Week Twenty Three
Week Twenty Three/Five months and three weeks/Almost six months: So close to the six month mark and the end of January I'm starting to feel like there should be some kind of milestone. I thought about having a party but waited too long to actually plan it. I decided that a year anniversary party in the summer will be better anyway. When I realised that February is upon us it made me evaluate what I've done with 2014 thus far: I have a job. Yay! I'm writing much more often. Double yay! Last week, I officially registered to be a business owner (I'll tell you more about my ideas later). Yay and whoo! And I think my language acquisition is coming along okay. Yay-ish.
On the language front:
This weekend I met up with my friend. She is an actor and she's Norwegian and she shaves her head. The first time we met I was still shaving my head too and she was one of those people that I just felt an immediate attraction to.
Vennin min [literally my friend, but also used as a term of affection like honey or darling] told me about a dream she had had the night before we met. In it I was speaking Norwegian fluently and she woke up very proud of me.
She also told me about a dream with dancing jelly fish and how both made her feel like anything is possible. I shared my recurring dreams of driving a car and she told me she often dreams of flying. IÂ was actually felt jealous of her dreams. Driving, really?! That's the best I can do? It's a dream anything should be possible. Like flying or dancing jellyfish or friends who do not speak your language suddenly being fluent.
Later I told her a story the story of my 'svisker' experience in the grocery store two weeks ago, pĂĽ norsk [in Norwegian] and she was super impressed that I got all the tenses right and how much vocabulary I had.
Weather:
After falling down (TWICE) last week despite wearing brodder (the spiky things I told mentioned a couple weeks ago and which seem to work better on ice than soft snow) I was glad to see the snow melt.
Yesterday morning I looked out the window and the ground was covered again and very large snowflakes were coming down. It was very beautiful from the safety of inside the apartment. Today it was snowing very lightly but there was a lot of slippery slush on the ground.
I'm kind of over snow now, which is unfortunate since the winter is nowhere near over. When we lived in Michigan we used to joke about the very last bit of snow around the bottom of tree trunks sometimes sticking around until April. I've heard the same joke here, it's not funny.
Culture:
This weekend I got very lost, I was on my way to a party and had used an on-line navigation website (which shall remain nameless) for directions. The advice was to walk, take a train and walk again. Toget [the train] turned out to be not a tube/subway train, but a train-train. After two stops I felt that not only did reisekortet min [my travel card] probably not authorise me to go this far, but I was also concerned that I was being taken out of the city. I told someone I met at the party (once I finally arrived) about my journey and she confirmed that if I had gone one more stop I could've been fined and also I would've been dropped off in the forest. Once I followed my keen instincts and got off the train I managed to find a bus stop that mentioned a stop that I recognised (from my route to work). So I was lost but I wasn't panicking and I had time to figure things out on a nice warm bus. At this point my friends started texting me to see where I was. I texted back and then I called my American friend when I got off the bus and was heading towards the T-banestasjon [tube station]. She offered to meet me at the station in town and walked me to the party. I was only an hour and half late! And most importantly I didn't panic.
The party was for Fortellerfestivalen [The Norwegian Storytelling Festival]. It's a great festival. I attended twice before I moved here and this year I'm volunteering. There was a wonderful ceremony for the volunteers (which I'm not even sure I'm supposed to be telling you about). There was a sword and an action reminiscent of a knighting ceremony, we got medallions and there was confetti. Luckily, I had already planned to wash my hair the next day so confetti in my fro was not a problem.
The fiancĂŠ is away on self-imposed writing retreat (which is the reason that I was alone and got lost on the way to the party, not that I'm blaming him, I'm actually very proud of him). Unfortunately I'm pitiful and can't sleep when he's not here. Even for the 2.5 years of our relationship that was long distance I would find it hard to sleep for about a week after we had visited each other. I have taken advantage of the absence of the one I love and the sandman by catching up on some reading and research. {Side note: Apologies to the Norwegians reading this, I usually ask the fiance' to check my spelling on the Norwegian words/phrases I used.}
Continuing the recent trend in celebrating the foods of my multiple cultures tonight I went shopping and tomorrow I will be making ackee. If I was a real Jamaican I would be making ackee & saltfish. However, I don't like saltfish so I'm having something else, I'm not going to tell you what that something else is because the real Jamaicans might track me down. (We'll probably serve ackee & saltfish at our wedding 1) because it's Jamaica's national dish 2) because most of the salted cod in the world comes from Scandinavian waters.) One of the advantages of being a mashup of cultures is that I'm not a purist. I don't have any rules about what things must go together. Because of this I am one of the few people in the world that knows that the following things are great together:
Southern American cornbread and Jamaican stew peas
South-Asian naan bread and Jamaican jerk chicken
Norwegian brown cheese and Jamaican bulla cake
Anyway I'm having ackee + my top secret ingredient with hard food. Hard food (or just 'food') describes a combination of boiled carbohydrate-rich foods, including but not limited to: yam, green banana, (Irish) potato, cassava, pumpkin, and dumplin (just flour, salt and water formed into rounds and boiled).
Yam, especially yam grown in the parish of Trelawny has been credited as one of the things that are responsible for the domination of the Jamaican track and field team. I didn't buy any yam today because they were too big and we never would've finished one. In the UK most places that sell them will cut them and allow you to buy just a piece of the bigger vegetables such as yam or pumpkin.
Green banana is literally bananas that are not ripe yet. I was taught to boil them in the skin (which comes off easily once they are cooked). They are an excellent source of iron. Today I went to my favourite innvandrer butikk [literally: immigrant shop] and had some communication issues: Me: âUnnskyld? Har dere grønne bananer?'' [''Excuse me? Do you have green bananas?''] Guy stacking shelves: [Repeated what I said back to me, but it sounded like brun [brown] penne.] Me: ''Grøn, they're green...'' (Enunciating better this time:) ''Grønne bananer?'' GSS: [A noise that sounded like he finally understood me, and he pointed me to some shelves in the back.]
I found something that looked like green banana but they were kind of big so they might be plantain. I think the sign said 'koke banana' [cooking banana?]. Once I cook them tomorrow I'll be able to tell. Based on the Wikipedia entry for green banana there does not seem to be a distinction between plantain and cooking (green) banana in some languages. Normally I prefer my plantain extremely over-ripe and fried.
Irish potatoes are just potatoes 'Irish' is included by some people as to differentiate them from other types of potatoes (such as sweet).
Cassava is another tuber/root vegetable. I was also able to find this at the shop.
There are people in my family who get genuinely upset at the amount of pumpkins that are âwastedâ at Halloween. âMi coulda mek wan big pot ah soup wid dat!â [âI could've made a very big pot of soup with that!â] The pumpkins at the shop were also too big so I didn't get any.
There are as few different types of dumplin in Jamaican cuisine: bwoil [boiled], fry [fried] (sometimes with milk instead or as well as water), bwoil-fry (boiled dumplings that are then fried, often they are even better when fried the next day), and festival (are similar to fried dumplings but with some cornmeal and sugar).
There are also different shapes, in my family:
boiled dumplings are usually flattened spheres
unless they are in soup then they are rolled into an oblong shape (we call them spinnas [spinners] but a real Jamaican once told me that they had never heard that before so it might be just my family)
fried dumplings are always spherical and deep fried (how deep depends on how much oil you have left)
festival are either spherical or oblong (the chef where I used to work used to go with oblong and tied into a knot before frying which was cute).
My family regularly tells a story [read as my sister brings it up all the time] about my younger sister, then maybe 7 or 8 years old, helping my dad to knead and roll the fried dumplin we were having for breakfast. Because she was such a little kid the dumplings she formed were not perfect spheres. When the food came to the table she searched for the malformed ones she had made but couldn't find them. My dad admitted that he had re-rolled them before they went into the oil. She cried. And by cried I mean: bawled living eye water.
The following is a list of images I wouldâve Instagrammed if I wasn't so poor that I didn't have to wait for my next paycheck to get a new phone:
Medaljongen min [my medallion]
The gjest reflektor: I bought a wrist reflector strip in case we have any uninitiated guests. It's kind of like those slap bracelets that were banned from my middle school, except they reflect light so that cars can see you in the dark and it is dark here in the wintertime.
The ridiculous amount of honning [honey] the people who live in this apartment bought.
The ackee and hard food ingredients.
