"Pamper, squirrel, lambs and Tyttebær" Hanestad by martinelli

... I call VACATIONS. And for our vacations - me and boyfriend have a hard time organizing our free days to match, so this time we planned with 2 months in advance - we decided to go visit Linda, my mother in law, in Hanestad.

As his vacations started one day earlier than mine, i took the train alone to Elverum (his hometown), where we met up with his brother and had breakfast with his dad and wife, sister and grandma. They were extra sweet and I got gifts and promises of visit in Brazil.

Then we got the car ready (6 cans of coca-cola and jazz) and drove off to Hanestad, across the beautiful fields and mountains, drooling over the indescribeable landscape of the norwegian nature in autumn time.

the scent is tranquilizing and obscene, the game of light and shadows, the sunbeams clattered against the mountains and dripping between the rocks... shades of yellow, golden, taupe, brown, red and green, big balls of yarn resting on the fields, round lambs pacing and cows taking their afternoon nap...

The Cowberry/Foxberry/Red cranberry/Lingonberry adventure

You people from the north have to understand that life in the tropical regions goes by very simple and easy to follow principles.

For example:

- the day lasts 12 hours, the night another 12, which is why the words "midday" and "midnight" make perfect sense.

- there are fruits with no nut but there ain't nuts with no fruit.

and so on.

even if these principles are not written, they're carved in our way of thinking. a proof of that is what happened to me the other day.

I was on my way to my acupuncture session and got hungry. So I stopped by a fruit store and took a good look on the available goods. the day before that i had been talking to my boyfriend about the fact that in brazilian portuguese we don't even have a word for berry. we'd roughly call it bush-fruit or wild-fruit. and although we do have name for some of the berries (i must assume 90% of them i had never seen before the time i looked them up in the dictionary), the only ones we can attribute a taste to are cherry, strawberry and blackcurrant - and generally derived from extremely artificial stuff, like syrup or chewing gum.

so i took a good look around and decided to go for those beautiful red shiny ones called tyttebær.

be honest. look at that picture. wouldn't you think those pearls of red would taste something sweet and delicious and soft and ... wouldn't you? if you would, that you would have done the same as i did and bought half a kilo of them and eagerly would have brought a handful to your mouth and chewed with excitement.

...

...ooooohhh....

...uuuuuugggg....

do you know that feeling you get when you bite off the brown soap expecting it to be a caramel bar?

i spit it all out instantly and threw the rest on the garbage, outraged.

follow my line of tought - for me, all that was called BÆR (or berry) would be small, born in bushes and sweet.

my boyfriend argumented - "but you had tasted rips (red current) before, and they're not sweet at all!". "but rips are called rips", I said, "not ripsberry!"

laughing for hours in convulsion and tears, he quickly spread the word to his brother, mother, father, sister, grandma.

So when we stopped at Elverum, we got foxberry jam and soft. And althrough the days we spent at Hanestad, at every meal there was something made of foxberry.

Now I know the proper ways to eat it.

:D

<i>~ more to come, this page is under construction ~</i>

• Pros:i had a wonderful autumn time there
• Cons:they didn't let me hug the lambs
• In a nutshell:wish we could have stayed there longer