One of the best ways to get to know a county is through its food. Even today, when American culture, English and global corporations have touched almost the entire globe , food culture remains a stronghold of distinctive national identities. In Norway, where everyone watches American tv, speaks English and buys iPhones, preparing a meal is a full-immersion cultural experience. You rarely feel so alien as when you’re buying food from the grocery store; accordingly, you rarely learn so much.

Here are a few things I’ve learned: first, and perhaps most importantly, Norwegians really love salmon. Of course, I loved salmon long before I came to Norway, but that love was kind of like my love for Mila Kunis – sure, I can admire her from afar, but it’s not really very likely that I’m actually going to get to know her. Here, however, Mila Kunis and I are engaged – salmon is the freshest and cheapest protein in the grocery store. An illustrative fact: I have been in Norway for 15 evenings, and on 13 of them, I ate salmon. Tonight, of course, I will do the same – being a salmon lover in Norway is like being a mountain lover, well, in Norway. To paraphrase Bertie Wooster on the profusion of Bassington-Bassingtons in England, Norway is fairly well-equipped with salmon. What I mean to say is that there’s no chance of a sudden shortage, what? Here’s a representative meal:

Second, Norwegians do not make sauce from scratch very often – rather, they hydrate or heat it from strange dried or frozen sources. I had thought this was interesting when I noticed an entire isle in the grocery store dedicated to dried sauce powders, but the strangeness of this really hit home when, last night, I tried to microwave some broccoli to accompany (what else) my salmon. Wondering why my broccoli package seemed to say a whole lot of other things besides just “Broccoli,” I opened the package to find strange frozen items that only vaguely resembled what what might expect in a bag of broccoli. They were the right shape, but they were too big, round, and white. They looked like little tiny trees after an early ice storm. Here’s a picture:

I put them in the microwave and went about my salmon frying business. Several minutes later, my salmon fried, I pulled out the bowl from the microwave to find that my broccoli was swimming like unmelted boulders in a basin of bubbling, magma-like cheese sauce. Astonished at the sudden appearance of a liquid dairy product from the ice surrounding my broccoli, I was reminded of the old saying: any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Let us add frozen broccoli coatings to that category.

It was a little odd to eat my curried salmon and rice with cheesy broccoli, but it was from from the oddest thing I have eaten in the last couple weeks, and like most of them, it was quite good. For example, in Norwegian grocery stores, there is often an immense bowl of loose, unprocessed shrimp. You take the scoop, scoop our as many shrimp as you want, and then later, often for lunch, you pull off their heads, tails and freaky little legs, put them on a piece of bread with some butter, and enjoy. This fills me with anxiety because my mother, unlike most human beings, doesn’t pull the tail off her cocktail shrimp before she eats them. I imagine that when she comes to visit me in Norway, she’ll be thrilled that she has finally found shrimp that are even less ready to be eaten than the ones she eats in the U.S., and swallow the crustaceans just as they came out of the ocean.

I’ve also eaten immense amounts of Norwegian brown cheese, which (since it is the same color as peanut butter) always leaves me slightly disappointed that it isn’t. I also regularly consume little tins of mackerel in tomato sauce, which are delicious and make me feel like I’m eating kippers, not that I have any idea what those are, and sandwiches whose main ingredient is leveiposten – a ground meat paste eaten mostly by babies. The tins, in fact, have little babies on the front, which always makes me feel a little nervous about where the meat comes from. But they’re delicious. And, of course, I’ve been asking all the Norwegians I meet about wild edibles, and besides the raspberries and blueberries all over the mountains, I recently found a new one with a Norwegian name that I can’t remember right now. They’re sooooo delicious – very tart, like cranberries, but without the mouth-drying aftertaste. Here’s a picture:

One reminder of home, however, is Norwegian people’s love of hot dogs. They’re called pølse, and they’re just hot dogs – you can get them with ketchup, mustard, onions, cheese, and lots of other delicious things. However, Norwegians prefer to put them in a little potato tortilla called a lompe, which is pronounced kinda like lomper. Some people are huge fans of these – one of the other fulbrighters, for example, spoke so passionately and evocatively about eating goat cheese on her lomper that I’m thinking of transforming it into a dramatic monologue. I, however, prefer a bun.

Anyway, Norwegian food is fantastic, and I’ve never eaten healthier. Tomorrow will be a bit of a setback, however – I’m going backpacking for a night, and so dinner is ramen noodles (here, the dominant brand is Mr. Lee) and lunch is gorp. I expect that this trip will be one of the most beautiful I’ve ever taken (I’m spending the night at a cabin nicknamed the Little Stone Castle, and whose real name apparently suggests vast vistas and glaciers). Also, since I have to take a series of buses there, and it’s hiking, I expect plenty of misadventures along the way. Stay tuned for the story!