Pictured here on the left is Norwegian Dagfinn Bjelland. Not too long ago he checked into the Clarion Collection Atlantic Hotel in the Norwegian town of Sandefjord, and like many, decided to take a shower. While standing butt naked in the shower the police burst into his room, proceeded to search it, and refused to let him get dressed until they had carefully checked his clothes. After finding exactly nothing of interest they then frogmarched him through the hotel down to the front desk with all the other guests watching and promptly left once they had determined he was of no interest to them.
Mr Bjelland was truly angry about it all, “At the very lest they could have apologised”.
So what happened, what triggered all this? Turns out that when he was checking in the receptionist misspelled his name “Bjelland” and wrote it down wrongly as “Helland”. Another staff member then spotted what appeared to be a very odd non-norwegian name, and since this was clearly highly suspicious, they called the cops.
Mr Bjelland promptly checked out and got his money back. That in turn pissed off the hotel manager who later commented that he should still have paid, “He had used the room and our services“.
As for the police, they commented …
“We often get these tips and take an assessment on site. All I will say on the matter is that we had reason to investigate the tip”, said Per Olav From the police.
Apparently this police spokesman then confirmed that once they had confirmed his identity, they then saw no reason to proceed with the case … no kidding.
So what do we learn from all this …
- Having a foreign sounding name in the Norwegian town of Sandefjord makes you a person of interest to the police … since the topic here is spelling, I do wonder of they can spell xenophobia
- Establishing your identity involves bursting into your room and doing a search while you stand there butt naked
- Since they claim the issue was a funny sounding name, it does also cause me to wonder if using an unofficial name is actually a crime in Norway
Links
Story is in the Norwegian press here, and is no doubt as weird and bizarre to most Norwegian’s as it is to the rest of us. Sorry yes, that is in Norwegian (gasp what a surprise :-) ), but if you would like to read it, then google translate is your friend.
[Note to self: Strike the Norwegian town of Sandefjord off my list of places to visit … especially the Clarion Collection Atlantic Hotel]
Personally, I think he should also write a review on TripAdviser, it might then encourage the hotel to spell big challenging words such as “apology” and “Sorry”.