Norway’s Funniest Signposts
Bom!
One of the quirks about Norwegians is that they are not very good at giving directions, generally speaking, and their signposts — or sometimes, lack of them — reflect this idiosyncrasy. It’s as if they expect everyone to just kind of know what to do. I’m sure they all do know. For visitors, however, this can be perplexing.
For example, most underground car tunnels have two lanes of traffic. But occasionally, you run into a one-lane tunnel. There are no signs explaining how to deal with a car racing directly towards you in the dark. Only because Teresa (my beloved spouse) and I have been in other Nordic countries with narrow tunnels did we know to look for “pull-overs” every few hundred meters. But even so, we had to intuit that the car with the pull-over to its LEFT must yield to oncoming traffic. It would have been nice to have that somewhere on a signpost.
Now that we have finished 80 days on the road through Norway, we can share our greatest roadside hits:
The “Bom” triangle, above, remains Norway’s most mystifying sign. We saw it often enough on the roadside that after awhile, we would shout “Bom!” whenever it appeared. According to Google Translate, Bom in Norwegian means, in English (wait for it)…“Boom!”
