Nostalgia

I finished my second full day back in Stavanger, and it has been marked by almost continuous nostalgia. I have been away this time five years, but this city, where I have spent a decade of my life, is the closest thing I have to a home. I have been “watching” myself and my reactions to things very closely and I have also tried to look around me with a much more critical eye. Overall, however, it feels great and very natural to be back here.

There are a flood of sights, sounds, smells, and tastes that have been having a really strong effect on me. Some of them are obvious, like the beautiful sunsets on the sea and the way the evening sunlight colors the two sides of my fjord Hafrsfjord. Also tonight, as I walked home from my bus stop just after midnight, the sky was a dozen shades of dark blue, with a touch of white sunlight just barely emerging from some black clouds on the western horizon.

Other things are less poetic, like the texture of the bread for my sandwiches, the strong after taste of the kirsbær (whatever berry that might correspond to in English) drinkable yoghurt, and even the sound of the heavy door closing at Olsokhagen 8.

Today I even rediscovered old feelings of not belonging. Saturday night in downtown Stavanger turns into a massive party. People of all ages prance around the dozen or two most popular bars and nightclubs, hopping among those most hip for their age group. The sidewalks are filled with hot dog stands, smoking groups of extremely drunk people, and the streets are jammed with taxis either unloading heavily perfumed and extravagantly dressed piles of youngsters or loading up people on the verge of passing out. I never got into this, I never understand what exactly the point was. I think the fact I don’t drink has a lot to do with this but tonight, I relived every Saturday in high school I ended up downtown and didn’t exactly know what to do with myself. I wandered the charming old streets of white houses and at one point stared for ages at an ancient cheese store I was amazed to see still surviving despite the fact that every other store on the street had changed. I bought one of every candy I used to love at a 7/11 (7/11 has completely conquered downtown Stavanger since I left) and devoured them all as I sat on the steps in the old vegetable market. I descended into my own kind of Saturday night debauchery.

Before taking a bus home I was stopped by a passing drunk who asked, “Are you from Stavanger?” I was born and lived over a third of my life here but that is a slightly more complicated question than I think he will ever know. I answered, “Yes,” confident that I would probably know any place in town he might be looking for. He then asked me the location of a small but popular bar. It just so happened that Glenn had told me only a few hours earlier where this bar was located so I gave him some directions. He laughed and said, “Haaa, you’re not from Stavanger! You gave yourself away!” He then thanked me for the directions and stumbled off towards the bar.

I spent the next half hour wondering what part of my directions “gave away” the idea that I was not from Stavanger. I went over every word I said. The obvious answer is that my lack of dialect gave me away. With the exception of question words, I don’t speak the Stavanger dialect and I bet my “r” sound, which is closer to the standard Bokmål or the Oslo dialect, than the Dutch sounding “spitting” r-sound that the Stavanger dialect (and my younger sister) uses was the biggest give away in my answer to his question (The r-sound is in fact one of the only sounds I have in common with my mother’s dialect which is supposed to sound like this but when I hear her talk, sounds more to me much closer to this dialect supposedly centered further to the south. (If you want to compare some of Norway’s other dialects, click around the map here. Check out the really cool northern dialects that I am seeing a lot on Norwegian TV and radio these days).

Of course, I could have said something just plain wrong. Ever since I was a kid I sometimes say things in Norwegian which are a direct translation of something from English but it is never conscious, I just say what I think is the thing to say. When I worked tech support for Norwegian Telecom and dealt with hundreds of customers per week from all over Norway I’m sure there were lots of times my Norwegian was less than perfect. I was almost never questioned about it though, except the occasional jerk who asked me if I was from Sweden or something (a natural mistake derived from the usually dependable rule that IF someone says a lot of weird stuff THEN they must come from Sweden). Anyways, I was annoyed at the guy’s comment, because, well, I am from Stavanger. And then I got annoyed for being annoyed because who cares? Why do I need to attach myself to this city? Why do I care if he mistook me as someone from Oslo or even Sweden? Why do I have to belong to this community and be recognized by them as its member? I head back to Tokyo in June, move to Boston in the fall, why does it matter?