Sandra as a Saetre: Norway in June!

And I'm back! June is the busiest month of the year for the restaurant and I worked nearly every day! We averaged about 250 guests a day and starting in mid-June would continue to break the record sales every Friday and Saturday. Needless to say, it was a very very busy month! At the end of the month Emily and Rick (friends from home) came to visit and then July 3rd I left for a two week vacation in Spain. So, it has been quite a while since I have written anything, and for this I am sorry, and will write a couple of posts in the next couple of days to get all caught up!

This post is about life in Norway, after the four mountain hike, right up until Emily arrived!

The end of May was relatively calm, all my coworkers at the restaurant were preparing for June and everyone else was relaxing and enjoying the arrival of beautiful weather. Like this night, which I spent out back behind our house enjoying wine and Norwegian brown goat cheese with my cousin, Gitte, her fiance, Arild, and Alf. I have started to learn that walking by Gitte's house (they live next door) is always a good idea, as I am usually invited in for some food, ice cream, wine, a movie... etc. This particular night she had just returned home from the store and she and I sat out at the table behind our houses and enjoyed the "sunset". As it was nearing summer, the sun never really sets, just dips below the horizon for about an hour and then starts rising again, and that is at about 12-1am. So she and I sat outside and chatted while Arild, her fiance, fixed us some snacks and wine for himself and me, as Gitte is 5 months pregnant.

This was our view:

After a little while, Alf, her father, and my boss, arrived on his boat and came and joined us. I love watching the three of them interact, they are hilarious! Then Arild brought out this very traditional Norwegian brown cheese which we ate with crackers. I hated this cheese growing up. At Janney, my elementary school, had an international day every year and we would do a Norwegian table. We would have open-faced sandwiches, Norwegian waffles, and this cheese, which would go completely untouched, it was practically just for show. But, it is very common and very popular here, so I gave it another try and loved it! I even bought some for myself at the store the next week. It's goat cheese, but brown, and kinda sweet, but bitter, it's hard to describe, but they have it at Whole Foods if you want to try it. I recommend it with graham crackers, the original kind, not the cinammon sugar ones.

This was our view to the other side, overlooking the family boat house, which is in the foreground, and the harbor. It was a wonderful night, and the kind of night I will miss the most when I leave.

The next big event in May was our staff party! A nice way to relax and spend some quality time together before the craziness of June hit and we would all be at eachother's throats everyday. The restaurant closed very early on a Sunday and all of the employees went out to the island. We started with some business. We had safety classes about what to do in the event of a fire and our boss gave us a very detailed set of rules about service and how the restaurant would run in June. This was, of course, all in Norwegian, and while I am understanding more and more everyday, it is very easy to zone out during speeches and not catch anything. After the fire and safety speech, I asked a coworker if I missed anything important, she said not really, just try and get off the island. So, I guess that's what I'll do, and hope no guests ever ask me about safety procedures. Alf gave the staff a speech about shellfish and where we get everything from, and we tasted everything. Then we spent some quality time together on the island.

Here is most of the kitchen staff, relaxing outside, about to start getting bored...

And the servers, inside, still polishing during the staff party!

A poster of Alf, from his days as an oyster farmer, that hangs in the restaurant.

To cure their boredom, the chefs tried to make the langostines race. It was a failure, however, as they can't travel on land. In water, the curl and uncurl their tail to jet themselves around the water, their legs and claws are useless, so the race was incredibly uneventful. It looked like this:

So, after the failed race, the chefs came up with this... I didn't do it, nor do I necessarily approve, but it was hilarious. The sticker on the box of cigarettes says "Smoking Kills" in Norwegian.

After the information sessions and the hanging out and polishing and langostine abuse, we had a wine tasting of all of the most popular wines we serve. This is when the party really got fun! Here we all are, at the wine tasting.

After the wine tasting we all headed into town and had a great night, management, kitchen, servers, everyone! It was great and definitely lifted spirits before June!

The last big event before Emily came, in mid-June, were the Saetre-lekene (Saetre games). This is a family tradition where everyone in the Saetre family comes together at the family-owned boathouse and land around it for a barbecue and some good, old fashioned, Norwegian competition! There are five events, everyone keeps a score card, and the person with the highest aggregate score wins that year's Saetre-lekene. I had participated in these games 6 years ago, when my Dad and I were visiting and I beat everyone to be the 2003 champion. This really upset my strapping, athletic, male, 20-40 year-old, Norwegian cousins! I was scheduled to work on the same day as the games, but everyone made sure I could get to work later so I could return to defend my title. The games were supposed to start at 5, when I had to be at work, so they moved it up to 4 and had me go first and finish all the events and then jet off to work. There are 5 events:
1- Darts (5 darts, concentric circles, more points for the circles closer to the middle)
2- Ring toss (5 rings, 5 stakes, one point per ring on a stake)
3- Running with a potato on a spoon (Cones set up on a hill and you have to run past them and keep the potato on the spoon and get points for all the cones you pass without dropping the potato)
4- Soccer (5 kicks of a soccer ball, trying to get it between two cones)
5- Pengacoste (Throwing 10 coins into a coffee tin about 10 feet away)

I'm pretty sure that pengacoste, darts, and soccer are the only legitimate Norwegian games, I think ring toss and running with a potato on a spoon are just fillers...

Anyway, I finished all the events, turned in my score sheet, and left for work before anyone else had competed. Two hours later, while at work, I looked at my phone and saw 3 missed calls and 5 text messages from family to tell me that I had done it again! I had won the Saetre-lekene!! I was so thrilled and couldn't stop smiling at work! I defended the title and represented the American branch of the Saetre family! My great-uncle Henneman would be very proud!

Here I am, with the winning score card, although I didn't know it at the time...