DAY 28
(May 21)Episode 5
Wow! I can’t believe I have been
away from home for 28 days. In a way it
seems as if I have been gone for years, in other ways it seems like I was just
home yesterday…it’s really weird. I am
hoping Brenda is ok and nothing on the farm has been too hard for her to
handle. This morning I drew Sowilo
again, I take it as a good sign.
We will leave today at 0915 and will be staying wherever we are going
for the next two days. The weather is
absolutely gorgeous! Sowilo at work no
doubt.
We all gathered and got right to the first challenge without any
delay; the theme of this week is “everyday
life in Norway”, and part of everyday life, is your job.
The village of Stranda is home to the Grandiosa factory where Grandiosa
pizzas are made. Suprisingly, the frozen
grandiose pizza is the most consumed food in Norway. The teams were chosen, I was on the blue team
with Todd, Jessica, and Barbara. In
front of each team was a table full of fresh ingredients…we were to each design
and make four identical pizza’s which would then be eaten and judged by the
towns folk on creativity, appearance, and tatse. Sounds like a fun challenge.
(Our pizza) (Their Pizza)
We went with a surf and turf pizza, trying to represent the best of sea
food, and beef. I think it worked well
and tasted great. Our pizza was also
beautiful; we used different color peppers arranged just so as to enhance the
presentation. I am certain that we
dominated in all three categories, the red teams pizza was nothing special to
look at, it didn’t have a design of any kind, so I was sure that we have
creativity and appearance sown up. But…that
was not the case.
The red team won on appearance and taste, we won on creativity, giving
them the overall win. What may have hurt
us was that as our four pizza’s were cooking in this outdoor overn thing, three
of them fell and crashed to their deaths in the bottom of the oven. That meant we only had one pizza, so the red
team could only use one pizza, which cut down drastically the number of
townsfolk that were able to judge. Instead
of 50 people there were only about 14.
Oh well, it’s just the first competition.
After the competition we were told that we would be staying the next
two nights with Norwegian families. Now
that is exciting!! We knew that one
family had a dog, and I desperately wanted to stay with that family because I
so missed my dog Adrienne at home.
Luckily for me my team got the family with the dog! We walked to their house and finally got to
meet them. The dad was my age (49), a
fantastic guy named Vebjørn, the mother was Merete she was 42, the son Tore
Andre was 17, and the daughter Hanna was 13.
Right away I knew they were wonderful, warm, hospitable people. Their last name was Skog, pretty cool name,
it means forest. Their dogs name was
Cindy and she was 4 years old. They also
had two cats; Nisse and Misse, mother and daughter.
We talked and talked about many, many things. We were pumping them for
information because we were figuring out how this game worked as well. We were asking them everything having to do
with everyday Norwegian life, because we think this information could show up
on a challenge. Tore Andre and I took
Cindy for a nice walk, the cameras followed of course.
I can’t say enough about the Skog family. As I write this from my journal I have been
back in America for awhile, and not a day goes by that I don’t think of
them. Vebjørn and I refer to each other
as brother; our brother from another mother.
We are great friends and I suspect it will be so for the rest of my
life. We just hit it off…I love that
guy, the whole family actually. When I
do return to Norway one day I will definitely go to Stranda and see them,
Vebjørn made me a promise and he can’t make good on it unless I go there.
Now it is 2330 at night, and still light outside. Tomorrow we leave at 0700 for the next
competition, the important one.
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