pedestrian traffic. The drivers behind wheels are very generous. They stop immediately when you show any sign that you want to cross the road.

Language
I guess all those years of mandatory Swedish at school has finally come into real use.  I can understand some basic things and follow the topic of discussions. Although at work we have very international mixture of people, so I don't hear Norwegian all the time. I do understand when they ask me in the grocery store whether I want a bag (pusse) and a receipt (btw. they don't automatically print the receipt).

Today I just found a Norwegian text book from the book shell and took it home to study it. I read the first 20 pages and understood everything except 3 new words (of course there were many more new words, but so similar to Swedish, that I knew them). Everyone asked me on my first day whether I am planning on learning Norwegian, and before today my answer was always "no" (about that some other time). But now when I see how simple it is, I don't think it will interfere with my current collection of active languages, so why not give it a try, but without any pressures.

I have to find the CD that came with the book, since hearing the correct pronounciation is important. Although there were not that many exceptions listed.

Groceries
Just an hour ago or so I returned from my fourth trip to the grocery store. I though I came home with 1 litre of plain jugurt, but once I opened  the package I figured out it was souer milk. I was standing in front of the jugurts for quite some time, and was trying to find just natural jugurt in 1 litre packaging, and it did not look as if they had it at all. There was a collection of same size packages of jugurt mixed with all sorts of berries, but no clearly plain jugurt. So I knew already when I grab the one which most resembled by name and packaging a planin jugurt and hoped it was the one I wished for. But luckily I like souer milk as well.

Home made oat bread

Otherwise it is quite easy to shop. Some items have even labels in Finnish!
But it is soooo expensive! Approximately 2 bags of basic groceries, which I needed to start filling my fridge, freezer and closets cost some 80€. So what I did was I bought couple of kilos of root vegetables (e.g. carrots, celery, swede..) chopped them for one afternoon and prepared them for the freezer. I also bough bigger packages of meat and packet them as well etc. You get the point. So now I probably won't have to do any grocery shopping for few weeks, other than few fresh things every now and then. A nice surprise was that salmon is actually cheap here, the price starting from 88 NOK onwards per kilo. Makes sense.

There seem to be some famous Norwegian nutritian who has her name all over the packages. Just like some Jamie Oliver in UK, here they have Tina, who seem to know how to market her expertise.

I will attach some pictures at some point – once it will stop raining, as it has so far every time I came from work. You will probably see some yellow fields of rape, the neighbours cows, some pretty wooden houses. And we will see where and what I will end up taking pictures of on my planned weekend cycling trip to Oslo.