The Basques (also known as Euskaldunak) are an ethnic group with their own culture and language whose historical home straddles the Pyrenees mountains, occupying northern Spain and southwestern France.
What makes the Basques so intriguing? Let’s start with language. I’m sure you’ve heard of some of the major language families, such as Romance Languages (e.g. Spanish, French, Italian, Portuguese), Germanic Languages (e.g. English, German, Dutch, Swedish), and Slavic Languages (e.g. Russian, Polish, Czech, Serbian). These are groups of related languages that all evolved from a common ancestral language. In fact, languages all over the world can mostly be grouped into “families”… but Basque (Euskara) doesn’t fit into any of them. It is a language isolate, meaning that is bears no relationship at all to any other surviving language. Its origins are utterly mysterious, and the culture it belongs to… oh boy.
As you know, today we’re in NORWAY, which is a new country for this blog! Unlike its Scandinavian peers, Norway is actually not part of the European Union, although it is a member of the Schengen area. Oslo is far and away the largest city in Norway, with a metro area population of 1.5 million people, although Oslo proper has less than half that number. For context, the next largest city in Norway by metro area is Bergen with about 460k people. And Norway overall has a population of 5.52 million people. That’s less than half the population of London, and is more than 7x smaller than the population of the Tokyo metro area. Not a big place, even by Nordic standards. But it’s definitely a beautiful place.
Here are a few fun-facts about Oslo…
If you've been a reader for any amount of time, you probably know that I started this website when I moved to Hanoi, Vietnam to work as an English teacher. However, you might NOT know that Hanoi was actually the 2nd time I had lived internationally. The first time was my study abroad, during which I spent a semester living in Madrid, Spain.
This is the first installment of what is going to be a #ThrowBackThursday series. I'll be digging up some choice photos from my time in Europe, re-editing them, and sharing some thoughts and/or stories about each of the places I visited. So let's get to the good stuff!
