Gronland: Redefining what it means to Norwegian

On Thursday, we toured a neighborhood in Oslo known as Gronland. It was an exercise to help us understand the multicultural makeup of Oslo and, consequently, Norway. As you might have gathered from my previous post, nationalism has been the subject of discussion this week, both explicitly and implicitly. We are studying how nations are created and what their purpose is in the political sphere. Gronland challenges the concept that Norwegian nationality is synonymous with blond hair, blue eyes and a folk history to boot.

I expected Gronland to be more like the ethnic neighborhoods in U.S. cities. In other words, I expected something similar to Chinatown in NYC. This neighborhood is nothing like that. There were as many people who appeared to be of Western European descent as there were people who didn't fit the norm of the rest of Norway. Much of the neighborhood is predominantly residential, and there are small businesses scattered throughout. As far as I could tell, Norwegian was still the most widely used language, and Arabic came in as a close second.

It was difficult for me to compare the environment in Gronland with the other neighborhoods in Oslo because I have only been here for a week, but my general assumption about the place is that it is distinctly diverse but generally Norwegian. Like many other places in Oslo, the sidewalks and streets were used by as many people on bicycles and scooters as people in cars. The neighborhood was not as nice as central Oslo, but it also did not have many tourist attractions. This is a place where people live and work. It's not a huge shopping district, nor is it a national centerpiece. Many people in my class were distracted by the graffiti and the seemingly run-down apartment complexes. What they failed to notice was the mix of modernity and tradition within the neighborhood.

I hope you enjoy some of the photos I took while I was in Gronland. Even without a solid description of each photo, I'm sure you can get the gist of what I'm trying to convey. The man I am standing with in the first picture is a Jehovah's Witness who happened to be in the neighborhood.