Monday, April 21, 2008

Registering Car Numbers



As a child up in the Norwegian mountains,
around the age of 10-14, I think,
we loved to sit by the roadside with a notebook
and write down the numbers on cars passing.

Norway has 19 administrative regions, called fylke,
and at that time each fylke had a letter in front of
the number of the car.
In other words, you knew where the car came from
by looking at the letter.
(In 1971 this system changed.)

The cars from our fylke Buskerud had the letter F
before the number, so cars with F were not so interesting.
But a car with A from Oslo, or a car with O from Bergen,
that felt good.
And what excitement when a car from abroad passed!
Foreign cars were mostly from Germany and Great Britain.

Friends would compare notebooks and brag about
the interesting cars they had registered.

Simple fun!

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