Home is where my bed is

It is late and I am tired so I am just posting a link to an article today. This article from the New York Times, At Road's End, a Taste of Rural Norway is from 2001 but I still remember the stir it caused. It is written by an American journalist living in Norway and describes his visit to a farm (sort of an agriturismo) in the countryside. The owner turns out to be less than friendly and the author, while loving the area itself, seems to focus on this. The interesting thing, though, is not so much the article, but what happened afterward. Instead of apologizing for poor customer service (for instance, not serving dinner when that had indeed been promised, and the guests were 10km from the closest town and without a car), the owner got very mad and said he could care less about these urban tourists and their whims. Hopefully this is the exception rather than the rule, but it is indeed true that customer service is not particularly great in Norway. You can have wonderful experiences but the culture of service that you see for example in the US does not really exist there.