Five months in
Many things will be said and written about 2016*, but in our house it will always be remembered as the year we moved to Norway.
Five months ago, I wrote this note to myself:
It’s nearly 11:30 at night and it’s still just about light enough to read outside, because I’m in Oslo and it’s July and oh yeah by the way we kind of emigrated here today.
Practically speaking, it’s not that hard to emigrate. You make a list. The list is very long, but everything on the list is basically doable. You get rid of a lot of things (but it’s never enough. After you move, you will get rid of more). You discover that “thanks, but I’m moving abroad” is the ultimate way to cut short upsell and other intrusions. You say many goodbyes, an experience full of pangs and gratitude for the good people you are leaving behind. You are also grateful for the internet, which will provide a soft landing in a new country where you only know a handful of people.
The first few weeks in Norway are genuinely quite weird. It’s impossible to shake the sensation that we are here on holiday, a feeling not diminished by staying in an AirBnB and living out of a suitcase. We keep checking with each other: We live here now … right? Friends and family text us to wish us luck; their certainty that we have emigrated only serves to highlight how ambiguous it feels to us.
This ambiguity is amplified by my spending my first two months of life in Norway commuting back to the UK to finish some work. Already living out of a suitcase, I get really good at packing an even smaller bag. Every weekend spent in Oslo feels like a holiday, which is surprisingly restful. We swim in the harbour and squint in the ferociously bright sun. We wander around the suburbs and go running in the parks and eat implausibly high-quality dairy products. It is a weirdly simple life, a bubble of sorts.
This gentle stasis is disrupted when everything suddenly happens at once: we find an apartment to rent, we move in, and I accept a job offer. It turns out that it’s really hard to continue a 1,500 km weekly commute and a job that’s winding down when you know that both will stop soon; you just want to be done with it and move on to the next thing. Exhaustion and ennui; more happy-sad goodbyes with brilliant colleagues.
Meanwhile, we are being processed. Getting tax numbers and (eventually) bank accounts is not something that happens quickly in Norway, but the process turns out to be reasonably humane. The worst thing is the uncertainty: while my husband has a job (our reason for being here), the immigration process doesn’t feel like a sure thing. What if we get sent home again? It resolves in the end, and I make the cut as my husband’s Plus One. We breathe out.
Now that we have somewhere proper to live, the movers can bring our things over from the UK. We have each lived out of a suitcase for two months, sleeping, sitting and eating on the same sofa bed in one room with the bare minimum of pots, pans and crockery — an impressively pared-down life even by Scandinavian standards. Having lots more stuff suddenly arrive feels overwhelming.
I go from working between two countries and having way more work than time to do it in, to being (briefly) unemployed. I have, fleetingly, three sets of house keys. The duplication and subsequent de-duplication of these things makes me think a lot about people who do not have even one house or job, and who are not ever going to receive a van-load of furniture, crockery and clothes. Norway is a rich country, but there are still plenty of homeless people in Oslo, some of whom beg for money in the streets. Many are foreign; their experience of immigration is unimaginably different from ours.
That’s kind of been my takeaway from the whole process, to be honest: emigrating to another country is a cinch if you are white and affluent and carrying a ‘friendly’ passport.
Take all our stuff (no, really, please take it). Shipping it here cost around 1/3 of the cost of buying it all again, so of course we chose to ship. But what if you can’t afford the shipping costs? You arrive with nothing and with limited means to buy anything (even if you were able to sell your old stuff, at a loss, in the UK). Paradoxically, it often costs way more money to be poor.
Plus, you know, we’re white. We don’t stick out. Norway is overwhelmingly white, and even though some people are pleasantly surprised by the lack of racism here, I still hear anecdotes. (It could be much worse, though.)
And at least for now, but I guess not much longer, we remain EU citizens. Emigrating to another country within the EEA is much, much easier as a citizen of the EU. So is cross-border commuting. (Why would a country give that up?) No one knows what will happen to Brits in Norway when the Brexit shoe drops. (By the way, we didn’t leave because of Brexit; our plans were already underway when the result came in. Knowing we were moving took some of the sting out of that result, but only some.)
If we’ve made emigration look easy, that’s because it was. In a year when we only heard more awful stories about people fleeing their violent, war-torn home countries to try to make a better life somewhere else, being able to pay some money and fill in some forms to move from one first-world country to another seems like a sick joke. We are very, very fortunate.
And we love it here. After London, the air is cleaner, the rent is lower, and the ratio of trees to people is much better. We are lucky to have interesting jobs and work with good people. Counting so many blessings at the end of 2016, and resolving in 2017 to do more to help those who have less.
Things I haven’t talked about here: the language; the culture; my new job; what it’s like living in Norway. I’m brewing a long post (or maybe series of posts) about learning Norwegian. In the meantime, if you’re interested in the experience of moving to Scandinavia from the UK, check out the Small Differences podcast that I’m doing with one of my new colleagues, Knut Melvær.
- Not everything on the world stage sucked in 2016, by the way. If you’ve got the end-of-year blues, check out this great list of things that got better.
