Thanks for the feedback, that is interesting to hear. I don't honestly know that well what Norway is like today. I am a father myself now, but I don't think my family is very typical of Norwegian families.

We don't particularly mind having other kids over for eating but it isn't really something that pops up. And besides most of our neighbours are not of Norwegian origin.

My youngest son used to have a Vietnamese-Norwegian friend. Her mom was a really good cook, so he started sneaking down there around dinner time, because he loved the food she made.

I also have a neighbor from Syria which have given me falafel when she made it. I happened to have mentioned to her in a conversation that I quite like falafel so next time she made she went over and offered. That was very nice but also very unusual for a Norwegian to do. We rarely go over to a neighbour to offer food like that.

So bottom line is that where I live and our experiences today are kind of outside the normal Norwegian experience so it is hard to compare. Of course all of Norway is far more multi-cultural than when I grew up.

Diversity when I grew up in the 1980s consisted of the one adopted kid from Colombia in my class. In the class below I think there was a Guatemalan kid. Today at the nearest schools the majority of kids have foreign origin.

My wife is Asian-Canadian-American who spent a lot of her formative years in the Netherlands, where we met. So in terms of culture and habits we have kind of picked up stuff from everywhere. We celebrate Dutch Santa claus, Chinese New Year, Thanks Giving... you name it ;-)

You raised an interesting question about whether we are more traditional or not than in the US. I thought about stuff like this many times when staying in different countries. It is like every society moves at different pace along multiple track at all times.

There are certainly many things that happen earlier in the US than in Norway. Chain stores, big box stores, car oriented lifestyles, eating out, SUVs etc are kind of stuff you see that happened much earlier in the US.

But there are certainly many areas too where the US would seem very traditional to us. The role religion plays in society for instance or the use of internet and electronic devices. This may sound strange to you. It is even to me given that the US is where the PC revolution began and where the internet got invented.

But it looks like technology adoption around in society has moved much slower than in Scandinavia. Whether it is in banking, payment systems, self checkout, tax returns, interacting with goverment or health care.

When you look at politics we also evolve in quite different tracks. Things that has been mainstay in US politics such as professionals tailoring messages, communication experts, political ads is only very gradually making a presence here. That is partly due to regulation. We have long heavily restricted the use of political ads. So elections have been mainly about debates on TV, door to door knocking, meetings in the town square, opinion pieces in the newspapers and that sort of thing.

But when it comes to how elections work in the US, then that is very old fashion to us. Like you have winner-takes-all voting. Whomever wins 51% or more gets to represent everybody in a voting district.

Also you have electors who select the president. That is the kind of stuff we read about in history books about elections in the late 1800s and early 1900s. It is strange to me that the US has a voting system which has changed so little since the founding.

Even the two-party system and the politics they stand for is very similar to how politics looked in the 1800s in Norway. We had a liberal and a conservative party just like the US today.

Now we have like 10 parties. The old conservative party remains as the largest party of the right but the liberal party is quite small.

Sorry, I am rambling a bit here. I just thought it was an interesting thing to reflect on. The US to me has always seems both very modern and old fashion at the same time. I guess different structures and cultural habits leads to things progressing at different paces.

But being such a large and visible country, the US is definitely a trendsetter. Things that happen in the US gets picked up abroad though the extensive US media that we follow.