Russ

Last night I went to a Russ pants decorating party at Siri’s house. The Russ (roose) are graduating Norwegian high schoolers and instead of running around in caps and gowns, they create mayhem in overalls. For 17 days (May 1 -17), the Russ are on the loose. The Russ time is one enormous party all throughout Norway during which the Russ do all these crazy things since this as seen as the last time for acting undignified and childish. Red overalls are the dominant color, but there are also blue, white, green, and black overalls (each color corresponds to what you're studying in school).

Each person is given a nickname by their friends for their Russ cap and for every activity completed they get a knot or token for the black string on their cap. Some of the more harmless activities involve swimming in the ocean before May 1st, putting a “For Sale” sign on a police car, spending a school day crawling on your hands and knees, sleeping in a tree, etc, but many "tasks" involve a lot of drinking (the legal drinking age is 18 over here). Fifty crazy things earn you a silver tassel and 70 gets you a gold one.

The Russ also ride around on red bikes or in these red cars or vans that are painted with people’s names and group names. They hand out Russ cards (mock business cards with funny pictures and sayings) and kids collect them like Pokemon cards. The festivities end on May 17th which is the Norwegian National Day. On this day everyone turns out in their bunads and there are tons of parades in which the Russ feature prominently. (On the 17th of May, it's also a rule that parents can't tell their kids to stop eating ice cream so you can eat as much ice cream as you want.)

Anyway Marte and her friends needed to get their pants all decorated so we had an arts & crafts party with Norwegian waffles on the side. I got to be an honorary Russ and decorated a red shirt for the occasion. The girls got a kick out of my coat of arms--the crossed osthøvels.

Heidi