My travels are finally over! To summarize my final week in Norway, I’d say: rain, all modes of transportation (bike, kayak, car), seed cracker picnics, and greenery. And, if I were to add another word(s), it’d be barber shops and hair salons. Inexplicably, on every single street, there were one, if not two, hair salons.
After seeing so many, we were confident that this wasn’t a case of simply noticing something and then noticing it all the time (the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon), and it made me curious: why are there so many barber shops in Norway?
I did some digging. A Redditor was curious:
The answers were anecdotal and humorous, though not necessarily satisfying. Money laundering. Norwegians have abnormal hair growth. The most plausible one was from someone’s hairdresser: it has to do with business scaling. According to them, it’s easy to run a profitable small salon with 1-3 hairdressers.
The answer is likely banal, but as a tourist, it was a fun task to try to fill in those blanks and simultaneously appreciate that they can’t always be filled in.
Anyways, sunburnt, content, and overstimulated - I’m back home now! I’ve been eating the brunost I brought over with seed crackers. Brunost, or Norwegian “brown cheese,” is made with whey, milk, and cream. The heat turns the milk sugars into caramel, which gives the cheese a sweet cajeta-like taste. It tastes best when it’s thinly shaved with a cheese slicer.
Other things I brought back with me are:
A renewed appreciation for the outdoors and nature
Reading!!
Shopping secondhand (There are so many secondhand stores in Norway and it seemed to me to be part of the large sustainability culture there)
Norwegian artists to research further (Borre Saethre, Gunnar S. Gundersen)
A short dispatch to be sure. I’ve updated my city guides if you’re in Oslo or Bergen sometime soon. HAGS until next weekend!