Friday 30 July 1999

What is making matters worse is that it's Friday evening. The few doctors who are sober will be overrun by people who have hurt themselves or been hurt by others in the traditional Norwegian Friday drinking binge. (Which I, by the way, do not take part in. I am as sober as they get, I just don't act like it.) So I better hope that my body manages to rebuff the bacteria by itself yet again. I don't have any particular immune deficiency; in fact, as a grown-up I have been somewhat less hit by bacterial and viral diseases than the average for my age and gender. This is probably due mainly to the fact that I don't get near other people much. When I eat contaminated food, I am at least as likely as the next guy to take ill from it. (Another reason why I haven't been eager to travel to foreign countries: Few of them have the standards of cleanliness that we have here when preparing food.)

The natives are restless, as you may expect. There are dark mutterings about there being too many damned foreigners, and us paying for them and all, and there should be room for Norwegians too in Norway, not just strangers who want to make Norway a Muslim state and take our money and our girls. I wouldn't like to tour the city on Drinking Night if I had a non-standard skin color, this week.

Actually Norway is the second most ethnically homogenous nation in the presumed civilized world, after Iceland. Of course, this is largely because the two ethnic groups who constitute most of the population, are taught from very early childhood that they are actually ONE ethnic group. In reality, there were two separate cultures at least as far back as the bronze age, probably back to early stone age, and they arrived in Norway from different locations and at different times. The Easterners are from the same influx as the Swedes and the current Danes (who emigrated from Sweden in the first millenium AD). The Westerners arrived from Denmark and what's now the Netherlands. They probably had a common origin somewhere further south, though, as they both spoke a proto-Germanic language. However, the earliest runic writings show that the languages of East and West Norway were already different, and so they have continued to be until this day.

Of course, the Saami people is different from these again. Living mainly in the Northern parts, they consider themselves aboriginal and like to team up with Native Americans for public relations. They also make some incredible pop music, and occasionally their joik (a music form used by shamans in the past) can be quite enthralling. However, their language is closely related to Finnish, an Alto-Uraic language which everybody except the Finns agree came from the east in the late stone age or early bronze by means of invading warrior tribes similar to the Magyars of Hungary. The Magyars speak a related language (in the same sense that English and Russian are related).

Not that any of this knowledge is going to do me any good if I am eaten by bacteria. In fact, it has hardly done me any favors so far either. But I love knowledge, and especially I love understanding, seeing the threads that connect through time and space. The more other people close their eyes and ears to any particular fact and chant "la la la la la I am not listening la la la la la" the more I delight in repeating it. Chalk up another human trait, I guess. (I suspect that this may be what motivates proselyting atheists. It's not like they can expect any reward in the afterlife for their effort, but the sheer beauty of seeing people put fingers in their ears should be reward enough for anyone. Of course, this works the other way too. :)

Now I'm off to bed. Hopefully I won't find out quite yet if the atheists were, after all, correct. (Let me say it would be quite a surprise if I wake up someday and find that I'm dead and there is no afterlife.)