Kelly's Hardangerbunad
Kelly (Kjellaug) Petit passed away April 7th 2010 in Paris, after a brief illness. I will miss her. These bunad-story and the pictures were sent to me by Kelly herself, and I will keep them here for all of us to remember. My thoughts goes to her family. Rest in peace, Kelly!
On Digitalarkivet they have started a thread about Kelly - you might want to visit.
This is Kelly (Kjellaug). She lives in France, but she was born in Odda, Hordaland in Norway. Kelly sent me her picture, and a good "bunadstory".
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First of all, I have to tell you that although I was born in Norway, Odda, Indre Hardanger, I do not live there any longer. For the last 33 years I've been living in France, but I still treasure all that is Norwegian and all our traditions.
As most girls in my part of the country, I got my costume (bunad) for my
confirmation when I was 14 years old and as often as I could I wore it with
pleasure. It's also true that since I came to France, there have been fewer
opportunities.
Some years ago though, there was a conference about Norway organized here in town (Angers, the Loire valley). It was held at one of our local movie theatres. Now, some of the organizers had heard that I had a Norwegian costume and begged me to come there and welcome people with them. At first I was very reluctant, I felt it was like a kind of exhibition, but then one day the man in charge called me and managed to persuade me.
He told me that he was really a Norway fan and that he'd been going to Norway almost every summer since he was 15 as he'd made friends with a boy of his age at that time when they were both scouts. I wanted to know where, but he said it was a small town on the Western coast so I would probably not have heard about it. "Well, I am from Western Norway," I said. After a lot of talking, he finally came forward with the name of the town. Can you imagine my surprise when I discovered that it was my small hometown, Odda? So, of course, I insisted on knowing who his Norwegian friend was. Once again I had to almost drag it out of him, he was sure that I would never have heard about him as he was a good deal older than me.
Well, second surprise, his good friend with whom he's still in contact was my very first English teacher at grammar school. He didn't want to believe me, who would? But he finally found out that I had told the truth.
What could I do but show up in my Norwegian costume? There were about 6 or 700 people present that evening and they all wanted to greet me and thought that I had come directly from Norway just for the conference. I was standing there on the top of the stairs and felt a bit awkward when all of a sudden I saw a couple I knew from school (parents of a student of mine), but they did not know that I was Norwegian. When they discovered me, the lady was so taken aback that she fell down the stairs and on her way, she managed to overturn a few other people. It was very difficult to hold my laughter back, but I managed.
Needless to say that a lot of pictures were taken and sent to my former
English teacher who didn't believe his ears when he heard about it, the world is really small sometimes. And all this would not have happened if it
hadn't been for my bunad-:)
Kelly Robberstad Petit