All Spruced Up.

Happy November to all. Here's my latest entry to the UNISG student blog......


This summer I needed to get out of Parma. Desperately. A girl can only sweat so much before she sits down, books a trip to she can’t afford, and flies off to Norway.

I landed in Bergen, mercifully cold enough to warrant a sweater, and walked through its medieval wooden quarters on the harbour. Further south in Preikestolen, I hiked to the imposing Pulpit Rock and peered over its edge to the Lysefjord below. At the tip of this fjord I chased BASE-jumpers up to the famous Kjerag Boulder, which I climbed upon for a picture (but didn’t jump off). Norway’s landscapes were wild, unpredictable, and already I long to return.

Norway tasted wild, too; one night we had dinner at Hanne på Høyden, a restaurant in Bergen owned by chef Hanne Frosta. They source or forage nearly every ingredient from Norway, and even make their own wines from a variety of local fruits.

I ordered the beef filet, butchered from a peculiarly small breed of Norwegian cow and served with spruce-tip butter. This topping was simple, just butter smashed up with the supple ends of spruce branches, and like lavender, the spruce tasted just as it smells: woodsy, earthy and green. It complimented the beef beautifully, and oddly enough, tasted familiar.

When we had the chance to meet Hanne, I told her a story: every summer when I was a child, my father took us camping on an island in the middle of a lake. When we weren’t upsetting nature’s equilibrium by digging wells or damning creeks, one of our many projects was to harvest spruce tips. We’d stick them in a can of water and leave it on the campfire to boil. With enough sugar stirred in, this tea-of-the-forest was drunk without qualms, though my mother, happy to abstain from these trips, would have had a heart-attack if she knew what we were cooking up in rusty metal.

I couldn’t have guessed that seventeen years later I’d be eating spruce-tips again, this time melted over beef and served on a plate rather than in a can. It is a rare and curious moment when taste elicits such a memory, and I love Norway all the more because of it.

Boulders and BASE-jumping.

I’m feeling out of place. I’ve come to Lysebotn, a small village that sit on the Lysefjord, about a 3 hour boat-ride from Stavanger in Norway. I came here to hike to the Kjerag boulder, and expected the hostel to be full of people doing the same. It is, however, full of people that hike up to the boulder, continue past it to the cliffs, then hurl themselves off them. They're BASE-jumpers. I’ve arrived at their southern Norwegian epicenter, and they are everywhere.

In the past 24 hours I’ve had a crash course in all things BASE-jumping, not that I am any closer to understanding their conversations. They speak in a language more foreign to me than Norwegian, but every once in awhile they’ll courteously turn to explain what this means or why that type of jump is bad. Last night the conversation included casual talk of the Russian guy who died jumping here three weeks ago, and another guy’s plans to go up Everest next year. To BASE-jump you have to have a minimum of 250 sky-dives under your belt, but many that I've talked to have done at least 300-500, “just to be prepared.” I hiked up to the cliffs they take off from yesterday, and what prepares a person to go over the edge of one of them is beyond me.

It’s all about perspective, however. Most of the world thinks BASE-jumpers are crazy, but when you’re submersed in a group of them it becomes the most normal thing in the world. It’s just what they do, what they love; everyone says I should take up the hobby too, casually suggesting it as they would scrap-booking or model airplane-making. Telling them you’ve bungee-jumped is like announcing to a room full of Michelin-star chefs that you once made Kraft Dinner.

This morning I was told to go down to the dock, look for “Ryan from Canada,” and go with him on the boat to the landing site for the jumpers.  So I did, and I ended up atop a big boulder, watching as over twenty of them rained down two or three at a time. I squinted hard to spot their tiny bodies buzzing through the air before their chutes went up and a few of them wore wingsuits, making them look like flying squirrels. And they do actually fly, higher and for longer than I thought possible for a person that hasn’t jumped out of a plane.

They're not crazy; they are extremely confident, ambitious, and outgoing souls whose lust for life I admire. There's no frigging way I'm taking up BASE-jumping, though.

It's OK, it's Gonna be OK.

I don't know why I'm on such a fish-kick at the moment, but I recently watched The End of the Line, a documentary about how industrial fishing is about as much help to the ocean as industrial farming is to soil (the implication here being not helpful, in case you haven't had your morning coffee ). The film is interesting, informative, if not a touch over-dramatic in its portrayal of fishermen, and though it doesn't outright state that we're screwed, the film essentially leaves you not wanting to eat fish ever again. With the exception of freshwater ling-cod, of course.

So this left me in a bit of a pickle, because tomorrow I head to Norway and have been told by people that while I'm there I must eat FISH FISH FISH. In an attempt to relieve my conscience I googled "Sustainable Fishing Norway," and good news people! Norway has been ranked number one in sustainable fishing by the University of British Columbia and the WWF. Pheeeew, she says, wiping the sweat from her brow.

That's a green light for my conscience and my stomach. Thank you Norway! I can't wait to come to your clean, organized, and humidity free country.

Bread Watermelon Summer.

My friends Aviv and Michal are the coolest. Aviv's passion in life is artisanal bread baking, so several years ago as a way to practise he began selling bread, delivering them on his bike each week and donating the money to a charity in Malawi. His girlfriend Michal is a self-taught filmmaker who has now funded and filmed 3 independent movies. In February they quit their day-jobs and went all the way to Nepal to pursue bread and film together. At the highest bakery in the world he baked and she filmed, then they moved onto Paris where Aviv apprenticed with Jean-Luc Poujauran and Michal ate croissants. Just kidding, she ate croissants AND filmed. Please read more about their adventures here, because I just think they are incredible.

Also, I'd like to share one of my favourite pictures from two summers ago. It popped into my head a few weeks ago in class when we were discussing food photography techniques, such as the close-up food-porn money shot that dominates all the magazines. Every once in awhile, however, food manages to sneak it's way quietly into a shot and hold it's own even without a close-up. Find the super-pink watermelon with a knife stuck in it and you'll see what I mean - I didn't even notice it for ages, but once I did it actually screamed SUMMMMMER to me!!



Speaking of summer, ours just officially started. My parents arrive on Sunday for a two week visit, then I'm off to Norway to hike some fjords, eat some whale meat, and hopefully for once be an anomaly as a brunette. EXCITED.