Norway is green. A beautiful emerald green. It is a bucolic and serene landscape, generally pristine in nature. However, it is always the green that stands out … and there is a reason it is so green. The main reason is that Norway is among Europe’s wettest countries. This does though give a somewhat distorted picture as there is a large variation in the amount of precipitation due to the terrain. The mountains create orographic precipitation but they also create rain shadows. Well today we found the bits of rainfall outside the shadows. It was chucking it down when we left Jøa and it was chucking it down when we arrived in Vingsand about seven hours later. In between it varied from chucking down to drizzling down, but generally kept up a steady dampness. This was enhanced by salt water spray as we bounced up and down motoring straight into a lumpy and short sea – a combination which meant that when you wiped water off your face, it had a slightly salty tang as well.
So, overall a journey akin to a malfunctioning rollercoaster with added water sprayed at you as you go along. Fun …. Midway through, Anne asked “So what pleasure do you get from this?” and I struggled to answer. Perhaps the satisfaction of a passage made is the only thing with the hope that a selective memory will wipe this one from the memory databank!
There was occasional shelter as we went along, but by necessity a lot of the passage was outside the islands, so the left-over sea from the gales of the last few days was still in evidence. Finally though we got to shelter, just outside Vingsand and headed in, mooring at about 3pm. Once in I asked about payment. As with most Norwegian small harbours, the main option for paying is Vipps and as non-Norwegians, we are not allowed Vipps accounts. I asked in the small second-hand shop and she didn’t know, but took me off to a community hall just by the jetty. On the way, I was asked the wierd question as to whether I liked ‘green porridge’. Not quite sure whether something was lost in translation, I looked quizzically at her and she explained that today is St. Johannes Day – a Norwegian celebration of midsummer. This helped explain why the hall was full of old people, who, when I walked in, went quiet and turned and looked at the bedraggled person in the doorway like something out of a Hollywood film.
It seems that the day is called Jonsok, or Sankthansaften and is a traditionally Catholic day marking midsummer. The day is named after John the Baptist, whose Danish saint name is St. Hans. St. Hans (John the Baptist) baptised Jesus in the Jordan river, and was the first one to recognise him as the Messiah. The name of the day Jonsok is an Old Norse word which translates to “waking night for Jon” (short for Johannes). Bonfires are apparently central to Sankthansaften and these will keep away the trolls (of course!) and other evil forces. More pragmatically the bonfires protect the farm animals from wild predators, but the troll theory is a more appealing one. This brings us back to the green porridge. It is apparently a traditional food for Jonsok and is called rømmegrøt. It is a sour cream porridge served with butter, sprinkled with sugar and cinnamon. The addition of sour cream made it something of a luxury, just to be eaten on holidays. So rømmegrøt is actually sour cream porridge, not green porridge. Looks like I need a hearing test …… Ah well, I wasn’t offered any anyway!
