Pizza Menu in Sweden

I'm just sitting here in the old Midwestern Town of Mexico City, enjoying some Pan Pizza and reminiscing about our recent trip to Scandinavia. I took this picture of our menu at a pizza place near Bollnäs, Sweden:

In the last twenty years, the "Pizza Kebob" places have taken over Scandinavia. I read Eat Smart, Norway before I went, and I even went to a presentation by Joan Peterson at the local library. I sampled some lovely food at home here. But that's not what we had while we were actually in Scandinavia. The real food in the backwoods of Norway was a strange conglomeration of random stuff on pizza- from corn to mutton to ranch dressing. There's nothing they won't put on a pizza there. Sweden was pretty much the same. I'm not saying it's necessarily bad food, but I do prefer American Pan Pizza in the United States- like the kind they have here in the Midwestern town of Mexico City.

The ingredients to the "Mexico City" are:

Tomato Sauce
Cheese (no type specified)
Mincemeat
Tobasco
Corn
Jalapeño
Taco Seasoning Mix
Arugula

Because nothing says "Mexico City" like Mincemeat and Arugula.

Sign #1

The fourteen year old boy in me thought this was really funny. I know it means, "Speed Bump." Farts Humper????? Ah, Norway. You're a freak of nature but we love you so.

The Unobserved Moment

I was in Norway. And Sweden. And Denmark. Lost, too, because my phone didn't work there and no one gives good directions anymore. But wonderfully lost.

You probably already figured it out. If I disappear, you can kind of figure I'm out of the country of these United States, and give it a fifty-fifty chance I'm in Sweden- because, let's face it, when you take the time to learn a language like Swedish, you're going back to Sweden. Often. I mean, no one else in the world speaks Swedish, so what's the point, otherwise?

People in Sweden don't even speak Swedish, half the time, but that's another story.

************

Time is different when you aren't writing about it. Or taking pictures and posting them on your blog. It's all different.

Something changes when you are making something into a story in your mind. I won't say it's a bad thing, necessarily, but something definitely changes. And then you race around writing and photographing and painting and creating and there's just a point when you have to take some time and just...

Be.

You know?

So that's why I haven't been writing of late. I feel refreshed.

***********

I did mean to write about it. I totally meant to keep a journal of my trip. I bought a really pretty journal. I wrote in it the first day. We went through Paris to get to Norway, and I wrote this:

A good beginning, I thought. Nothing special.

Incidentally, my Swedish friend, Stina, went to Paris three years ago. She was staying with a friend. She stepped outside for a moment. The garbage man was there, emptying the trash into his truck. He asked to have sex with her.

She declined, and then asked her friend whom she was visiting what the heck?

"You looked at him," said her French friend.

*************

My book was number three today in comedy give-aways, right behind What's French for WTF? I wish I had thought of that title. My next book has that as the main idea. Guess I'm not alone? I shouldn't get the book, though, because I might be keeping Gwen Ellery ahead of me (although she deserves it).


And yes the book is free again, still today and tomorrow and Sunday. Ja ja.

***************

It's good to be back home, though they sure make it difficult to get back into these United States. Their motto at customs is, "If you left the US willingly, you must be a traitor." They treat people accordingly. Still, God bless America, and all that. There's no place like home.

A guinea hen started living here while we were gone.

I know I wasn't supposed to write this until Tuesday. Forgive me. Förlåt. I couldn't wait.

Another week...

I need another week's "blogcation". After that, all will be revealed. Or most will be revealed, anyway. Some. Thing. Will be revealed. I have a good excuse, I swear!

In the meantime, if you know anyone who never downloaded "Exhaust(ed)" when it was free the last time, have them download it now. It's free today through Sunday.

And now I shall reveal a pictorial hint of what has been keeping me so occupied:



This blog shall reactivate Tuesday, September something or other (the next one) at 9:03 PM.

Norway

Norway! I went to Norway a few times, once for about a week, and... yeah. Nothing really struck me about Norwegian culture. Well, except, of course, for the fact that Norway spawned the likes of Thor Heyerdahl, the Twentieth Century's greatest adventurer. I saw the Kon-Tiki in a museum in Oslo and bought a slide that looked like this:



Fast forward fifteen years and...

I volunteered to be a guest teacher one day in a high school special ed social studies class. I had recently found a box of slides labeled, "Norway". I had no real way of looking at the slides, except in the teeny tiny view, but I was pretty sure I could wing it when I saw them. I mean, who doesn't remember pictures they took in a foreign country, even after fifteen years?

I introduced the slide show to the class- "These are some pictures of Norway I took when I was your age," blah blah blah. I turned on the slide projector, and that slide- the picture up above there- came up. And I, naturally, had absolutely no idea what that slide was meant to represent. I paused. A feeling of panic slowly came over me. Then, out of the blue, a voice,

"The Kon-Ticki!" yelled a man in the back of the room. He yelled it with gusto! With joy! Apparently, he was a substitute for one of the assistants in the class, and he was a great fan of *Thor Heyerdahl, the Kon-Ticki, Norway in general. And so was I, suddenly. It all came back to me! He saved my life, for the moment. Or, at the very least, he saved the social studies lesson.




* For those of you not in the know, Thor Heverdahl sailed a raft around the world, in an (I think successful) attempt to prove that primitive peoples could have travelled the earth in rafts and moved from one continent to another.

I think he had a lesser-known adventure when he lived on an island with his wife for two years. I only remember mostly that in the documentary they mentioned that they were naked almost the entire time, because they liked feeling the leaves brush against their skin.