Cultural Differences, Part One - Time and Potatoes

After one week in Scandanavia a few distinctions have become apparent between the way of life I'm used to and how things are now so I thought I'd share the less obvious ones with you:

1) TELLING THE TIME - In England, if I was to say "see you at half four", you would understand that we were to meet at 16:30; that "half" means "half past". But in Norway, "half four" means "halfway to four", that is, 15:30! It took a couple of separate explanations for me to understand this.

2) MEAL TIMES - I still haven't fully grasped the eating schedule here, but my current understanding is that you have breakfast first thing, lunch at 12 noon, dinner at about 4pm and tea roughly at 8pm. Tea could be a sandwich or two, waffles, something like that.

3) PEELING POTATOES - Whereas the english way of serving boiled potatoes is to peel, boil and dish them up, the norwegian way is to just boil them. Then, at the dinner table, everyone stabs a fork into a potatoe and skillfully peels it with their table knife. Never in my life had I witnessed such a dinner-time act.

With your new knowledge you should be able to navigate Scandinavia without looking like a foreigner whatsoever. Congratulations.