Beside the Seaside

« In Which The Mystery Of The Russian James Bond Is Revealed | Home | In Which Norway Disappoints Me »

In Which I Find Out How Norwegians Let Their Hair Down

August 5, 2006 by Mike

A leisurely day hanging out in Kirkenes.

I started out at the lake just above the town centre. A parade of likely lads and lasses were being pushed from a wobbly tower down a makeshift chute into the lake in a variety of novelty home-made 'boats' -- the sort made out of prams and sledges covered in papier-mache to look like submarines, ambulances and the like. Most of them were wearing fancy dress.

A large crowd was cheering them on.

You make your own fun in a small town.

Back in town at the market: Michael was glad to see I'd escaped from Russia. His partner introduced herself. All very friendly but it got weird when we swapped email addresses.. Marianne, it turns out, has the same surname as my (Norwegian) mum: Astrup.

"No it's not common at all," she assured me. "For sure, we're related. Cousin!"

Family trees are well-researched over here, and we realised we (or our grandparents) were both in 'the big blue Astrup book'. Although, as Marianne commented, some of the bloodlines of the Astrups up here in the North aren't included in the book.

"There's a lot of inter-marriage.. Norwegians, Saami, Finns, Russians. Maybe the people who put the book together weren't so proud of this."

It's an old book. I'd like to think things have changed.

I look forward to seeing more of Marianne and Michael -- they travel round Finnmark's markets and small towns all summer. And I'm looking forward to seeing the road in Berlevag named after one of our fellow Astrups. More on this in the next few days.

---

Not only have I been here for the one week of hot sunshine this summer, I was also in town for a night of music, dancing and, frankly, getting bladdered. It looked like a year's worth of going out was being done in an evening, but to be honest I think they do this most weekends. Hell, most nights. "We are rather wild up here" as Marianne coyly put it.

In a large marquee close to the docks, bands were playing all afternoon and all evening. The bar was very long and very busy. The men were trying hard to look sloshed - but who are they kidding? It was the women who showed glassy-eyed determination to get Very Seriously Drunk.

By which I mean deep-breath-before-draining-your-glass drunk; hold-on-to-the-table-to stop-the-world-spinning drunk; lurching-through-a-packed-room-taking-no-prisoners-with-three-full-glasses-in-your-hands drunk.

There were half-a-dozen women so beautiful I could never dare even say Hello to.

There were at least twice as many who I could never dare say No to. If, for some strange, drunken reason, they ever decided they wanted to play with me for a while before tossing me aside. Hefty, I think, is the delicate word to describe them - but there was nothing delicate about them. They looked like they could all power a Viking longship -- each.

Two women were particularly striking -- dressed head to toe in matching, cleavage-thrusting tops and sprayed-on leggings, they were clearly on the prowl as a tag team. Their sunbed-red faces suggested they were mother and daughter, but the only way to tell them apart from behind was that the mother had dyed ginger hair with blonde roots, and her daughter had dyed blonde hair with ginger roots.

Grown men wept with relief every time one of the women walked past.. and kept on walking.

It was the kind of evening when you keep one eye out for the first fight and the second eye making extra certain the first fight doesn't involve you being the punch bag.

Luckily, the women were concentrating on drinking fast and the men on just drinking. And perhaps by design rather than luck, the music was helping to keep things quiet.

When I arrived, a group called Bassment were in full swing, noodling their way through jazz-rock interpretations of dancefloor-pleasers by the likes of, err, Leonard Cohen. The kind of jazz-rock where the rest of the band stare intensely at the fret board for every last, lingering note of every gut-wrenching guitar solo. And every bass solo. The audience were left to drink in peace.

Even when the band launched into the potentially combustible 'Sympathy For The Devil' they stopped the crowd getting too volatile by letting the drummer sing it. As a rap.

But the last band on were called Five Drunk Men. They looked exactly as you'd want a band called Five Drunk Men to look. They sounded exactly as you'd want a band called Five Drunk Men to sound. Unless you didn't want to find yourself in a 200-woman fist-fight. (OK, I'll admit, I was tempted...)

They launched into an anthem called "I Am Stupid". I stayed 'til the end of that... just so I could say I did.. then made my excuses and left.

Beside the Seaside

In Which I Find Out How Norwegians Let Their Hair Down

Comments

Leave your comment

Latest comments