Eric Dregni's great-grandfather Ellef fled Norway in 1893 when
it was the poorest country in Europe. More than one hundred years
later, his great-grandson traveled back to find that--mostly due to
oil and natural gas discoveries--it is now the richest. The
circumstances of his return were serendipitous, as the notice that
Dregni won a Fulbright Fellowship to go there arrived the same week
as the knowledge that his wife Katy was pregnant. Braving a birth
abroad and benefiting from a remarkably generous health care
system, the Dregnis' family came full circle when their son Eilif
was born in Norway.
In this cross-cultural memoir, Dregni tells the hair-raising,
hilarious, and sometimes poignant stories of his family's yearlong
Norwegian experiment. Among the exploits he details are staying
warm in a remote grass-roofed "hytte" (hut), surviving a dinner of
"rakfisk" (fermented fish) thanks to 80-proof aquavit, and
identifying his great-grandfather's house in the Lusterfjord only
to find out it had been crushed by a boulder and then swept away by
a river. To subsist on a student stipend, he rides the meat bus to
Sweden for cheap salami with a busload of knitting pensioners. A
week later, he and his wife travel to the Lofoten Islands and gnaw
on klippefisk (dried cod) while cats follow them through the
streets.
Dregni's Scandinavian roots do little to prepare him and his
family for the year in Trondheim eating herring cakes, obeying the
conformist "Janteloven" (Jante's law), and enduring the "morketid"
(dark time). "In Cod We Trust" is one Minnesota family's spirited
excursion into Scandinavian life. The land of the midnight sun is
far stranger than they previously thought, and their encounters
show that there is much we can learn from its unique and surprising
culture.
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