language and food

Norwegians eat 4 meals a day, traditionally. Only one of them is a hot meal, and that's dinner. Lunch is generlly the simplest meal, with many Norwegians bringing from home a "matpakke", whose literal translation is "food pack".

A matpakke consists of maybe three slices of bread (cut fresh from the loaf that morning) layered on top of each other, with perhaps cheese or meat on each slice. The set of slices are wrapped in something that's a mix between butcher's paper and wax paper. To eat it, you unwrap the paper, peel off a slice, spread some substance on it from a tube (see my earlier post about tubed substances), and enjoy. At lunchtime, maybe half the people in the cafeteria have a matpakke bundle.

Interestingly, the matpakkes are generally made by the wives before the husband goes to work.

On another note, I mentioned in an earlier post something about a tubed substance that had a picture of a baby on it. It turns out that substance is pate'. I'm not sure what's up with the baby, but it might be a brand icon.

Finally, the Norwegian language has the most logical naming scheme for members of a family that I've encountered.

father = "far"
mother = "mor"
father's father = "farfar"
father's mother = "farmor"
mother's father = "morfar"
mother's mother = "mormor"

brother = "bror"
sister = "sostre"
father's brother = "farebror"
father's sister = "forester"
mother's brother = "morebror"
mother's sister = "morster"

son = "sonn"
daughter = "datter"
son's son = "sonnesonn"
son's daughter / daughter's daughter / daughter's son = not sure, but it probably follows the same scheme...

Anyway, it's a very efficient scheme for indicating both a family member's place in the hierarchy, and which side of the family that member comes from.