Firstly, the whale.

Again, sorry for falling off the planet. I would normally spend some moments explaining it, but really it isn't really worth it. Lucky for this blog I am at the computer for work and if I'm writing it's like I'm working and not procrastinating at all.

So, the whale eating.

Technically Laurie did eat whale. But not eat-eat whale. You know how these things are.

We got to Norway. (There's a long and classy story in that involving sleeping in Swedish bus shelters and in a plastic bag on a Finnish cruise ship but that's for another time. Probably next time if my procrastination continues, in all honesty). Basically, Norway is the stupidest place on the face of the earth to go if you are travelling on a budget. You will probably end up eating out of cans bought from your friendly Turkish grocer for $5 each with stolen forks and find yourself saying to your travel partner "I think I'm just going to eat the whole cracker".

So we were in Bergen and just wandering around, innocent and whale-free, and we got to the fish markets. And suddenly everyone was offering us free smoked salmon and raw salmon and wild salmon. And, you know, it's salmon. It's pretty nice. So what they do is talk to you in whatever language you pretty much want and start slicing off a bit of fresh salmon. And we just nodded and discussed the virtues of cured salmon in relation to smoked salmon as if we were going to actually purchase something in kroner. And then while we were trying to slide away to repeat the same routine at the next stall, the fish monger starts to slice off a piece off a dark, almost purple, thick square of meat. And I was like, that's whale. That is whale. And I start to shake my head. I thought about explaining the complexity of my 'no mammals' policy to the aforementioned monger, but he just keep flailing the meat about on the end of his big long knife.

"It's just like beef", he said. And I, still in the afterglow of the best salmon I've ever had in my life, could just keep shaking my head. And so that is when Laurie, reluctantly gallantly, stepped in and said: "I'll eat it".

He said it was not nice.

So that was the first time he ate whale. The second time is my fault too. I was at another fish stall surrounded by seal oil and whale and sampling their salmon (incidently, it was far inferior to the first stall) when the monger started flailing whale meat at me. Then he started to explain the entire whaling regulation regime and the cultural relativist arguments for whaling. And I was really stuck, still half chewing my salmon and nowhere to go. And then I saw Laurie walking past. And I thought, well, he's already eaten whale. So I said to the fish monger "He'll eat it" and gestured Laurie over with a Judas wave.

And so, Laurie ate whale twice. It was pretty much my fault. I'm a moral-less pescetarian.

These are other ways in which Norway hates nature: