Day 4, pt.2: Grandma's Meatballs, watercolors & wildflowers

Day 4, Fri., June 3--cont.  Arriving back at the little village of Vik, we found a place to leave the car and headed off to find somewhere to have lunch.  Contrary to our first impression, when we were able to make a closer inspection on foot there appeared quite a paucity of appealing eating places.  The one cafe that we'd seen when we first zoomed through town in the car was very tiny inside, with tables jammed together, and it was mostly filled with mommies and babies and/or small children.  There was another place on the main drag which seemed to be a coffee and pastry hangout--people were sitting outside (presumably inured to the chilly temperature), nursing their coffees.  Unni Marie told us later that it is, or used to be, a dairy and they still sell many dairy products, so maybe we could have had a cheese sandwich there.  We should have gone inside to check it out.  Still a third choice was the large hotel in the town center, but when we went to look at it, it turned out that its restaurant didn't open till 2 and it was not even 12:30 at this point.

   So back we went to Balestrand.  We'd intended to drop the car at the hotel and do a walk around the center of Balestrand ending up at the "kai" (the dock area).  But we took a wrong turn and found ourselves, quick as a wink, at the water's edge, with the Tourist Ofc. just to our right, beside us.  We parked and went inside.

   A beautiful assortment of postcards first confronted us.  Then Rob found a lot of brochures worth taking (for free), and there was a small booklet containing all the ferry schedules, so we took that in order to give Unni Marie back the one she'd given us.  The Post Ofc. was right next door inside the Joker Market, which was sort of a combination 7-11 and Mervyn's, so we went in there to buy stamps for the postcards.

     We were hungry so we were keeping our eye out for somewhere to eat.  A few doors down from the Joker was an attractive-looking building that looked as if it might have a restaurant in it.  Sure enough, it was Me Snakkast, whose menu I had glimpsed briefly in our hotel lobby last night.  Because it was already after 2, we were a bit late for lunch but the owner, a Brit whose name we found out later was Arthur Adamson, seemed an agreeable sort who appeared ready to negotiate a meal for us, perhaps an early dinner or a large (late) lunch.

     Upon opening the book-like menu (which had a lot more in it than just the food items on offer--there were droll write-ups of some of the menu items, and photos and biographies of the owners, Bjorg Bjoberg [both o's have lines through them] and Arthur Adamson), I spotted Grandma's Meatballs, which looked just about right for my hollow place.  Rob ordered the same.

Me @ Me Snakkast waiting for Grandma's Meatballs

   The food was rather a long time coming--we thought maybe the meatballs were the problem but Arthur said, with a perfectly straight face, "No, we have Grandma locked up in the attic making meatballs all day long", so probably it was those delicious buttery potatoes that took the time--and I had noticed that there seemed to be some sort of art gallery in the next room.  I could see it through the large glass window that was opposite our table.  I went to investigate and discovered that the front part of the gallery contained small reproductions of many attractive watercolor paintings of local scenes, some in the form of note card packets that said on the backs of the cards that they came from Balestrand.  I suspected that the older woman in the arty clothes who was carrying the food up the stairs to customers sitting up there might have been the artist and indeed she was--she was the Bjorg Bjoberg pictured and written up in the menu book.  And in fact her husband Arthur, who'd welcomed us into the restaurant, was also an artist, but his work was of quite a different sort than Bjorg's (nudes and such).

   I told Bjorg that I loved her watercolors!  The small format ones in particular were truly little gems that had a kind of glow to them.  I recognized the hand of the artist in several pieces I'd seen back at our hotel, including the place mats we'd used at breakfast.

   Some of her paintings were entirely of flowers, so I thought there might be a chance she'd know what the wildflowers were that we'd seen on the way here from Oslo Airport.  When I asked her whether she knew about the local wildflowers she said yes, but she could never remember their Latin names.  "Let me run upstairs and get my Flora," she said.

   She came down with a small book with illustrations, somewhat resembling our Peterson Pacific States Wildflowers book, but much less comprehensive.  "This isn't the best one, but maybe it will help," she said.  I immediately looked up Phacelia, because I thought I'd seen them yesterday when we were briefly stopped by the side of the road.  There wasn't a single phacelia listed.

   She started questioning me about the appearance of the flowers and when I said they were intensely purple, she said "Blue purple?" "Yes," I said.  "And did they have 5 petals?" she asked.  "Yes."  "Cranesbill," she said, "our cranesbills are large and quite often a deep blue-ish purple."  "Ah ha, it's Erodium," I said, "but our erodiums at home have pink flowers that are very tiny, and the ones I saw the other day were quite large."  (Erodium is the Latin name for Cranesbill, a plant in the Geranium family.)  A difference between species and countries, probably.  She also mentioned campions that are a deep shade of rose and she showed me a little bouquet of fresh wildflowers she had in the shop, pointing out lily-of-the-valley, forget-me-nots that are a lovely shade of sky blue, and an odd greenish white flower she called Lady's Mantle (Alchemilla vulgaris, which is in the Rose family).

   A lovely little watercolor on the wall was labelled "Rossling [the o had a line through it], Norway's national flower".  With that name, I had no clue what it really was.  Bjorg looked it up--it proved to be some kind of Erica--so related to our Manzanita?

"The Blacksmith's House"

   I ended up buying several note card packets and an unframed reproduction of a house with a little man standing next to it which she called "The Blacksmith's House".  I bought the notecards as presents but I'm not sure I'll be able to part with them!  Bjorg gifted both of us with one of her birthday notecards--Rob's (his birthday being in June), was full of flowers, but mine, for a November birthday, was disappointingly somber, gray, pale and filled with raindrops!

   Grandma's Meatballs finally came in a brown gravy (tasting very much like my own made-from-scratch gravy when I have no meat drippings to start it with, though minus the wine flavor), with tiny boiled new potatoes and broccoli.  Everything was delicious--not fancy, but well-prepared and tasty.  With the food, we ordered some Hansa beer (draft) in .41 liter glasses.  It was delicious, too, as was the home-made cake we had for dessert.

   Back at the hotel, I noticed that the vacant land behind the parking lot had several kinds of wildflowers blooming.  And by george, Bjorg was right:  that large purple flower on a single stem was a geranium, the leaves gave it away (I hadn't been able to see the leaves yesterday).  There was another deep rose-colored flower that might have been a campion, or perhaps some other kind of pink.  There was also a small, furled pale periwinkle- blue flower with many single flower stems branching off a central stem that I had no clue about.

   I heard some people speaking Norwegian to each other today and darned if it didn't sound like a cross between Dutch and Scottish Gaelic.  It seemed full of rolled r's, with an occasional guttural sound.  Makes you realize how closely related some of these Northern European languages are.

   Just before bedtime, I noticed a beautiful sight through our hotel room window--about as close to a sunset as I was ever going to have the chance to see, since I couldn't stay up till the wee hours of the morning!