Norway Comes to Us

June 27-29

The second set of visitors to our home in Luneburg arrived on the same day that the Bennett Family left to continue their family trip in Wales.  Fortunately, we had the entire day to attempt a quick turn-around of our guest sheets (laundry takes 2 hours just to wash) and the day was fine for quickly drying the sheets in the sun.

Jan Oge and Randi are Norwegian friends we met in Bloomington, Indiana when Tom was a graduate student in 1996.  Back then, we were still "newly weds" without children and they had arrived with their three children for a semester at Indiana University where Jan was a visiting scholar in the same department with Tom (sound familiar?).  There have been many times these past months when I have reflected on their family's experiences in Indiana and have a new sense of what they went through!  We stayed in touch over the years as their children grew up and our own family grew into five.  When A was just 14 months old, we visited them in Narvik, just North of the Arctic circle.

Jan and Randi were only able to stay two nights, squeezed in-between our other sets of visitors.  This was their first visit to Luneburg, but certainly not their first European vacation, so we didn't feel the need to help them see everything.  It was enough to take a walk up the hill, Kalkburg, overlooking Luneburg and the surrounding area and then stroll through town where we met the girls arriving from school on the bus and enjoyed a treat at the "Eis Cafe".

Perhaps I already described this, but the Eis (German for icecream) Cafe is a unique German experience.  I had been told by my German language instructor in Ohio that we would have to try one while we were in Germany.  As she descibed it, it sounded much like an icecream parlor, which have largely faded from the American scene, but seemed not such big deal.  However, they are a big deal in Germany and we have yet to find anything like them in any of our travels to other countries.  I can think of three large cafes and two smaller cafes just here in town.  Two of them are located across the street from each other on the main thoroughfare of the town center and are always busy.  They always have tables set up outside with large umbrellas - at least a dozen at the larger ones- but you can also sit inside.

It was a month into our visit, for A's birthday in March, before we ventured into the Eise Cafe.  It was too cold for us to think about eating icecream.  Not so for the Germans.  Many a chilly March aftrenoon I would see people sitting OUTSIDE at the tables, wrapped in the blankets provided, delighting in tall and colorful icecream concoctions!

The menus at the Eise Cafe are extensive. At one cafe, their are 3 menus - one "regular", one seasonal, and one featuring frozen yogurt.  They have a variety of what, in America, we would call sundaes.  The "sundaes" are adorned with a variety of syrups, liquors, fresh fruit, wafer cookies, and whipped cream.  They come in fancy glass bowls or tall glasses.  One of R's favorites is the "spagetti eis", made of icecream which has been squeezed through something like a ricer, to make it look like spagetti and topped with strawberry (or other flavored) syrup, sprinkles, and whipped cream.  Some of the fruit-topped creations look like bouquets.

The icecream is Italian Eis, which is not like the gelato I think of as Italian Ice, but more like a premium soft-serve or custard-refreshing and satisfying, but not overly rich and sweet.  Most of the sundaes are made with chocolate or vailla icecream, but the cafes have a case where you can choose from several flavors such as hazelnut, amaretto, Waldmeister, melon, banana, and berry flavors, eaten from a "waffle" (cone) or cup, either eat-in or take-out.  One generous scoop in a waffle can cost only 60-80 cents - a deal hard to pass up when strolling through town!  The other thing to note is that the whipped cream is unsweetened.

Besides the fact that the Germans are willing to sit outside in all weather and eat icecream, what strikes me as interesting is that here are grown people, sitting with a generous and fanciful tower of icecream, sometimes even before noon, with no shame in what we Americans would see as an indulgence.   In the US, icecream sundaes are seen as a special, just-this-once, kind of treat, usually reserved for children's parties or special occasions, and certainly not something to eat sitting out where people are walking by, witness to your extravegance. Our health-consciousness society views icecream as something to be eaten sparingly, just a scoop or two please.  Ironically, however, we have a craving for either super-rich premium icecream filled with nuts,chunks, and ripples of goo or fluffy towers of frozen dairy product dipped in chocolate flavored wax or swimming in caramel/fudge flavored syrup.  Which is a healthier attitude towards food?  Something to think about, certainly.

So, the Eis Cafe is something that we have agreed is a must-do experience for all our German visitors.  We ate our fanciful icecream in good company on a sunny afternoon, watching the busy coming and going of Luneburg citizens.

The weather continued to be fine the rest of the day and the next.  Our Norwegian friends, who were on a true vacation from an intense last few months of work and graduate studies - Randi had just finished her final doctoral dissertation defense- took advantage of the opportunity to soak up the sun in the garden and we enjoyed catching up on family news and remembering the days together in Bloomington.