Juice is good. Sometimes really good. And, I’ll admit it, I like cod liver oil. Not the taste, just the promise of the longer life that it offers. So… if I like juice and fish oil is good for me, then a strawberry fish smoothie is just the thing to keep a body healthy. It sounds a bit odd but I’m sure that these must have been the thoughts going through the minds of the product development team at SmartFish(R). I must admit the culinary creations of norwegians are creative and intriguing. Since moving to Norway, I’ve had the pleasure of eating both lutefisk and rakfisk. Lutefisk, if you’re not familiar with it, is a salted cod that has been soaked in lye for a week, rinsed, and then cooked. Although it is essentially tasteless, it has the odd property of remaining gelatinous after cooking. The first bite can be disconcerting but with enough butter, mushy peas, and Akavit, it’s actually not too bad. Rakfisk, on the other hand, is probably the most disgusting thing this side of rotten fish. Oh, wait a second, it is rotten fish. It’s worth trying once though (if you hold your breath). And if one of the questions on the Canadian astronaut selection form had been, ‘Can you stomach Rakfisk?’, I might have made it for an interview. As it turns out, I just got my PFO. I was kind of hoping for an interview but knew that my undergraduate grades would probably come back to haunt me at some point. I knew that I should have spent less time playing Risk…
As I type this I’m a bit sore. I decided to go for a run today. Actually, I decided to go buy some speedskates and somehow convinced myself to run over to the shop. The roundtrip was about 20km. I figured that I should probably start working up to marathon distances if I’m going to do the Norseman Xtreme Triathlon. It’s a little over 10 months away and I’m concerned about my running. Today, I felt good for the first 15km. After that, I felt like a gelatinous pile of lutefisk. My lungs, muscles, and heart seemed to do okay. It was just my feet. My pronation, it turns out is not fully cured by the insoles that I’ve got. If nothing else, my shoes are at least good for whacking spiders. Spiders, it seems, get really big in The Hague. I suspect that it’s a combination of the ‘Frites met Mayonaise’ and herring that makes them so big. I had never really paid attention to spiders until a woman came up to me today while I was on my run and asked me something in Dutch. I explained that I didn’t know Dutch but that if she wanted to try in Danish, I’d be more than happy. After looking at me like I was an idiot, she explained that she is terrified of spiders and that there was a ‘big one’ on (of all places) her bike. ‘Could I help her with it?’, she asked. Of course I could. A spider was surely no match for a no-do-dickey-di, lilly-white collegiate boy like me. Did I say that it was big? It was big AND hairy. But, after stunning it with my map, it agreed to move to a better spot and I agreed to run away like the lilly-white collegiate boy that I am. She was thankful, I was gone. So after 20km I arrived back at my hotel with thoughts of lutefisk dancing in my head. There was only one thing to do. Go out for sushi. And, as luck would have it, there’s a sushi restaurant close to my hotel. At €50 a person though, I decided that my money would be better spent at the Genki-Tei by the Grote Kerk in Den Haag. Mmmm, it was good. Succulent edamamme, spicy tuna, and fried salmon skin temaki. Tomorrow night I’ll try the blowfish (served a la ‘Rak’)…
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