One End of the World

In Norway you can take a train an hour and a half from Oslo and see the "Verdens Ende," the end of the world. Strangely enough, there's a lighthouse and a bunch of boats at the end of the world lined up to sail off to God only knows where -- where do you go if you're already at the end? To Copenhagen, tee hee, the Norwegians would say. I sense some rivalry. (Incidentally if you're ever traveling in this part of the world, take care to remember that Copenhagen, when you actually get to Scandinavialand, becomes København. This seems natural enough, but on no sleep in a strange airport with a bunch of elves instead of people, you too might find yourself wandering among endless rows of baggage looking for the ones tagged with a C-word, instead of a K-word.) A quick Google search reveals that there's a World's End State Park in Pennsylvania. And as we all know, the Pirates of the Caribbean were also "At World's End." Everybody's got one. My guidebook, wrong as usual, suggested that the end of the world would be good place to take a swim.


Actually, it was pouring rain. But! It was lovely. And in Tønsberg, I had the longest and loveliest lunch of my entire life. I and my small party began eating at 1 o'clock in the afternoon and we were still half-eating, half-sleeping when we had to get up to catch the last train back to Oslo at 9 that night. In the course of this supermeal, I discovered Norwegian goat cheese, which is indistinguishable from chocolate, and is the best thing I have ever eaten in my entire life. Some chunks of it left with me in my bag and are waiting to be eaten from their shelf in my fridge in Oslo.


Two glasses of wine, two more glasses of port wine, and a lot of goat cheese later, we then ate the next best thing I've ever had in my entire life which is very much like a Russian blini (they tell me), only better. You can't possibly make these little pancakes in the states because every step of the making process requires things that you can't buy there. Like "sour milk," which has to go into the batter, and is maybe a little bit like buttermilk. With a pancake sizzling on your plate, you then drizzle on something like very liquidey sour cream. I don't know what the stuff is called but it's like really excellent tartar sauce with cream cheese and sour cream all up in it. We probably don't have that in the states either. On top of the liquidey sour cream you spoon super finely chopped sweet onions, and on top of that, yellow caviar, which we might actually have somewhere. The black stuff is evidently DYED, which I never knew. Or at least, it's a rumor that Norwegians like to encourage gullible Americans to spread.

During a short break before the main course, I wandered off into the pouring rain with an excellent pair of borrowed galoshes, and here I discovered snails, a lot of them, and a lot of fluorescent moss.

I probably stepped on thirty snails flapping back into the house and screaming about how wonderful it was with the masses of snails on the ground, and everyone gasped. Tønsberg apparently had an infestation last year, and I was the bearer of the unwelcome news that they'd returned. Snails are like small goats; they eat anything. According to people living in Tønsberg, these particular snails come from the dirty people living in Holland who don't know how to keep their snail problem to themselves. But how cute??!