... not who we pay our rent to, but who we buy our food from! The generic food brand sold in Rema1000 grocery stores in Norway is named Landlord - from which we buy a lot of food. So, what
do we eat here in Norway? Surprisingly, we eat meals very similar to those we ate in Minnesota. Of course, this is achieved primarily by bypassing the entire fish and seafood section in the grocery store. After 8 months, we're still a little disturbed by the sight of fish balls and
whole frozen fishes (scales and all!).
Breakfast (Frokost): We start each day with a bowl of cornflakes with skummet melk (skim milk), and a bowl of müsli (granola mixed with oatmeal) with vanilje yoghurt (vanilla yogurt) and rosiner (raisins). Fortunately, the names of many food items in Norwegian look very similar to their English counterparts! Notice that the cereal and raisins shown in the photo above are all Landlord (or Rema1000) brand! The company, Tine, has the monopoly on dairy products in Norway - and Norwegians
love their dairy. One of the more endearing things we've seen is college boys walking around campus carrying several bananas and a 1 L carton of milk. Their mid-morning snack, perhaps?
Lunsj (Lunch): For lunch, we eat a cheese, meat, pickle, and mustard sandwich with chips, an apple, cookies, and sometimes a carrot. It is custom in Norway to eat sandwiches open faced, often with liver or fish paste. We've seen many students on campus bring what appears to be a large stack of bread slices for lunch. On closer inspection, each slice of bread is adorned with meat paste or a slice of cheese and carefully separated from the next slice of bread by wax paper. Some of the food items shown in the photo above are: skivet ost (cheese slices), servelat (bologna, and one of the few meat products we can actually afford in Norway), røkt familieskinke (smoked ham, because we can't
only eat bologna), agurker (sweet pickles, dill pickles aren't sold in Norway - sigh...), kneippbrød (everyday bread, very cheap - only $1 per loaf - and, it's bakery style bread not melt-in-your-mouth American Wonderbread).
Middag (Dinner): We have managed to put together a small, but diverse, dinner menu on a very tight food budget by Norwegian standards (~$100/week) - light on meat, heavy on Landlord items! 1. Spaghetti and garlic bread - made with Landlord noodles, Landlord pasta sauce, Landlord baguettes, and Landlord marinated garlic. 2. Stir fry. There is a wide variety of Uncle Ben's Asian sauces available but Szechuan sweet and sour is our favorite. The price of fresh vegetables nearly doubles in the winter, so we sometimes use a frozen vegetable mix for our stir fry. Also, notice the shrink-wrapped red bell pepper in the photo above - cucumbers and broccoli are also sold individually shrink-wrapped but we're not sure why. 3. Mozzarella, tomato and pesto sandwiches on ciabatta bread. This was one of our favorite "summer garden" meals in Minnesota, but thanks to Landlord ciabatta bread and Landlord pesto sauce, we eat it year-round in Norway. And, fresh mozzarella is one of the few types of cheese we've found in Norway besides the ubiquitous Norvegia (swiss-like) or brown cheeses. 4. Burritos. Nearly an entire aisle in the grocery store is devoted to ingredients for tacos and burritos. We usually make rice and black bean burritos, but sometimes we splurge on chicken and make fajitas. 5. Tikka Masala chickpeas and couscous. One of the foods we thought we wouldn't find in Norway is Indian food, but it turns out it's quite popular here - there are several brands of tikka masala sauces to choose from. 6. Pizza. Like in the U.S., there are countless frozen pizza varieties and brands sold in Norway, but they also sell all the tasty ingredients needed to make your own! 7. Drum roll please... Hot dogs! With chicken at almost $14/pound, can you blame us?
The different effects WWII had on East and West Berlin is still very apparent. In the West the city is dense and well-developed, while in the East there are still large open tracts of land. The photo above was taken in Potsdamer Platz and shows a remnant of the Berlin Wall in the middle of a large, new development - an interesting juxtaposition of the past and present of Berlin.
During the tour, we made short photo stops at the West End Gallery - a section of the Berlin Wall covered in murals by famous modern day artists - and the Brandenburg Gate, shown in the photo above. It was amazing to see places that played such prominent roles in very recent history - much more awe-inspiring than cathedrals and forts from centuries past...
One of our favorite places in Berlin was the Holocaust Memorial. The rectangle stones are deceivingly small on the outskirts of the memorial which covers the area of a city block. But once we walked in just a few yards, the stones were significantly taller plus the ground sloped downward. We almost lost each other when Meghan turned a corner without Rolf noticing! Some teenagers were sadly using the memorial for a loud game of Marco Polo - completely missing the point of the memorial as a quiet place to contemplate a very serious event in world history.
The rest of our stay was interspersed with conference events and a lot of sightseeing. Luckily, our hotel was located within walking distance of most of the major sights and museums in Berlin. The photo above shows a bridge leading into the Museum Island on the right. You could still see pockmarks from WWII gun fire in the stone columns and facades of the museums! Our hotel is the left of the 2 tall buildings visible in the distance beyond the bridge.
The photo above shows the view from our hotel window on the 27th floor. All of the Fulbright rooms faced away from downtown, but we really enjoyed our view nonetheless. Much of the East Berlin that has been rebuilt after WWII was with high modernist urban planning: long, narrow apartment buildings and large public spaces.
