Norwegians 2: Intellect and social life
Norwegians have a broad yet shallow knowledge. They might know rudimentary facts about your home country or remind you of the time Norway beat you in anything, but it stops there. The same thing is true for languages. Almost all Norwegians speak English with a good or bearable pronounciation, but the vocabulary is often limited. In current events, Norwegians rarely have any information about anyting above headline level.

A good way to demonstrate this is to consider how easily Norwegians are offended if someone mistakes Norwegians for Swedes or believes Norway to be a city rather than a country. This mistake should not be made by a European, but an American and certainly an Oceanian cannot be asked to know the intricacies of European geography. It is inadvisable to point out how inconsequential Norway is to world trade or world peace, but in reality, there is no reason why an American should know Norwegian geography any more than that of, say, Togo, which has a sesquimillion more inhabitants. Norwegians would of course not know the capital of neither Togo nor any other African country (or in deed most European, Asian or American), as geography, along with history, mathematics, religion, social science and grammar are considered unimportant subjects.

Most people coming from abroad are surprised by the informality of Norwegians. Informality reads "rudeness". Norwegians hardly ever apologize, they cut lines wherever possible, they rarely use words like "please" or "would you mind", they place the blame on others whenever possible and they often roll their eyes if you have not heard of a typical Norwegian phenomenon. For what it's worth, it isn't you, it's them. And by international standards, they're quite good drivers. Also, Norwegians mostly leave you alone. Beggars do excist, but ignoring them is widely encouraged.

Other points of note is that Norweigans have a strange relationship to money. They care little or nothing about how to save money by choosing a less expensive supermarket, they rarely start campaigns or even compare prizes. Doing so is often considered petty. Contrary, what is not petty is that Norwegians pay and demand exact change if they pay, say, your drink or food at a restaurant or pub. This technique borders on the textbook definition of greed.

As far as religion is concerned, over 80% of the people are members of the state Church of Norway, which by and large means that they are atheists. This atheistic approach to Christianity has shown to have many advantages, amongst them general acceptance of gay marriages, female priests, abortion and sermons void of religious content. Many hard-core Christians want the church separated from the state, which makes their homophobia less of a hindrance.

There is a growing Catholisism in Oslo, mainly thanks to Polish immigration, but as few immigrants who come to Norway stay there (Polish, Swedes and Germans are work immigrants), the main focus is on islamophobia. There are, at most, a handful of semi-scary cells of aggressive and semi-militant Muslims in Norway, and they have, as in the case of Arfan Bhatti, shown to be completely useless and incompetent.