Yesterday's big adventure was a trip to a smorgasbord. A cruise ship landed again, The Albatros, so the town was teeming with tourists for a few hours. Flåm has only 300 inhabitants, but in high season there can be 20,000 visitors in a day. That seems hard to comprehend, as there are only a few souvenir shops and a handful of restaurants here, but I have seen photos of swarms of people. In any event, the restaurant was hopping in this otherwise sleepy place, so I gave it a try.
I like salmon, but I'm done with it. Pickled, smoked, sliced, chunked, grilled. Herring (no thanks). Some kind of fish thing that was kinda spongy; I wonder if it was stockfish that had been reconstituted. A common Norwegian export is whitefish, usually cod, that is air dried (in some places, still on rocks or on racks on cliffsides) for weeks, then soaked or boiled later for use. It can be the main ingredient in Italian baccala, and sometimes baccala is (mis) used as a generic term for this dried fish. Clipfish is another form of dried fish, more often used in baccala actually, but clipfish is salt-cured, and stockfish is not (cold adapted parasites are involved but I prefer not to think about that). I learned this, by the way, from Andreas Viestad on New Scandinavian Cooking. Love him.
Whatever it was, it was nasty. There were some other meats on offer that looked like rather ordinary meat patties, but when I launched into one, there was another spongey texture thing that did not appeal. I may just go right off of meat and fish here.
On the other table were various pasta based salads that generally had some surprise seafood element hidden within. Beets, and of course, a couple varieties of potatoes were part of the action too. On the dessert side were hunks of jello, flan, and some Sara Lee-ish little squares of pastry. No cloudberries. The desserts were uninteresting, save for some creamlike substance in pitchers to be poured over them. This wasn't cream, wasn't whipped cream, wasn't creme freche. It was thick but still pourable--about the consistency of runny pancake batter--, slightly yellow, and really delicious. I had several nasty cakes just to be able to pour this stuff over them. Coffee was fair. At least it was strong, but strong also seems to mean bitter here. All for 239NOK, or about 50 bucks.
I came home from lunch and found my little duck friend waiting for me. She came up within about 4 feet of me, and seemed quite unafraid when I moved closer to her. Later in the evening she brought a friend, so I threw out some bread to them. A good sized branch washed up to the shore, and I thought it about the right size for a walking stick. As I whittled off some of the bark, my feathered friend seemed hopeful that what I was dropping was more bread. I felt guilty and got her another slice.
I think I miss my pets.
I played a little guitar, messed around with the recorder Pammy got me in Ireland, wrote a couple of postcards, then watched The Graham Norton Show on the BBC. I did some checking around on the web to see if audience tickets would be available when I am in London, but the TV show doesn't seem to be in production at the moment (this was an old show I watched). I've never had much interest in that kind of audience experience before, but he's crazy funny (and did a great interview with Fiona Shaw on the radio this weekend that was excerpted in his podcast--so sorry I couldn't hear the whole thing. They were fun together). It seems I have settled into something like a normal life here.
The snow that was on the mountains a few days ago has melted, and the tops are just being kissed with light, though the sky is mostly filled with dark and dramatic clouds. Dramatic. That's the word that best describes this landscape for me.
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