Tuesday, June 28, 2011

It's Fryday, I'm in Love

Howdy.

The past ten days have produced a lot of photos, good times, and patriotism, so it's time to catch up.


First, we'll discuss good food.


Last weekend, a beautiful thing called "Fryday Saturday" was established at the home of our fun foodie friends, Hal and Alison.  They have every cooking contraption in the universe, including possibly the only deep fryer in a home in Norway.  They're pretty awesome.  


We rarely eat fried food here, because it's just not as common (or tasty) as the goodies at home.  I suppose we don't really eat it in the U.S. all that often, but whatever.  When it's gone, you miss it.


We decided to tackle all fried cravings in one day.  This glorious day was Fryday Saturday.


So Hal revved up the deep fryer, and the Fryday crew rocked the house...


Fried pickles with chipotle mayo sauce (nearly cried tears of joy when I found a few cans of chipotles in adobo sauce hidden on a shelf in a shop here), a spot-on rendition of KFC chicken strips, ditto for the KFC biscuits and coleslaw, sweet potato fries, and crab wontons.

Oooh and the dessert:  donuts.  These babies were better than donut shop donuts.  Also featured but not pictured: batter-dipped and fried Oreos and various chocolate candy bars.

Wowza that sounds like a lot of fried food now that I'm typing it all out.  


Can I just say that I'm so glad we've found friends that are not only a great time, but enjoy the experience of good food as much as we do?  Our get-togethers are fantastic, to say the least.  Thanks for the delish evening, Hal, Alison, Vier, Brigita, The Jet, and Bethany!  


Don't you worry though...the good eats for the week don't end there.


We were able to attend an early Fourth of July gathering, where tasty American food was handed out for free!  Again, things we don't even really partake of in the U.S. that often (other than the Erath Pinot Noir and the burgs), but when they're in a foreign context, you flock to them...


Burgers that tasted normal, Hebrew Nationals, Erath Pinot Noir from Oregon, Sam Adams, Ben and Jerry's, and...

McD's fries.  I loved watching a bunch of people in business attire walking around with bright red boxes of fries.

Thanks, America.  You know how to throw one heck of a party.

After all of that, you'd think we wouldn't want to eat for days. 

However, Norway celebrates the summer solstice, so Silje made us a traditional Norwegian porridge, which was delish.

After dinner, people go out to watch bonfires around the city.  We went to Aker Brygge and watched a bonfire on the fjord, of which I did not take a photo.  However, here's one pic from the evening:

No, we weren't even drinking.

Alright, now for the flip side of things.  We do actually exercise too.

The sun doesn't set for most of the summer in Northern Norway (Nord-Norge), and there's a marathon and half marathon in the city of Tromsø that takes place at night around the time of the summer solstice.  Ken and I really wanted to see the area, we like to run, and I wanted to run a half marathon as a fundraiser for a non-profit I support in Portland.

So, we flew almost two hours north to beautiful Tromsø, and ran a half marathon that started at 10:30pm.
Getting ready to run at what would normally be the time we fall asleep on the sofa.

What most of the race looked like - just gorgeous.  This is around 11:30pm.  

It was really cloudy that day, otherwise it would've been broad daylight all night long.  It was indeed light outside all night, and it was crazy to finish the race and see people lined up outside of bars downtown in daylight in the middle of the night.  Thankfully, our hotel had really dark curtains so we could actually get some sleep after this and do some sightseeing the next day.

    
Tromsøya from a mountain on the mainland.

Pretty mountains surrounding the city.

Tromsøya.  Thank you, iPhone panoramic app.


There was definitely no shortage of taxidermy in this city.

See caption above.

Now for some tasty tidbits from Tromsø...

Some sort of dried fish.  Nei, takk.

Various goodies at the meat market.  Nei, takk.

And the Moment of Zen:

Alison and Hal's donuts get a second shout-out, because now I can't stop thinking about them.