101–110 of 190 posts
I cannot resist… I have to tell… when they did it, they had non-stop media coverage, as much as could possibly be done. An hour or two after traffic switched, TV broadcast from Svinesund, the biggest of the road crossings to Norway, and a major route for road haulage, and a reporter said something like "here we have the driver of a Norwegian 18-wheeler, . Well, , what do think of the big reform?" Norwegian, looking a…
This almost sounds like a sketch since Sweden has “Norway jokes” where the punchline is consistently how dumb Norwegians are — a structure that I’m sure is mirrored in Norway and similarly in other countries (england/scotland, france/belgium maybe?)
Having a non-binding referendum and moving against the 85% vote takes balls. And we're forever greatful that they did. Presumably people thought it would be inconvenient and voted no, while politicians realized the cost of doing it later would be much larger than just ripping the band aid off. At the time, the number of massive motorway crossings and similar was probably nearly zero. Today the cost would be unimagina…
If you already drove cars where drivers sit left side as Wikipedia says, what exactly were those 85% thinking about? Clearly not road safety?
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As I remember the 1970s joke wars, they were driven by tabloid newspapers on both sides, and all in good fun between friendly nations. I learned later that many of the jokes were translated American "Polish jokes".
> all in good fun Well, not everybody's idea of good fun I guess, friendly nations or not. But what do I know, I only visit Norway once in a blue moon nowadays. I have actually yet to hear a good "swede joke" at all actually; maybe they are just a myth?
Perhaps most of the good Swede jokes moved to Minnesota?
(seriously, a bunch of the intra-scandinavian humor seems to be of Scandahoovian-American origin. Like the "10,000 Swedes chased through the weeds / by one Norwegian" thing.)
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Where do you live?! You couldn't park facing the wrong way in any big city in America, either. Maybe on small residential streets it's not always enforced.
I learned to drive in Seattle, where it's 100% allowed, and then moved east and almost got ticketed my first day in my new city.
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> Speaking English That’s the opposite of what we should do. If a plant monoculture is susceptible to diseases, then a language monoculture is susceptible to mind-viruses. What would the world look like now if every country spoke German in 1933?
Mostly the same as today, if that was the only difference? Same language is a result of cultural similarity much more so than a cause for it. If there is no political or cultural pressure to speak the same language, they relatively quickly diverge.
They do so by turning "he has a point" into "who is this funny little moustache guy and why does he sound so angry?"
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As a Swede it amazes me that some countries allow parking "in the wrong direction". I've never even thought about it, and I don't know if it's a written rule (I'm sure it is, just it;s been a long time since I got my license).
In finland this has been allowed since a few years ago. It is quite useful on narrow sidestreets in residential areas where it helps hunting for parking spaces. The biggest problem seems to be that now many misinterpret the law that one must leave 5 meters empty space before pedestrian crossings as being measured from the front of the car, ie not applying when parking on the ”wrong” side
Sometimes things just get weird.
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Oh yes. In Norway we have the exact same jokes about the Swedes. One quip which did the rounds in the papers prior to the Swedes starting to drive on the right was that they would perform the switch in several phases - first heavy traffic, then cars a month later...
> In Norway we have the exact same jokes about the Swedes This is a fairly recent development. When I moved to Sweden in the 1970s, it was so bad I learned Swedish at accelerated rate in order to avoid the kneejerk compulsion of many (if not most) Swedes to tell their favorite jokes about how dumb Norwegians seemed to be. No doubt a consequence of century-old rivalry and the fact that Sweden during the early part of…