First day

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First of all: we made it! I’m actually in  Norway and it’s just like you think it would be.

Bergen is busy, touristy, friendly and beautiful. Everything centres around the harbour, and we had amazing fresh  cooked fish, scallops and whale meat there for lunch.

Then it was up the mountain for some stunning views over the city.

There’s Internet in the hotel, meaning that you might get a flickr upload if we have a moment to spare. But that seems unlikely, given that we want to spend every waking hour exploring more of this amazing place.

Yes, I like it here. 🙂

Salt

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When it snows (in the other world, not in this South African one), the authorities put salt on the roads. This lowers the melting point of the ice and snow, meaning that it melts even if the temperature drops below zero. Thus, it has to be colder for there to be ice and snow on the roads, meaning that generally, there will be less ice and snow on the roads throughout the winter. Thus, fewer accidents. Or so the logic goes, anyway.

In the cities of the USA, about 19.5 million tonnes of salt is spread across roads in this way each year, and a lot of it comes from a dried-up 400 million year old sea about 2000ft below Ohio. There are some photos and some stories of the mining process on Wired and they’re rather interesting:

A front end loader used to haul raw salt around the mine at Morton Salt Mine in Fairport, OH on March 23, 2015. Photo: Ricky Rhodes

Apparently, when anything breaks down, deep underground, it’s simply discarded there. Why waste time, energy and money in getting it back up to the surface just to throw it away anyway?

I foresee some extremely confused archaeologists somewhere way down the line.

Tenuous a-ha link: Name of salt mine in question is Morton. Oh, and effect of the salt is surely to Stay On These Roads, ne?

Premature Publication

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I’m not saying that I’m unprepared for this trip, but I totally ignored the rules of the 24 hour clock on today’s pre-written post.
It should have come out at 4pm, but it popped out 12 hours earlier.

I don’t do 4am flights. Ugh.

If you haven’t read it yet, please wait until 1600 CAT (UTC+2). That will then overwrite my error.

Thank you.

Bergen-bound

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Right. *deep breath*

If all goes well, when this post self-publishes, we should be on the first leg of the journey to Bergen for the final concert in a-ha’s Cast In Steel tour.

This first leg is deeply uninteresting and involves fighting with the rush hour traffic on the N2 to get to Cape Town International Airport. From there, things get a little more exciting, involving international air travel (twice) and a bus journey to a fish market in Bergen. To be honest, given last time’s problems, I am more than happy for the entire traveling process to be wholly mundane and uneventful.

As ever, when I’m on the move, I’m not sure what sort of blog coverage will be possible, so I have attempted to furnish you with some pre-written posts, each with at least a tenuous a-ha link. In addition, if I get chance to blog, I shall, obviously.

You may also expect twitter and Instagram updates, although Flickr may be out of the question.
Still. Go look and you may find yourself be pleasantly surprised.

I shall see you on the other side. Of the world.

Sorry, Vegans. That’s not what we do.

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What a wonderful story. I laughed and laughed and laughed.

And then, once I had sufficiently recovered, I laughed some more.

Apparently, the owners of a chain of vegan cafes in California – a chain which features irritatingly named “affirmation” dishes such the “accepting” sushi bowl and the “grateful” kale salad – wait for it… aren’t vegan.

Brilliant.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, it seems that the husband and wife team behind Cafe Gratitude and Gracias Madre haven’t been completely open about this lifestyle choice, and perhaps even less surprisingly, their patrons aren’t hugely happy now that they’ve found out about it:

“They are duping vegans to support their animal killings,” screams one post on the Facebook boycott page. “Fxxxing HYPOCRITES!!!! Hope they will be FLAME BURNED and eaten by Meat Eaters,” says another.

Sorry, Vegans. That’s not what we do. In my several (or more) years of eating meat, I have yet to eat human flesh. Especially hypocritical human flesh. Most other stuff: sure. I’ve tried sanctimonious lamb chops before and only last week I had a delicious overly sincere fillet steak, just to mix things up a bit.

The Engelharts spawned an entire industry with a carefully marketed message of peace, love and sharing, which includes a sister vegan Mexican restaurant, Gracias Madre, in San Francisco and Los Angeles.

The couple have written several books, including Sacred Commerce: Business as a Path of Awakening and Kindred Spirit: Fulfilling Love’s Promise. Their personal website is named Eternal Presence and references the board game they created in 2004, called The Abounding River Board Game, which was on every table in their San Francisco flagship; and which they said would train players to embrace “an unfamiliar view of Being Abundant” and develop a “spiritual foundation” for looking at money.

Right on.

To be completely honest, it’s actually unclear (to me, at least) whether the couple had actively claimed to be vegan, or whether the hoards of puny leaf-nibblers visiting their restaurants along the west coast had just taken it as read. If it’s the latter, they were wrong.

Personally, while I’m sure that many diners will be choosing not to go to any of their outlets after learning this news, it wouldn’t put me off. Sure, the lack of any decent protein on the plate might be a bit of a downer, but you don’t sell 28,000 dishes a day if you can’t do something fairly special with a lentil. Or something.