Post by Grubb.
We arrived late in the afternoon by train. The weather was sunny, in the high sixties, but so it was in Gothenburg when we left. We had to do the dock walk to give a sense of where we were. The first clue was the opera house.
Then there was the outdoor dining catty corner to our AirBnb next to a park overlooking the waterfront. For cocktails Ella ordered a Negroni and I went with a spicy ginger beer. For the main course I had the wolf fish, Ella the creamy fish soup. We shared a dessert pudding topped by a dark purple sorbet flavored by a mix of berries we had never tasted before. I would describe it as feral with a woodsy tang. Ella would describe my description as desperate without a clue. So a fish I had never heard of but was like cod with attitude followed by a sorbet made from deep forest berries ripened by the tender licking of young fawns. All in all, a Norwegian sampler to get the gastric juices flowing.
An after-dinner stroll along the docks completed our entry into Oslo. A cruise liner the size of a small city was pulling in nearby. A minor invasion was about to take place. Viking ghosts wept. It was time to turn in for the night.
Translating food names is always hard because (in this case a species of fish) the item simply doesn’t exist in America. Flekksteinbit = … . It appears that steinbit is in, what we would call, the catfish family. In German Steinbut is turbot (Stein = stone).
And berries pose all sorts of problems, as the European varieties don’t match exactly (or at all) what we have in America. We have this problem all the time in Austria/Germany (Johannisbeere, Preiselbeere, Stachelbeere).
Since I love berries of all sorts, I’m willing to try any and all even if I have no clue as to what they might taste like. I mean, how bad could an edible berry be?
And did you escape to Norway to avoid the mad crowds after Sweden won the Eurovision song contest? And it is mother’s day here, but probably not in Scandinavia. It is called “mothering day” in Britain and it is in March.
Charlie and Wynette: if you read this, this question applies to you two in Spain.
In Norway, Mother’s Day is celebrated, but in mid-February. Maybe mom’s need a little relief coming out of the dark winter months.