[Leica] OT: Some square snaps

[daniel.ridings at edd.uio.no (Daniel Ridings)]

Tourists are very welcome and the Norwegian population is a charmer.

As a tourist, you won't need to have anything to do with these salaried
twits. :-)

Daniel

On Tue, 8 Mar 2005, Alastair Firkin wrote:

> gee, Helen and I were due to come up that way, perhaps we will go to
> New Zealand: they are only moderately unfriendly there ;-)
> On 08/03/2005, at 1:04 AM, Daniel Ridings wrote:
>
> > Graham,
> > Foreigners are not really welcome here. Tolerated, but not welcome. The
> > fewer, the better. Perhaps I'm exaggerating, but I feel I have to since
> > Scandinavia has tended to have a liberal stamp on it. The various
> > countries react differently. I suspect that Sweden has the most liberal
> > refugee policy, Finland the least, Denmark, a small country, has been
> > over
> > saturated and Norway is somewhere inbetween. Probably closer to Finland
> > than anything else.
> >
> > Norway does have a lot of public money, oil money. So it can afford to
> > have civil servants on duty who really don't have to pull much weight.
> > They can act offended if you show up and expecting them to perform
> > their
> > duties. (I've had a run-in with a few of them, so my background
> > information might be tainted :-) ). It doesn't really matter if they do
> > anything or not. The country and afford them. The bureaucracy is of
> > Byzantine proportions.
> >
> > So you have these furners. You make them report to the police station
> > (one
> > single police station in all of Oslo, the capital city, mind you, not
> > just
> > your local station) between 8 and 10? possibly 11. Anyway, at the end
> > of
> > the short time frame they close. Doesn't matter that you've been
> > waiting
> > there since 8 am, they close. Sorry. Come back tomorrow.
> >
> > So all these poor souls start queuing up at around 7 am. This
> > particular
> > day it was -15 degrees and the wind was raging off the fjord, the
> > harbour.
> > Cold. Very cold. Most of these people come from temperate zones ...
> > Africa, Pakistan, India etc. 15 degrees is cold for many of them.
> >
> > At 8 o'clock ... make that 8:05 if the police really feel like screwing
> > with you, they unlock the door. Now at that point, you don't retain
> > your
> > queue place, but you have to rush to a number machine and get a queue
> > number.
> >
> > Some of these will not get served on today. The one station is Oslo is
> > not
> > open long enough to take care of them.
> >
> > Maybe they'll get tired of it and decide to move home?
> >
> > http://www.rollei-gallery.net/ridings/image-80729.html
> >
> > Excuse my cynical humor today. I had a run-in with the customs people
> > at
> > the border last night. Norway is a member of Schengen so they're not
> > allowed to do controls of people, only of goods. I think they're
> > trying to
> > drum up business for the train line to Gothenburg they now have but
> > can't
> > get to take off (they raised the price 100%) so they're making sure all
> > other forms of transportation are so miserable to use that people with
> > opt
> > for the useless train instead (it's a milk-run. Stops at every farm
> > between Gothenburg and Oslo).
> >
> > Something like that ...
> >
> > Daniel
> >
> >
> >> Hi Daniel,
> >>
> >> I particularly like these two:
> >> http://www.rollei-gallery.net/ridings/image-80727.html
> >>
> >> http://www.rollei-gallery.net/ridings/image-80728.html
> >>
> >> and I am curious about the reference to 'foreigners dose of
> >> humiliation'
> >>
> >> --Graham
> >>
> >>
> >> _______________________________________________
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> >>
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> >
> >
> Alastair
>
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