Trawling the Norwegian supermarket

 Look at these blond kids who are so excited about liver pate. Norway!

 So many different kinds of brown cheese.

 A can of Budweiser is $5.55 at 5.7 Norwegian crowns to the dollar.

 And a carton of Ben and Jerry's is $11.29.

 They love chocolate chip cookies in this country. I don't know about the American taste.

Added after the fact for comparison purposes (these are from a Japanese supermarket)

 Kakemann. These must be wildly popular, as they are sold at all of the Norwegian supermarkets I've been to.

Caviar in a tube, presumably so that you can use it as toothpaste

ShrimpCheese, BaconCheese, and HamCheese, in a tube. The product is a creamy, almost fluffy off-white paste, with little orange flecks in it (it doesn't matter what flavor, it's all orange flecks). Dan the Swede loves this on sandwiches.

Monster sandwich

Once during a summer camp ice breaker (Governor's School Area 3), we were going around the table describing our ideal meal. One kid--I can't remember his name, but he had a blond ponytail--said his ideal meal was "a bowl of chopped white onion." I despised this answer, but now it's one of the few things I remember from 2007.

Today for lunch I ate three sandwiches, each one worse than the last. The first was ham and mild cheddar on brown bread. (Skinke means ham, and a skink, as every good four-year-old knows, is a lizard.) The second was ham, mild cheddar and brunost, Norway's signature food product, a beautiful caramel-brown cheese that actually tastes like cheesy, salty, sugarless caramel. On its own brunost is disgusting but somehow irresistible. It bestows upon a sandwich a deep, unsettling flavor, like dulce de leche that's been left out of the will. My third sandwich was ham, mild cheddar, brunost and about half of a red onion. I always thought that onion's enlivening effects on a sandwich were in direct proportion to quantity. This was a big mistake.

I'm embarrassed by how much I love onions. There's something tacky and unsophisticated about it, like saying that Fight Club changed your life. Or maybe this is trauma from one of my sophisticated friends telling me to lay off the Felipe's onions when I got my first boyfriend. In any case, today onions failed me, and I am more alone than ever.

Above: Brunost. Ekte means "real" or "authentic," which I know because, surprisingly, I can remember a bit of the Waste Land.