From the Archives - Bits & Bobs Volume IV

Introduction

This is the fourth installment in the “From the Archives – Bits & Bobs” series. Volume I is here, Volume II is here, and Volume III is here. If I were a famous writer, these posts would comprise passages from previously unpublished letters or lectures that I’d bring out just to basically print my own money. But since I’m only a blogger, I’m providing similar such collections for free because I think they capture moments in time (in this case my latter college years) that I think are amusing and/or universal. All of these below are from letters written to a friend, in chronological order, and the setting is the Berkeley area.

October 1, 1990

I really like the old ladies in my apartment building. It’s an old, very elegant building in one of the best parts of Oakland, with radiators that hiss and click all the time because the landlord keeps it as warm as a sauna in all the units, for the old people. They spend most of the time indoors, since they’re really quite frail and possibly afraid of the cruel, harsh society outside. Their perception of reality is based on precious few data: if they only make it outside once a week, and happen to see something unpleasant, they may assume that’s what happens all the time.

Case in point: today I was on my bike cruising down College Ave toward home, and some old geezer pulled out of his driveway without looking. A redneck type in a big pickup truck had to slam on his brakes, and started cussing real loud. The old dude seemed unfazed, and after the truck got by, the old guy kept backing out, and almost clobbered a taxicab coming up the other way. I was almost sandwiched in the middle since I’d been trying to pass. So I started yelling, in vain of course because the old fellow probably forgot both his hearing aids, and as I escaped by hopping my bike up to the sidewalk in front of my apartment, one of my elderly neighbors was standing there watching the whole thing.

I was struck by her look of fear because until that moment, I myself hadn’t really perceived much danger (my foul language and evasive action having been entirely automatic). So she asked what happened, and I tried to play it down, but it’s obviously made a big impression. As we walked toward the building, she said, “My god, you could have been killed!” Since the front door into the building lobby is awfully heavy, I opened it for her, and she said, “Thank you! I was so close anyway but you’re really never safe until you’re home, you know?”

So I try to be as polite as possible to my neighbors, to help them live out their lives in a tranquil and pleasant fashion. This one old lady, Ruth, obviously loves having college age people around; she seems to hang out in the lobby a lot and strikes up conversations. Once I encountered her on the stairs while I was descending at about a hundred miles an hour, and she had to step quickly out of my way. I apologized and said “excuse me” and everything, and she said, “Don’t worry, I won’t mess with you,” but then, with a wink, added, “But if I were a few years younger, I sure would!”

Nov 2, 1990

I was trying to study Latin yesterday and it ultimately overloaded my brain. We’re having our second midterm Monday and I’m hoping not to eat shit like I did last time. We learn so much in there it’s not even funny. Well, we’re supposed to learn it, anyway. Recently the instructor said, “Okay, we’ve been going too slowly so now we have to speed up to catch up with the curriculum.” Yeah, right. We’ve already covered more in Latin 1 than I did in studying through French 6 at UC Santa Barbara.

Today the instructor gave us two entire pages of vocab and irregular verb formations (all tenses, and in both indicative and subjunctive) to memorize, along with three pages of exercises over this new structure. “This should only take you five minutes,” he says. Yeah, right … I’ve been at it two hours and I’m still not done. The other day we “learned” something even the instructor conceded was really difficult, and afterward he said, “You’re all very smart. It took me months to learn this.” I said, “And we get a day?” He replied, “Well, you’re Berkeley students.”

Dec 5, 1990

Thanksgiving with what’s left of my family was pretty fun, but I paid a price. On Saturday I drove straight through the night from Colorado to to Geoff’s place in San Luis Obispo and then had to take Greyhound back up to Oakland, and then I started on my research paper. This was at about 11:30 on Sunday night. I called my friend A— to see if she was still up; she was, as she’d just started on her paper too, for the same class. This paper was due the next day, and would be 80% of our grade … so this was pushing it even by our shameful standards.

I finished at about 8:00 the next morning, and rode to campus basically in a trance, after the back-to-back all-nighters. In class we broke into little discussion groups, and I fell asleep in mine, and I guess I must have started talking in my sleep because I woke up and everybody was laughing. This one girl was just shrieking with laughter and couldn’t be calmed down. The professor came over saying, “Hey, what’s going on here?” and everybody was laughing except me. I looked at the professor and shrugged: no, I have no idea what’s come over my group.

June 4, 1991

So this dipshit college kid comes into the bike shop with a broken front quick release skewer and asks how much for a new one. I tell him $9.95, and he rolls his eyes and asks if I think he can glue it back together. I tell him no fucking way, but he says he’ll try it anyway. I tell him to be careful since his front wheel is going to roll off, and that I’ll see him a little later. I should’ve clamped his head in the vise.

September 10, 1991

I’ve finally got my health back after a bad bout of strep throat. But I still have this one queer symptom: I can’t open my jaws more than an inch because of the residual swelling down there. So I’m eating a bit more slowly lately. Like I had to eat this roast beef sandwich the other day, at which point I could only open my mouth about a centimeter, which was kind of embarrassing. A friend had me over for lunch and it turns out she lives in a sorority house now, where all the meals are prepared for you, so all I had to choose from to eat was the roast beef sandwich or a salad (which, as you know, is ideal for rabbits but not guys like us). So I’m there dipping this roast beef sandwich in the “au jus” and kind of smashing it into my lips and sucking it through the gap. Real suave.

I just got home from class. I was sitting in there listening to the professor reading her notes, and it sounded something like this:

It is easy to see to what species of entities Ullmann’s description does apply. Certain entities exist the full meaning of which can be said to be equal to the totality of their sensory appearances. For an ideal perception, entirely devoid of complications resulting from the interference of the imagination, the meaning could only refer to a totality of sensory appearances.

This comes out in my notes something like this:

Ullmann has some sensory perception thing devoid of complications from imagination interfering with sensory oh fuck this shit.

November 25, 1991

I went for a mountain bike ride in the morning before work yesterday. I wanted to leave early enough to have time, upon my return, to shower, eat, et cetera, so I didn’t invite my roommate Eric along. You see, by the time he shaved, shat, pumped up, put on his clothes, and filed a report with the bureau, the morning would be gone. The only flaw in my solo attempt is that Eric always carries the spare tube, patch kit, pump, and other survivalist gear. They would have been handy today. Imagine that the ride is basically a loop, of diameter d. The bike shop is exactly d away from where I had what we in the research and development program call a “happy accident.” A rock placed by the powers that be in a strategic location began an experiment in Reduced Inflation and Pressure (RIP) of the front tire. This led me to some impromptu analysis of the handling characteristics of a standard mountain bicycle with a front tire having absolutely no inflation. On the standard dirt sections, I noticed a remarkable change in the tracking of the front wheel. It wasn’t until the single track, however, that I experienced the most dramatic ramifications of the Handling Enhancement Characteristic Kinesthesia (HECK), a sudden increase in the muscular toning of the upper body due to special bicycle control requirements. Especially on rocks and large branches, the new technology provided a Divergent Arrangement of Multiple Navigations (DAMN). Because the feel was so dramatically different, I found it necessary to actually reduce my speed, although I expect that a little practice will see the RIP being a great improvement. A thirty second shower saw me open the bike shop only ten minutes late this morning. Happily, and amazingly, my American-made Sun Metal rim sustained no damage whatsoever!

April 20, 1992

I got this Chinese fortune cookie fortune that said, “His heart was yours from the moment he met you.” How much happier I would be with that forecast if I were a chick. If I were superstitious I reckon I’d lose some sleep. The newer Square Wheel location on University Avenue, where I work about half the time, is next to a Chinese restaurant, and another fortune literally blew in the door. It read, “To you maybe too greatness, especially love adventures.” It’s the best fortune I’ve ever gotten. But so far it hasn’t come true.

I just love it when things are lost in translation. My mom bought this “Electronic Mosquito Repeller” mail-order, and it has the greatest instruction manual. I offer you this excerpt:

Mosquitoes frequently infect you place in Summer, especially at night, They are externely irritating as they disturbed our sleep and the most annoying of all is the difficulty in getting rid of the itch & soreness. After, ordinary mosquito increase or “Electrified Mosquito Killer” are used. However the odour is unbearable and the abuse of some of them may become dangerous. . . . According to the research of insect ecology, most of biting mosquitoes are female ones in spawning period. A Spawning female mosquito is very disgusted at the approaching of male mosquito. Therefore, the trequency of Repel It’ is made to imitate the sound signal of male mosquitoes to repell female mosquitoes away.

Under the heading “Applications” are six pictures of possible uses of the Mosquito Repeller. They are: Sleeping, Camping, Dating, Hunting, Livestock Farm, Farming. Where the manufacturer got these ideas is beyond me. Dating? I can’t get over that. Yeah, when I go on a date, my biggest concern is how to keep those damned mosquitoes away. The picture shows this young couple sitting on a park bench, with the guy in the process of putting his arm around the girl, about to bust a move. The Repeller is sitting on the bench with little cartoon lines to indicate its sound. My mom sent back the thing back because the noise was unbearable. I wish she’d given it to me instead, since I could have used it for my dating. Of course, if female humans are anything like mosquitoes, and become “very disgusted at the approaching of male,” I hardly think it would help.

October 8, 1992

I’ve got a midterm in my Milton class tomorrow. As far as I’m concerned, Milton is a zit on the face of English literature. (Here I’m paraphrasing Turgenev, who was referring to Dostoyevsky, another writer I’ll be reading at length this semester.) If you ever have to write a paper on Milton, you can start it off with that quote from me. Footnote it by saying, “Dana Albert, Letter of October 8 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), p. 1.” Whether or not you note the Turgenev origin is between you and your god. But actually, it’s probably best not to malign Milton, because you can usually presume that a grad student who is a T.A. for a Milton course really likes him … so you better brown-nose a little bit. Here, for example, is the first paragraph to my last paper:

When I first approached Milton’s “Sonnet 7” I found it a confusing, ambiguous mess given to complicated phrasing, difficult metaphors, and pronouns without antecedents. However, on second analysis, I find Milton to be the dopest, flyest, O.G. pimp hustler gangster player hard core motherfucker who ever lived.

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The Food of Norway - Part II

Introduction

As far back as the Book of Ecclesiastes, people have grasped that there’s nothing new under the sun. Perhaps nobody appreciates this better than Hollywood, with their endless sequels and cycles. So it is with albertnet. Based on the popularity of The Food of London and The Food of Scotland Parts I and II, and now The Food of Norway Part I, I’m doing another cheap ‘n’ easy retread: Part II of The Food of Norway. (For Part I, click here.) Herein I’ll cover Cheap Eats; Fails; Things We Didn’t Eat; Weirdness; and Adventures in Norwegian World Cuisine.

Cheap eats

“Cheap Norwegian food” is essentially an oxymoron. I’ve never seen such uniformly overpriced fare. Walking by a 7-Eleven in Oslo (these are common, oddly), I saw an ad for disgusting vulcanized plastic nachos, with a price of “only” 80 NOK. That’s like $9.50 US. I searched on “cheapest restaurants Bergen” and found Zen Café, my favorite capsule review of which was “crap and good.” (I think that was supposed to be “cheap and good.”) TripAdvisor rates this place with one dollar sign ($), as in “cheapest category.” Lunch for four—meaning a single entrée apiece, no drinks, no appetizers, and no dessert—ran us about $90 US. Although that lunch was a highlight (see below), I cannot call it cheap.

That being said, we did manage, ultimately, to find some fairly reasonable places. One was called Sostrene Hagelin and was a fish-themed fast food joint. For “only” $40 we had a take-out lunch of fiskesuppe, fiskewraps, and fiskekake. The soup was pretty rich and creamy and included a seemingly infinite number of strangely uniform reconstituted fish balls. The first few bites—because we were starving—tasted pretty good. Then it got tiresome, and finally uncanny … you’re peering into this Styrofoam cup at all these little white spheres thinking, “What is this stuff?” The fiskewraps were pretty good: basically wraps with (albeit farmed) salmon or trout. The fiskekake (fish cakes) were, again, reconstituted and a bit rubbery, but highly filling. By the end of the meal I was quite satisfied … in fact, I kind of never wanted to eat again. But good! (Alas, I don’t have any photos of that food … we literally had our hands full carrying it all out.)

The next cheap find was the Kebab Huset, a little shack near the college campus run by a guy from Kurdistan. He was one of the few people we encountered in Norway with really poor English language skills (not that I can speak a word of Norwegian, so I’m not complaining). Normally you can guess your way through menus and such because, near as I can figure, Norwegian is just poorly spelled English. But we guessed totally wrong on the two entrees we bought. I wanted something wrapped up in pita, so I chose the “pita brød, lam.” My wife didn’t want any pita, so after a long, confusing, grinding-of-gears consultation with the proprietor, she settled on the “rullekebab lam.” What I got ended up being folded in one of those weird square tortilla-like things, and hers—you guessed it—was wrapped up in pita. They were 90 NOK (a little under $11, which is a still a lot) but they were huge. Check it out (the “pitabrød, lam” is on the left):

They were pretty tasty. The lamb was just lean enough, and not too greasy. There was the matter of sauces, though. There were big, opaque squeeze bottles up on the counter colored yellow, white, and red. I assumed mustard, mayonnaise, and ketchup, and had him hold the red. My wife had another long, convoluted, ships-passing-in-the-night discussion that got her nowhere, following which the helpful proprietor gave her a sample of each—squirted on her hand. Half a dozen paper napkins later, she announced the sauces were curry, something mayo-ish but also a bit ranch-ish, and hot sauce, all of which she likes. So her rullekebab was pretty much drenched in condiments. I’d give this food about a 7 for quality, a 10 for quantity, and about a 9 for economy (by Norwegian standards). “Crap and good!”

But can you get even cheaper? Why, as a matter of fact, you can. Check out this frozen pizza, which had the shockingly low price of 20 NOK (about $2.50 US) at the corner grocery:

“First Price,” not to be confused with “Fisher Price” (“this pizza is not a toy!”) is the grocery store house brand. The variety, “med paprika dypfryst,” literally translates “with deep-frozen peppers.” At least they’re honest. I should point out that most of the cheese you see on there we added (driving up the price). In fact, the “cheese” it came with was probably non-dairy. The most interesting thing about this pizza was the box. Look at this closely:

On the upper left, you have the standard product description, designed to lure the consumer into buying and/or to prevent buyer’s remorse later (“The tasty pizza pleasure for yourself or to share”). We get this description in German and Spanish as well. Below that, we have the baking instructions in no fewer than eight languages—but English is not among them! I guess they figure English speakers are a tough sell, but that once we’ve ponied up our money, we’re perfectly happy winging it on the preparation (or eating the pizza raw). I randomly baked the pizza at 200 degrees Celsius, whatever that is, until it looked done. I ended up really enjoying it, but then I love all pizza. I could probably rifle through the pockets of a passed-out homeless guy, retrieve a smushed slice, eat it cold, and enjoy it.

Does Norwegian food get even cheaper than that? Yes it does! In Bergen we stayed at a hostel, where lots of travelers leave behind food, which gets tossed in a “free” bin. After an egregiously expensive Italian dinner in town, we came back to the hostel, my appetite only teased, and I found a box of pasta, a jar of goulash, half a jar of pesto, some random bits of cheese, a bit of butter, and some milk—almost all of it from the free bins—and made a scrumptious and almost entirely free meal. I felt mighty vindicated after the restaurant rip-off.

Fails

We didn’t have any epic fails—that is, anything that gave us food poisoning, or was totally inedible like the plaice we had in Bath. But we had some pretty lame fare for giant sums of money. Consider this calzone:

I couldn’t quite figure it out. It was supposed to be pesto, and looked like pesto, but didn’t taste like much of anything. And what was that goo inside it? Thousand-island dressing? Fortunately this was my daughter’s entrée and I only “had” to have a bite (i.e., the mandatory parental tariff). I asked her how she liked it. “It’s pretty good,” she said, fighting not to sound lugubrious, in the spirit of a good sport who knows you just shelled out major bucks for her lunch.

At the same place—a “we’ve got you trapped” cafeteria near the ferry landing in the tiny town of Voss—my other daughter shared this big stupid sausage with me.

I guess it could have been worse, but it really needed to be hot. It wasn’t. (You know those oily rollers that 7-Eleven hot dogs get slowly rotated on, like some crazy torture rack, throughout the day? Well, maybe there’s a benefit to that after all.)

Here was a fail from a pretty pricey Italian place:

Can you imagine paying like $15 for that, and then sharing it with three other people? It’s fricking tiny! And what the hell is it? Other than the nice tomatoes, it looks like a pile of curds and compost that a goat was eating before suddenly taking ill and throwing up. Or maybe the goat had just eaten the foam rubber stuffing out of a cheap armchair and that’s why he barfed.

This apple cake looked pretty good, and was from a fancy place where we did have some pretty good food. The problem was, it was insipid and overly sweet … so much so that even my kids didn’t want it. In my family I’m known as “the closer” and ended up eating it. Laboriously chewing my way through it (because I hate to waste food), I found myself wondering, “Why am I doing this? How did I get here?”

Things we didn’t eat

Norwegians are really into fish and bread. They have historically specialized in dried cod. They have a process for drying cod by hanging it in a salty marine wind, and once it’s as dry as jerky, they can store it unrefrigerated for thirty years. Here’s what it looks like:

Full disclosure: the above is actually a dried King Cod, which is hung from a ceiling to give good luck. I don’t have the story completely straight because this was an hour into a museum tour and I was getting pretty tired out.

Here’s a place we didn’t eat at:

Look closely: “pimp your hot dog.” Talk about lost-in-translation. But that’s not what turned us off. It was those giant udder-like condiment dispensers. Utterly unappetizing. (Full disclosure: this was not in Norway, but the airport in Frankfurt en route.)

We did not eat at this place because it had permanently closed:

Probably a taqueria in Bergen was a quixotic endeavor to begin with. The fact is, Norwegians don’t eat a single thing that is spicy. We encountered nothing with even a hint of spice, not even black pepper. What a bunch of pansies.

We did not buy one of these fish at the famous open-air fish market:

What a crazy, huge, ugly creature. When we first examined it, its mouth was closed—but then suddenly it gaped open! I about had a heart attack, and the fishmonger laughed with great mirth. She has a little fishing line attached there that she can yank on to frighten the tourists. Probably spends half her day doing that … and I would too.

We did not eat any of these:

I always thought “cheeze doodles” was a playful nickname for Cheetos, but it’s actually a brand. Again, I’m bending the rules here; it’s a Swedish product, from the company Old London Wasa.

We also didn’t eat at McDonald’s, even though we encountered quite possibly the fanciest McDonald’s ever:

They wanted just 20 NOK (about $2.50) for a “Chili Mayo Cheese” burger, which I have to admit is cheap, but then you get what you pay for. I’d rather not participate in the cultural imperialism those Europeans quite rightly complain about.

Weirdness

Yeah, we had some weird food. First, we got these crabs at a high-end grocery; all the meat had been pulled out of the shells (which is a lot of work) and then stuffed into the main shell. Seems like a great service to the consumer, eh?

What made this weird is that the tomalley and other innards (kind of the entrails of the animal) had been shredded up and stuffed in there along with the tasty white crabmeat. It was kind of a lower layer, no doubt there to plump up the overall offering. The first few bites were great, but then we got into murky territory. The tomalley tastes really bad, an intense, putrid sea-stink kind of flavor. What were these grocers thinking?

Then there was this so-called “fish pudding,” which was kind of like tofu except tougher, and of course instead of soybean cake it was reconstituted fish.

The large brick of it did last a long time. Every time my wife would bring it out, the rest of us would groan. “It’s good!” she would say, unconvincingly even to herself, very much in the spirit of fake news. It did fill us up, though (or at least end our interest in eating). Note the 2.4% ABV “Lettøl” (i.e., light) beer in the background—purchased solely to wash down the fish pudding.

Speaking of weird, check out the strange spelling here:

If you saw “appelsinjuicen” on a menu, would you ever dream it was orange juice? That’s just plain mischievous.

Adventures in Norwegian world cuisine

Here’s a pretty nice Italian appetizer:

I mentioned a Vietnamese place earlier, which I couldn’t bring myself to call “cheap” despite its “$” rating. But it was good. Was it authentic? Well, the Asian waiter didn’t speak a word of English, which left him out of the mainstream among Norwegians, so perhaps it was. I’ve never been to Vietnam, but the food didn’t taste Norwegian, anyway. Check out these noodles:

The sauce was a tiny bit grainy, but good. Here’s a soup:

I could never make that at home so I’m going to call it authentic. And this curry was as good as what I’ve had in San Francisco:

Moving on to other world cuisine, I’ll remind you of the very exotic kebab place. And then we encountered this treat, in the free food bin at the hostel, which is bona-fide Russian:

In case you can’t read the label, it says “каша бананоьа.” Hmmm, I guess that’s not so helpful. Phonetically that reads “kasha bananova,” which you can probably guess is banana kasha (porridge). We didn’t actually eat this; my older daughter brought it home as a souvenir for a friend whose ‘rents are from Russia.

Conclusion

If I were a natural born promoter, I would always be sure to finish on a high note, but I guess I’m not. Think back to my first Norway post, though … we did have some darn fine meals in Norway, especially the salmon. And guess what? I have more to say about farmed Norwegian salmon, so check back next week!

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