I just got this from another Caro-fan (see a few posts below). It’s the text for the Caro advertisement that was send in TV (and radio?) advertisement in the late 1980s (maybe also somewhat later). You have to know German to understand it of course.

Ich mag das Schöne dieser Welt, ich mag den Wind im Roggenfeld
– Ich mag es, wenn der Tag erwacht
Und die Sonne dazu lacht
Ich mag Plaudern am Nachmittag, Obstkuchen mit Schlag
– Ich mag die Lichter meiner Stadt
Diskutieren bis in den Tag
Lass mich von deinem Duft verführ’n
Deine Wärme spür’n
– Caro, ich mag dich! Du bist einfach gut!

But the important part is anyways not the text in itself – the important part is the time period that West Germans connect to it.
Continue reading Caro-song →

Oh my, these last two experiences really made me loose the last little bit of faith in “the system” (OK – granted, that’s a lie, I lost that quite a long time ago, but it makes it sound more dramatic). It’s really not meant to be read all the way through- if you fall off some time in there you really got my main point 🙂

The situation that I want to tell you about is about a friend of my from Douglas, AZ. I met him there when he was about to graduate high school, and now he has been attending Cochise College for almost three semesters. He has good grades and all, and he thought that he could just come over here under whatever program they have in place. So he asked me to find out what possibilities there are, and this is where the fun starts… We have this building called the “Administration building” and it looks very much the way I remember the office building that Asterix and Obelix (a very popular comic book series in Europe) have to enter in their tour to Rome when they have to get just one form for some reason, but they are send back and forth and up and down the stairs as they always need just one more form to get the form they request, etc. .

Now I don’t know whether they modeled the comic drawings after our building or whether they build our admin building according to the comic or whether simply all bureaucrats make their buildings look that way, but the similarity seems striking to me.
Continue reading BureauCRAZY! →

Another thing I was thinking about in connection with my trip to bergen is the extreme focus all other regions in Norway put on Oslo – at the same time as they really don’t like it at all.

They were all very certain that in Oslo you can get killed by just walking out on the street and living for them was apparently all about moving back out into the middle of nowhere where they were born after finishing their education in the nearest town with a population just large enough to provide for a college.

The most amazing thing about these misconceptions of Oslo is that Norway is incredibly Oslo-focused.

Continue reading Oslo Oslo Oslo →

This weekend I was in Bergen and it was the first time for a very long time that I have spend an extensive amount of time with “normal” non-political Norwegian youngsters. Well, not really, they were not all that unpolitical, but they were not on the extreme far left. Or at least not all of them were. I was attending the fall camp of the Pedagogy Students (PS) – the student chapter of the main teachers labor union.

And then yesterday, I started reflecting a bit upon the the meaning of coffe-substitutes…
Continue reading post-modern coffe substitute →

Do you know those situations when you think you feel love (or have recently) for a person at the same time that you really despise their behavior? Well, that’s where I’m at right now. It might not even be her behavior so much as what my subjective interpretation is of it: whenever she shows some positive signs – a smile, a brief, a flattering remark, a yell of my name across a room full of people – I almost always tend to interpret it as no sign at all or a sign of her trying to play with me. But then I got this dream (with Nazis and stuff), and I think that explained a lot.

Continue reading a strange dream →