Icelandic sushi was only the starter for a long meal in Akureyri, including local sefood, game, vegetables, and herbs. The cooks at restaurant Fridrik V took great care to explain who had fished the salmon and who had captured the puffin. The dinner was at the same time creating a story about the local community and its nature. Of course, the wines were well selected for each one of the many dishes.
Not too many happen to pass by Akureyri, if you are not actually intent on visiting the north coast of Iceland, but if you do so, you should not miss Fridrik V. They also have a deli store in the same house. The north coast offers a lot to the tourist and as you may be aware the prices in Iceland happen to be quite good for the moment…
The anemone now withered down, Colchicum again flowers alone. The first snow has already passed and there are more and larger flowers than ever. In this climate there are no bees around this time of the year to benefit from its nectar and pollen. Maybe some mice? Other species of Colchicum are known to be rodent pollinated.
If you are in Istanbul, don’t miss the museum Istanbul Modern. And don’t be surprised by its location behind what seems to be an industry parking lot. The gallery is welcoming and spatious, showing a broad panorama of the development of Turkish modern art.
There are also installations and a lot of interesting video art. Especially recommended is the video work by Ali Kazma showing a minimalistic and highly personal view of industrial processes. Jeans, steel rods and household gear come to life.
Until January 11, 2009, you can watch an exhibition Held Together With Water, from the Austrian Sammlung Verbund, with an impressing international display of, not least female, photograhers. I was very much fascinated by the work of Francesca Woodman and sorry to learn about her tragic fate.
The excellent restaurant of the gallery, with fine turkish food, wine and beer, offers a nice view of the Bosphorus from its veranda.
In a magic evenening, this 89-year old made us sing his rhymes and laugh at the stories of his own life, but also think seriously about childrens culture. “All pedagogic literature is bad and all good literature is pedagogic.” Actually, in a sense, all of us, and also our children, are his children.
Lennart Hellsing told us about his cooperation with Stig Lindberg which started because Stig was working at the cooperative movement’s ceramics industry and he himself publishing with its editorial. After 4 or so books, among them the classic Musikbussen (Music Bus), Stig didn’t have any more time since he always had a lot of new projects. Lennart was left with the popular new characters Krakel Spektakel and Kusin Vitamin so he had to find a new artist for them. His choice was the then young and unknown Danish cartoonist Poul Ströyer, and they had a long and fruitful work together.
He also told us how he became a horseback rider as a young recruit, what happens if you don’t follow the moralistic rules for childrens books, how his black great grand-mother came from the caribbean to be an estate-owner in Scotland and a great number of other completely true tales….
The naked lady is again flowering (lower right), but now has some company in her corner of the garden by a Japanese windflower (anemone). There are now several lady buds coming so this will be a long and beautiful flowering. As can be seen in the picture, the maples already consider this autumn and shed their leaves. Many other plants are however also flowering even in this northern archipelago garden.
Finally there is some scientific research produced that has some relevance for everyday life. The Ig Nobel Price committee has again in 2008 selected the most improbable research. My favorite this year is the physics price, about string theory. The californian scientists got it “for proving mathematically that heaps of string or hair or almost anything else will inevitably tangle themselves up in knots”. As is evident from the picture, I am already familiar with the phenomenon. Strange things happen during the night, even if you leave a cord fully stretched out. It will take me twenty minutes to undo it and my collegues will not accept it as a good excuse for coming late to the job. (I for one thing would not want to miss the radio news while biking to work.) I am sure I will not understand the math behind the proof, but I feel relieved that somebody does.
Another good candidate is the economy price, awarded to the skilled researchers who found that a professional lap dancer’s ovulatory cycle affects her tip earnings. This comes of course as no surprise for any evolutionary biologist, but in economy it must have a shattering impact. (I don’t have a picture on this. My lap dancer has here day off.)
I happened to spend some days in Iceland last week – and during three days the Icelandic Krona lost 10 percent of its value. Of course a scary situation for Icelanders, and for the traveler a somewhat familiar sense of profiting from an unfair economic situation, that you run into now and then during a lifetime.
It has been said in British media that Iceland is a high-risk unit trust disguised as a sovereign nation. This is of course not true, since the risk-takers are only a few handfuls of individuals, who now have changed from the nation’s heroes to its crooks.
So what is the origin of the international financial crisis? Could it be the unlucky combination of Clinton economics, supplying cheap loans to the poor, and Reaganomics, not wishing to take any government responsibility for the capital? Of course there is also the unfortunate shredding and reselling of loans, almost taken out of a textbook on how to produce a maximum of predictive chaos. Doesn’t the whole situation remind you of the familiar example of the raisin in the dow, which has been repeatedly rolled out and folded? No simple equation can describe where in the bread you will find the raisin – and this is what now scares the guts out of all the banks….
The brass band of the Black Sea Fleet of Russia in Sevastopol greets incoming ships with some merry tunes. It may need these to cheer up themselves and their own comrades.
The Black See Fleet has Sevastopol on Crimea as an important port. Since 1954, Crimea is administratively part of Ukraine. Russians say about Nikita Khrushchev, who was responsible for this, “He must have been drunk”. It did not matter so much until the Soviet Union was dissolved and Ukraine gained independence. Ukraine in 1997 gave the Russian navy a 20-year lease for using the harbor.
To prolong this lease, negotiations should now already have been undertaken. Despite constant disagreements about everything else, it seems that the protagonist troika in the Ukrainian political reality soap agree that Russia must leave in 2017. The majority in Russian-speaking Crimea probably does not agree, however.
For Russia there may be a problem to find such a good port on the Black Sea. For Ukraine, however, the problems will be worse – they will lose a lot of incomes to Sevastopol, and probably have their prices on Russian natural gas increase even more than today.
(To show the video on this post, I had to learn to open an acccount and publish my video on YouTube – a new accomplishment just as a side effect of blogging.)
In Iceland, Greenland shark is prepared by being buried in gravel for some weeks and then dried in strips for several months. Kaestur hákarl is considered a delicacy and is servered in particular during the winter feast Þorrablót although it can be found all around the year. The smell is very ammonia-strong because the shark meat contains a lot of uric acid. The fresh shark meat is poisonous and cannot be eaten. Hákarl is normally served with Brennivín, a brand of caraway-spiced Icelandic potato-aquavit also known as Black Death. As far as I have noted there are no other foods directly associated with it, like bread or potatoes, although there is a whole buffet of “typical dishes” served together as Þorramatur. Brennivín has left some tracks in recent culture, for example Kill Bill and Foo Fighters.
Personally I found that hákarl was not as bad as I had been told, but instead quite tasty, even if I appreciated the shot of cold brennivín afterwards. On the other hand, noting my previous food track record, it might not surprise anyone that I would like it. Compared with sour herring it does not have the lactic acid taste, but rather a combination of a milder cheesy taste and the sharp ammonia.
It is now again the time for sour herring parties. The release of this year’s harvest has not yet taken place, but there are always old cans around to start with. The one pictured in Swedish Mad magazine in 1965 can however not be found, even if the slightly rounded shape is realistic.
We had a dinner last night with Kallax from last year, and Oscar’s from last year and 2005 – all very good.
This year’s herring harvest is said to have been good so their should be plenty of new sour herring available on the market in a week or so. Reports will follow.
