Thank you so much! I realized that most people would spot our mutual friend when he came up, so I was hoping the other character would provide a twist.
As for the Norwegian issue, I was interested to see that fan-sleuthing had placed Durmstrang in Norway. I realize this probably wasn't intentional on JKR's part, but I liked the idea of there being something magically significant enough about the Durmstrang site to create its own linguistic phenomenon apart from the Muggle world's language politics. It didn't end up surfacing in the story, but it was just part of the whole 'decentralizing Britain' mindset I had while I was writing this.