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In Which Mike With Eats Fish
August 9, 2006 by Mike
Hello everyone. Just testing a new mapping idea. Hope you like it.. it'll disappear from this page soon.
--Mike
Berlevag
A concerned reader writes: "So what exactly are you feeding yourself, Mike?"
(Concerned? Nah, she just wants a good laugh...)
Now I know that in the modern manner, as a bloggist I should be describing each bowel movement, with video podcast on demand and lot of links to other bloggers' best evacuations. But I'm an old-fashioned kinda guy... flowers on the dinner table, starched handkerchief, never kiss on a first date.. and manage to write far too much about far too little as it is, so I've done my best to keep things generally interesting.
But then again.. 'Mike With Eats Fish' is a headline nobody ever saw coming. In my house, at least, I'm famous for not eating anything that comes out of the sea. It's not natural.
But when in Rome.. and so with stomach steeled and tastebuds traumatised, , and promising myself a big chocolate bar for dessert, I had sei in Berlevag's 'street kitchen' (cafe), run by one of the film stars and his beaming wife. (I don't want to know the English translation of sei, by the way.. it's bound to be something fishy and I'd rather pretend it I just ate a particularly anaemic fillet of pork.
It tasted of fishfingers*, without the breadcrumbs. I didn't even not like it. How depressing.
And yesterday - reindeer. They are all over the place, after all - on the road, in the forests, across the plains, and taking up half an aisle in every supermarket.
This was a huge tin of reindeer meatballs. The meat tasted great, if a little bland. But I noticed the stamp on the bottom said: 'Best before 2012'.... 2012??? Dang my britches if that dead reindeer wasn't going to try and outlive us all, if I hadn't done the honourable thing and eaten it, along with some lovely potatoes and someone else's ketchup.
But with a shelf-life like that it's perfect airline food, no?
Re: food... I draw the line at 'king crabs', some of which are two metres across. They've arrived recently in these waters "from Russia." Like all of a sudden, we trust them Rooskies and all their crazed nuclear scientists and all their fiendish plans to take over first Chelski, then the world? N'uh-uhh.
---
Spoke on the phone to my brother, who lives near Oslo.
Nick: "So is it true they have mosquitos the size of sparrows up there?"
Mike: "I was about to ask you why there are so many sparrows in northern Norway..."
---
To Gary's for a liquid supper, watching Chelski play Celtic in a friendly. Also present: the manager of Berlevag's football team, currently propping up the local league. 'Local' being relative -- even at this level the team travels 100s of kilometres to away games. As there is snow on the ground for up to eight months a year it requires a special dedication to the game to stay involved. The manager is even more dedicated to drinking beer and eating entire reindeer, by the looks of things. There's a lot of dedication.
And then to the boat.
I've been promising (threatening?) to ride every last inch of the coast. If forced inland, I intended to double back to make sure I hadn't missed a single grain of sand. Here I am, a week or two in, already skipping not one but two (and a half) dead-end gravel roads to teenyweeny fishing villages on bleak headlands in the blasted Arctic.
What kind of an Englishman am I?
A half-Norwegian one, and the chance to take the Hurtigrutene, the fabled coastal vessel, was too much to resist, if only for three brief stops.
More on these wonderful boats later. Stay tuned for the story of the man who proved it was possible to link Norway's remote coastal communities with a regular, now daily, boat service. Stand up and take a bow Richard With.. yes, that silly name again.
*Incidentally, my old biology teacher Mr Bishop claimed to have invented the fishfinger. Who the hell would claim to have done that, if it wasn't true?
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