Flashback: Odda, Norway, July 2010!

This came to my mind while I as thinking about food and eating out in other countries. Someone do not like to try other things than what they are used to from home, and when for instance visiting China, always go to the western orientated restaurants and order stuff they know.


On our way through Norway this summer we came to the very nice little town called Odda, at a beautiful fjord in the middle of the Norwegian highland. We’d just been driving over a mountain where there was still laying some snow and where we got our feet chucked in it and they got a bit cold.
As we came down from up there, on the other side of the mountain, we found ourselves at a long fantastic 30-kilometre fjord with high mountains on each side, and at the very end we were in "Odda". Just at the little harbour we found the only Hotel in the town and checked in.Doing that we asked the receptionist where –or if- we could watch the world cup football, which was on that night, and of Corse there was a bar just across the road for that purpose, so that was settled so the next thing was if he –the receptionist- could recommend a restaurant where we could get a nice typical Norwegian meal, the fresh mountain air had given us a big hunger.
Then he looked at us and said that there was a place a couple of kilometres out side, called “Tyssedahl” where there was a Hotel with good Norwegian food, but in Odda, there was only a little Chinese place.
“No”, we both hummed out simultaniously; “We don’t want Chinese food when we are in Norway!”
“But it is good”, he said, looking at us as were we some kind of Culinary Racists or so, but as we explained to him where we come from, he understood. We got ourselves installed in the room –with a nice view up through the fjord- and jumped into the car again, to go back the couple of kilometers along the fjord, to Tyssedahl Kro and Hotel.The food was excellent there, so was the surroundings, and there we celebrated Cats birth the second time with a lovely salmon dish, before we got back to Odda and the bar, to watch Holland beat Paraguay and enter the Final of the 2010 world cup in South Africa.