International Friday

Yesterday I went to the annual International Forum Day. There were "Your Excellencies, Distinguished Guests..." - and I'm not the former, so I guess I had to be the latter. I was there accompanying a friend, who works for the foreign ministry and was allowed to bring a guest - but most others were paying guests. Paying a lot, because all income was for charity. And then there were most ambassadors living in Oslo - but I don't know what they look like, so I couldn't tell you who were there... I also met my boss, and a former colleague (of my new job), very friendly environment!

The whole reception took place in Fanehallen, a part of Akershus fortress. It's an awe-inspiring building - there were too many people to get it properly photographed, though. But here's a bit of armour and weapons for you..

Australia's stand (I tasted the meat balls with some bbq sauce, very good)
France's stand. It looked like a work of art! But none of the food actually appealed to me..
Italy. I had to taste Italian pizza, just for the chance of being proven wrong. But I wasn't. Italian pizza really isn't very good. They may have invented pizza, but they can't prepare it anymore...
I absolutely loved Ireland's stand: Guinness! And lots of it! And that was it... (The platters of food you can see belong to other countries.) Genius. The fact that I didn't have any of it doesn't diminish the geniality factor.Perhaps it doesn't startle anyone to learn I headed straight for the Greek stand. They had cheese pies and spinach pies in abundance! Well, they did before I got there...

For dessert - Canadian butter tarts (on the left)...
And our favourites, on the Portuguese stand (I shamelessly confess - we ate as many of these as we managed, then brought the rest home with us when we learnt they were going to throw the rest of the food in the bin as soon as everyone had cleared out!)

Ok - it's not the pastels de nata (sp?) of Belém, but these were also good. VERY good. I even wrote down the name of it, so you will know what to look for when in Portugal; Queijadas leite and bolinhos de areia.

And in between the Greek pies and the queijadas? Thumbs up for Costa Rican empanadas, Argentinian empanadas (...), Moroccan, erh, pita-bread-look-alikes-with-honey, Sudanese falafel, Spanish meatballs, Turkish Köfte and börek, Indonesian chicken satay, Russian pretzel, Belgian chocolate cake, the Canadian butter tarts and possibly some others that I can't remember... The only things I didn't finish (even though these were tinysized portions) were the aforementioned Italian pizzas and American pumpkin pie... I'm really sorry, it wasn't that horrible or anything, just, erh, boring, really. I didn't waste space on that... (Also my ex colleague, an American, said she had yet to meet a Norwegian who liked it. Possibly it's an acquired taste and we're not good at acquiring things...)

- I've still got a bunch of queijadas leite and bolinhos de areia (correct, I don't know which is which..) in my fridge, anyone?