Cheeses: Gjetost og Nøkkelost

So I get a text from my wife with a picture of Gjetost asking me if she should get some. It went down like this. Try not to get too excited.

Of course, I said yes and soon she was coming through the door with her find. It turned out she bought two cheeses: Gjetost and Nøkkelost. We haven't yet tried them, but we will be eating them with dinner very soon. Here are some pictures of our new cheeses to look at while we eat.

Thanks for waiting. Dinner is finished and I'm in love with both of these. I was told to eat gjetost on brown bread  and even to put jam on it. I tried it this way, but in the end, I just sliced it off and ate it straight. It is something between caramel and cheese, a very weird place to be, but I do love it. 

The nøkkelost is more like what I expect a cheese to be. Then, two herbs that I like very much, cumin and caraway, are added to make it really great. It will probably become part of a toasted cheese sandwich for lunch tomorrow.

We got them here.

Hyper-focus on the Norwegian keyboard, and a brain fart

My relationship with the Norwegian keyboard has evolved. It began in denial, or I simply didn't know I'd be getting into Norwegian and wasn't willing to put in the effort to learn about the keyboard. I used the double-letter method (vaere, baade) rather than the Norwegian letters (være, både). That naturally didn't last long.

The next stage was better, but still anglo-keyboard-centric. Actually, this is still very useful when I am typing a lot in English and want to insert the odd Norwegian word. It's called the Dead Key method. It assigns a key that you don't normally use to be a trigger that the key that follows it will be a special character. I use the CapLock key, because I haven't used it for it's real purpose in about ten years. When I want an å, I hit caplock and then a twice and the å appears. It takes three keystrokes, so it is very inefficient, but gets the job done. Honestly, I used this method just now to type these characters in, so this method is still useful, but once you being typing in Norwegian instead of about Norwegian, it gets annoying.

So my next move was to get used to typing on a regular Norwegian keyboard. Now that I'm rather used to it, it is much faster than using the Dead Key method. All the special letters are typed with the pinky finger of the right hand, which is already in good shape from hitting enter and delete all day.

I got used to that in a short time and was having a great time smacking out the å¸ æ, and ø. However, I began to have problems. I couldn't find the apostrophe. Generally, you don't need to use apostrophes in Norwegian, but it happens often enough that you don't want to be switching back and forth between language settings. So I went looking for it, willing to spend a minute or two, but no more. I poked out various keys, seeing what came up, but didn't find it. Another time, my minute or two had me opening up a picture of the keyboard from the settings.

There were a lot of apostrophe-like things, but apparently I had reached my time limit (i.e. attention span) for searching and went back to work. Later I googled it and found that I'm not the only person who had trouble finding it. Googling it, I did not find an answer, however. My final search--final because I found it--I asked a Norwegian learners forum directly. That's it, between the æ and the Return key. I don't know what took me so long.

Although I'm doing pretty well now with the special characters and apostrophe, characters on the English keyboard that are in different places are still bringing me to a stand-still at times. I suppose I'll get used to it, and it is much safer than learning to drive on the left side of the road when I moved to Japan.

My next goal is to figure out how to make that é without going to http://norwegian.typeit.org, so I can type kafé and én.

Salmon Fillet: Laksefilet

OK, so we called the blog "Beyond Salmon and Sweaters", but here is some Salmon we found at the Amagasaki Costco. We are definitely finding more Norwegian things than we imagined.

 And a close-up of the label showing it is from Norway.

I also learned that in Japan they haven't decided how to write Norway in katakana. If you compare this label and the details about the cat in the previous entry, you'll see they are written differently. This one is ノルウェイ, but on the skogekatt sign it is written ノルウェー. The Japanese input system accepts either one.

Norwegian Vocabulary of the Day: Norsk Skogekatt

 The newest Norwegian thing we've found in Japan, a Norwegian Forest Cat a.k.a Norsk Skogekatt. We found her at the Animal Kingdom in Kobe on Port Island. It is kind of like a huge petting zoo. Her name is Liz and was rather shy. My wife, who we'll call Puffin, tried to pet her and she swatted her hand, but let her take a picture.

We were not expecting to see a Norwegian Forest Cat at the petting zoo. This is our first time seeing one. Here are her details.

Here we go.

We'll start with a confession. We have become embarrassingly obsessed with Norway. Related to my work, in a few years, we will travel there as a family and stay for a year. Being language instructors, we decided to walk-the-talk and learn the language of the country we'll be staying in. Recognizing that motivation is the primary make-or-break variable for success in learning a language, we set about arranging out lives in a way to better convince our brains that Norway is: 


a) a real place, and 
b) that is is a good idea to remember words and grammar for things that we already have two or three perfectly good sets of words and grammars to describe, and 
c) there are many things to love about Norway.

The idea being that--on top of a base of tons of Norwegian language study--when our brains are convinced of all of the above, our language learning will reach a higher level and we'll enjoy ourselves doing it.

Since we both have had a deep interest in Norway and Scandinavian countries, these things are naturally falling into place. The level of our obsession is a little more than I expected, though. This blog will follow us through the process of preparing ourselves for our trip to Norway and making ourselves fluent in the language on the way. It will include how we are going about learning the language, materials, experiences, etc., and ways that we surround ourselves with Norwegian things.

Now, we are in Japan and that means that there are very few Norwegian things.  We have put in a great deal of time finding them. We figure that we'll share them here and if there is anyone out there with similar interests who benefits from that, or wants to share things with us, great. We would especially like to be informed if anyone detects signs of Norwegian life in Osaka. 

Crispy Thin by Kavli

Not the most interesting find, but the first thing we've found since deciding to start blogging about Norwegian things we are finding in Japan. We got it at a supermarket, Kohyo, across the street. There was a box of them marked 30% off.

So, word of the day: Knekkebrød (et knekkebrød, knekkebrødet)

So, here it is. A box of crackers, or "Crispbread". They are nice and light. We do have a question though. On the box, it shows the crackers being eaten with cheese, maybe camembert, and strawberries. Is this a normal thing or did they just like the colors?

  Here on the back, it says it comes from Bergen. I cut it off, but it says, "Kavli is owned by the Kavli Trust. Profits go to research, cultural and humanitarian projects." Very Norwegian. :)