Norway is one of the most expensive countries in the world….that is if your country has a crap currency like Australia’s Pacific peso. It stands to reason that if our currency was a lot stronger, it wouldn’t have cost me A$66 for two beers. Admittedly one of them was a litre and the other was half a litre but that price should at least come with a lap-dance. I’m not sure whether that would have been on the CB’s list though, she being the recipient of the girlie half litre beer. The litre should have come with a girlie.
And why is this the case? Because Norway built a massive sovereign wealth fund on the back of North Sea fossil fuels so has a strong economy and therefore a strong currency. Australia, which has more wealth in the ground than just about anywhere else on earth has sqandered opportunity after opportunity. We should be creaming it but aren’t. Why? Because idiots vote for idiots and we all live happily ever after until, as prescient Margaret Thatcher noted, we run out of other people’s money and unfortunately that won’t happen until the IMF or the World Bank or the Chinese tell us we can’t borrow anymore.
And now for something completely different (to steal a phrase). We were sitting in a bar overlooking the commercial area of a marina with tour boats and other working boats in Tromso when we saw people actually in the water, in October, way north of the Arctic Circle. What madness is this we asked as one? They were at the end of a 50m pier periodically emerging from a wooden shed-like building before diving, jumping or getting gingerly into the water. Turns out the building is a sauna. So these people were heating themselves to lobster mornay then jumping into the Arctic Ocean. I can’t think of anything with more heart attack inducing efficiency.
Tromso has this very modern church which they call a cathedral but it isn’t. It’s A-shaped with glass at both ends. The back is lined up with where the sun comes up and as there are times of the year when the sun barely gets above the horizon, for a big part of the year the parishoners were looking straight into the sun. So they all started wearing sun glasses. It must have looked like the Godfather’s funeral every week. To alleviate this situation the church now has a stained glass back window. A cheaper option would have been to turn the pews round, move the alter to the other end and buy sunnies for the pastor.