I didn't know we were famous for lefse even, to me it's like French being famous for Ratatouille (if you exempt the movie of the same name, where people probably forget that it's the name of the food), because it doesn't seem to be the kind of thing people remembers. Unless you are geographically close to Norway or have some reason to know about it or unless you are educated you are likely to not know much about Norway. Usually only thing foreigners knows as "facts" about Norway seems to be 1) wealth, 2) oil, 3) it is part of Scandinavia and if you are really smart you can also say it is bordering Sweden (less often people know that they are also part of the Nordic countries, and even fewer people know it has borders with Finland and Russia up in the Sami-North), after that many things seems to be random things people have picked up.bobevenson wrote:Funny? Why don't you tell me what Norway is famous for besides lutefisk and lefse?
Among personalities there seems to be virtually no person of mainstream interest. Despite this, Norway has many things which should be more known than they are. Statoil was in recent years called the world's 7th most innovative company for instance, the original national oil company and still Norway's biggest (government still owns shares but doesn't exercise pure political control over it, it works by market capitalistic principles and the governments role is more a capitalist one), Norway is home to and people of its population is the original creators of the web browser "Opera", which despite not being part of the giant browsers (IE, Firefox, Chrome, Safari) still is the biggest or one of the biggest in the "niche" browser market with very useful functions like its turbo technology and integrated email client (of which it was pioneering in, though the email client is getting redundant with the ever-increasing importance of website and app-based email clienting), then it's worth noting Object-oriented programming of which today is the norm of programming paradigms was invented by a Norwegian, then you have a less well-known but quite interesting fact that Norway "owns" and operates a very large chunk of the Antarctica (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Queen_Maud_Land), and of course you shouldn't forget in so saying our polar explorer national heroes who first reached both the north and the south pole, one of them in a very historically famous (if you are interested in polar areas) race to the south pole, of today's world economy more people should be aware of the Norwegian pension fund which currently "owns" 2 percent of the European stock market, making it an increasingly giant of influence on the European big bucks investment market for being just a single player, and then among Norwegian writers you have "Ibsen" which wikipedia says: "He is often referred to as 'the father of realism' and is one of the founders of Modernism in the theatre.". I could go on, but I wonder if you want to hear more first?