Beautiful Scenery and Strange Foods

Naked Banter

Greetings from Europe! I am very slowly working my way back to Paris via a variety of transportation modes. We arrived in Amsterdam to visit our daughter who is working there this summer, which I was very excited to do as it was her birthday and I have not visited Amsterdam in many, many years.

We checked in to the beautiful Hotel de L’Europe which is apparently owned by the Heineken family of Dutch fame. The story goes that Herr Heineken was always drinking in the bar in the hotel and his lovely wife never knew where he was, so he bought her the hotel, renamed the bar Freddy’s (his name), and continued to enjoy his time there. I kind of love that story—true or not.

Hotel de L’Europe

Amsterdam was a whirlwind of canal tours, museum tours and dangerous encounters with cyclists. Those people will run you down and knock you in the canal if you get in the bike lane inadvertently. Fast footwork is a must, as is the tried and true, “look both ways three times” before you cross the street or even step off the sidewalk. And absolutely no looking at your phone as you navigate—I shudder to think of the carnage after getting hit by a raging cyclist.

Pedestrian danger aside however, Amsterdam was lovely and we had a fanstastic three days. Highlights for me include the Rijksmuseum and the Van Gogh. Pretty good stuff.

Van Gogh and Rembrandt—Dutch Masters!

And, of course a birthday celebration with our daughter at a very fancy restaurant called the Duchess. The food and ambience were great and we had a ball, but the coolest thing was this painting at the entrance which I hope you can see is three dimensional. Her dress is literally bursting out of the canvas—I don’t know who the artist is but I loved this surrealist portrait of the “Duchess”.

Touching the Duchess!

Upon leaving Amsterdam we embarked on a lovely cruise around the Baltic Sea with wonderful friends. It was the perfect way to ease into the summer and prepare myself for the Olympic madness of Paris.

We set sail from Hamburg, Germany and two days, and hours and hours of sailing later we ended up in Denmark— literally 45 minutes from Hamburg. It is crazy how different going by boat is from overland travel. Only by boat would we have experienced the scenery of the German countryside and small villages along the way.

Ma and Pa at the farm!

An old fortification in the city wall of Lubeck

Denmark has been beautiful also, and the people so friendly, but the food has been slightly suspect. They have an affinity for these open-faced sandwiches with tons of little shrimp and lots of mayonnaise. Sometimes they also serve them with pickled onions and liver paté or pickled beets and ham (so bad, I know) but no matter what, they are always served open-faced and slathered in mayonnaise. All of us on the boat have come to dread the words, “And as a special treat, we will be serving you traditional Danish fare”. There is always a collective head-hanging at those words and a mental note to eat a bigger breakfast the following day on the boat-which has delicious food!

A hearty example of the open-faced sandwich with not one but four types of fish and seafood!

This is the word for the open-faced sandwich—found on restaurants everywhere!

The ubiquitous open-faced sandwich nothwithstanding, there are several other Danish food oddities with which we have become acquainted. I think I mentioned in an earlier post that I traveled to Copenhagen in February to eat at what has allegedly been the number one restaurant in all the world—Noma. After winning the title of best restaurant four years in a row, it is going to close at the end of 2024 so we got in under the wire—lucky us. I never did write about the experience but it was WEIRD! The food was strange and the whole experience was a little surreal. First, you arrive and you have to sit in this waiting area where they bring you tea to drink. Then after a suitable wait you are guided to your table and told there are no choices for beverages except homemade juices or approved wines to go with each dish. Hmmm. I knew right then I was going to need the wine and made my selection. There are 14 courses and they got stranger and stranger as the evening wore on. My favorite was the cod tongue, which quite literally was a cooked cod tongue that had been thoughtfully put back in the mouth of the cod and served face up and sticking out. See picture below.

There were several other quirky items on the Noma playlist, and I was regaling the passengers on the boat about the experience when one friend happened upon the Noma cookbook in Copenhagen, and lo and behold, the recipe he found was this beauty.

Yum Yum.

Kind of makes your mouth water right? Who doesn’t long for a little reindeer penis salad when feeling peckish? It is a safe bet to say that we probably won’t try to squeeze in another evening at Noma before it closes. So bring on the open-faced mayonnaise sandwiches!

Weird food aside, on the top of my list of things to buy in Denmark or Sweden was candy. I have a very good friend from Sweden who swears the most delicious candy hails from this part of the world. That is —if your taste runs to licorice and gummy-style candies—(pure sugar) which mine definitely does. On the hunt for this elusive delicacy, we all purchased candy everywhere and at every opportunity, but it was absolutely the worst thing you have ever put in your mouth! I don’t know where the delicious candy was hiding, but the only thing we could find was this licorice candy that looked good but that was covered on the outside by a layer of salt! It was so bad people were making faces and spitting it out in the street like chewing tobacco! You have never tasted anything so foul in all your life. It would have made a child cry just to have a lick of it. In an evil moment however, I have brought some with me—just in case I run into someone I despise to whom I can then offer a little treat and just sit back and watch as my unsuspecting nemesis takes a big bite! Just kidding, kind of.

This particular one is called the Swedish Devil -I should have known!

Sailing on through Denmark and on to Sweden, we took one afternoon to try the whole Swedish sauna experience. It was a shocker! I haven’t seen so many naked people since—ever! The Nordic people love their sauna custom and the experience was quite invigorating, and dare I say, liberating!

For the uninitiated like myself, here is the rundown. You enter the bathouse and check in like you do at any spa and then separate by sex. When I entered the women’s side—there were probably 60 women, all 100 percent naked, lounging out of doors on towels by a secluded part of the sea that had ladders going down to the water so you could ease yourself into the icy Baltic as slowly as you wished. The idea is you go sit in the sauna first and then take a big dip in the ocean water-which is freezing! The sauna sitch was women-only in the dry and wood-burning sauna areas but in the infrared sauna it is co-ed. Well, I tried the dry and then I took a little dip in the sea—which for a brief moment I truly thought might stop my heart. Then, I tried the wood burning sauna and thought I might incinerate myself it was so hot, so I took another dip—more confidently this time.

Finally, curiosity got the best of me and I had to try the infrared sauna—which as I mentioned was co-ed. In all the ladies’ areas everyone was completely naked, but in the co-ed portion you are allowed to cover yourself with your towel if modesty requires you to do so, which in my case—it did. As I entered the infrared sauna however, it became apparent that I was the only American prude there, as all the men and women were again naked as the day they were born and chatting chummily with each other. Well, I slinked over to a bench and closed my eyes so as to avoid staring —it just could not be helped.

Not very long after I sat down, a woman started trying to speak to me in Swedish, which I do not understand and out of politeness was forced to admit. No problem—she switched to English and asked me for the time, but by then everyone in the sauna knew I was an American. Sadly for me, the naked and heavily tattooed man sitting directly across from me was quite excited (pardon the innuendo) by this news and began to question me about Nashville, Tennessee—a place he longs to visit. I tried to convince him that I knew absolutely nothing about Nashville, but undeterred, he pressed on, asking breathlessly if I had ever met Blake Shelton or Garth Brooks—two of his apparent favorites. All the while he is engaging me in conversation, he is gesturing, talking and walking right in front of me— in all his glory, and it is all I can do to keep a straight face. My eyes were darting about and I could not decide exactly where to look as I was seated, and my eye-level view was—well, you get the picture. It was very stressful. Ignoring my monosyllabic answers and go-away body language, he then began to muse on whether one should wear skinny jeans tucked into cowboy boots or wear wider-legged jeans that cover the boots when dancing the two-step. At this point, I was thinking that one could not make this up if one were paid, and I muttered something unintelligible and fled. Straight into the sea where my cold dip washed away all my embarrassment and I started to laugh hard. All in all, it ranks as one of those experiences I shall remember for a lifetime! Sorry—no pictures available to protect the guilty!

After a week of fun in the Baltic, it is off to Paris where I have much to do whilst fully clothed. More on that soon.