Drøbak and food!

Wow, it's been a while.  I was in Drøbak (still in Norway) the week before, for a field course in biology.  This involved going out in a boat every morning, like this: 

...and collecting buckets of sea creatures, like this:

...then spending lots of time looking everything up in field guides (which is not so easy, especially when your polychaete dies and decides to scrunch up when it's dying, or when the guidebook itself tells you that it is very difficult to distinguish between two species of gobies).  This turns the bucket into this:

Awww, nicely labeled organisms!  We sampled hardbottom, softbottom (mud) and seagrass habitats.  On the seagrass day, my group caught an eel.  I have a video of this, but it makes grabbing it out of the bucket seem entirely too easy, and it was not.  Eels wriggle (a lot) and secrete slime, so I will leave you to imagine it.
On Thursday, we all went to the aquarium, to see all these sea urchins and fish we had been staring at alive and happy.  This was fun, and I learned lots of Norwegian names for things, like steinbiten (wolf-fish=very ugly), sjøpølser (literally, sea sausage-sea cucumbers), tangkutling (2-spotted goby), leirkutling (common goby), sandkutling (sand goby), svartkutling (black goby), bergkutling (painted goby)...I told you there were a lot of gobies.
Anyway, it was very fun.  I fulfilled my dream and went swimming in the fjord: now I have swum on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean!

Then it was back to Oslo, where I saw mini-quilts in the T-bane station.  Mushrooms, gnomes, and a Ruter card (very well done-it pretty much looks exactly like a travel card).

Last weekend was the culture festival, including a gourmet food fair by city hall: free samples!
I tried such wonderful things as chocolate, cheese, reindeer and moose sausage, and rakfisk (rotten fish-according to the internet, this is raw fish that is left to ferment in a brine for a couple of months).  It was salty, but really good!  As at all festivals I have seen in Oslo so far, there was the obligatory whole animal roasting over coals and vegetable sculptures.

There were also music performances and other events that weekend.  The new TV season is kicking off again, so there are ads at the train station for shows such as Alt for Norge, a reality show about Norwegian-Americans going to Norway to participate in stereotypically Norwegian things, such as skiing.  It's very odd seeing your culture through the lens of someone else-check it out!
I tried some candy on Monday-smarties (unlike those strange fruit-flavored pill-like objects that always get left behind in the Halloween candy jar after 3 years) these are M&M like: chocolate covered in a colored candy coating (say that 5 times fast!).  However, these are flattened, and the colors acutally taste different: I believe red is cherry-flavored.  It's odd that both Norwegian and American smarties are both fruit-flavored, though.  Food for thought.

Fast Food and a Scavenger Hunt

On Wednesday, since the weather was sunny, some friends and I went out to the islands in Oslo fjord again.  This time, it was quite windy.  As you sit waiting for the ferry boat to arrive, there is a building made up of maybe 6 large cylinders on the right.  I think they are open to the air on top, since there was this unearthly whistling sound like when you blow air across the top of a half-filled bottle.  I tried recording the sound, but it was too windy.
Anyway, here are some pictures of a buoy and the painted summer houses built on the islands.

 By this point, I'm getting quite chilly from standing in the wind, but luckily, the cabin in heated.  They also have lifejackets in case the boat runs into that picturesque little marker buoy.  These are more serious lifejackets than those provided on the ferry at Mackinac Island.

Earlier that day, we ate at McDonalds, because that is the cheapest hamburger you will find anywhere in Oslo.  I think McDonalds in the USA should offer curry sauce!

Finally, I enjoyed the electrified little man in a kilt on my cup reminding me to throw my trash in the garbage can.

The next day was the Scavenger Hunt-this is a different (and much more hilarious) event than during Buddy Week.  My group of 4 did many of the tasks, including sitting in a tree acting like owls, dancing, asking random strangers odd questions, crawling around a statue of Ibsen, and forming the strange Norwegian letters with our bodies.  Here is me wading into the fjord. 

If you can't tell, it is cold.  And windy.  And kind of slippery, with all that algae.  Thank you, groupmates, for saving me from sliding into the fjord!
The last task we did before the Hunt ended was a makeover of me.  Don't I look distinguished?