When I was on academic exchange in Bergen, Norway, I once fell asleep on the bus on my way to the student house. This was Week 2 of my studies, so when I woke up, the bus was locked, empty (the driver left, too!) and parked in a location I didn’t know (turned out to be Wergeland, only 15 minutes by foot from our student house at Løbergsveien 85). I panicked! I took my phone and looked around for any number I could call: in Russia that I am from, you can always find a plaque inside the bus with the contacts of the office that manages the fleet the bus belongs to. I didn’t find any number. I looked for the hotline number on the website of Skyss (the public transit operator of Hordaland, the county (fylke) that Bergen used to be in); unfortunately, their hotline was not working at the moment cause it was like 6 pm, and Norwegian customer support services are understaffed and only work 9-to-5. So I had to use the emergency exit. No, I didn’t break any glass, just pulled the pneumatic door release and left only to see people embarking on the same bus #10 that was departing soon in the opposite direction, so I hurried there and thus learned that Wergeland was merely 3 or 4 bus stops away from my student house. Later on, some Norwegians told me there was a law forbidding bus drivers to wake passengers up! That literally shocked me cause things like that would never happen in Russia: I once tried to cheat on the system and bought a bus ticket for 1 travel zone less when going home (I studied in a big city but lived in a small town nearby), only to be awakened by the driver and asked to leave the bus!

The bus stop where I’d often take #10 from University to home: Olav Kyrres gate (if I am not mistaken, it’s been long since I left Norway!)

Another cultural shock, no less big, has already been mentioned: hotline hours. I am a spoiled Russian who is used to every more-or-less big company having 24/7 customer support. Hey, even the bank that managed my student card back when I was doing Bachelor’s and Master’s at CSU, URALSIB, did have a 24/7 hotline despite being a small bank with only 3 offices in our city! And whenever I call my current bank’s hotline, they usually reply within 3–4 minutes at max, no competition with the 20+ minutes hotline queue times of SpareBank 1 that was managing my student card in Norway. That is not even to mention that when I finally got a DNB card and switched my scholarship to it, the DNB app looked ugly, was inconvenient, and far less functional than, say, Russian Alfa-Bank’s or Tinkoff Bank’s apps.

So as a Russian who had been used to thinking that everything in God-blessed Europe was so much better, I was shocked to find out that customer service was often better, more readily available, and far more diverse back home in Russia. Europe does offer far superior quality of living, there’s simply no competition here; but we young people in Russia often fail to appreciate some little things that are better at home than in Europe.