Jul!

It's going to be Christmas really soon and we have yet to eat traditional Norwegian Christmas food.

Drats!

This will of course be remedied soon as Jose K will be finishing his exams today.

Till then, I will share some pictures of how the Jul (pronounced as "yul"aka Christmas in Norwegian) spirit has permeated even the most humble of grocery items. It's really quite cool how everything is "jul-lified' here.

I present... the Christmas beer (Jul Øl) (pronounced roughly as"yul erl")



The picture is unfortunately quite blur because I sneakily took this at a supermarket which shall not be named. Each bottle is about 14 kroners ($3.50 SGD) and I didn't feel like drinking beer at 10.30am in the morning... If you look closely at the Ringnes logo, you will see that there are little Santa-ish figures around it. The Norwegians call them Nisse, they are from Scandinavian folklore and are believed to take care of a farmer's home and barn and protect it from misfortune. You can read more about it here.

All the beer manufacturers put out their own Jul Øl and it does taste different from the usual beer that we get which is usually a lager. This Jul Øl is more like an ale.

Ok... we move onto to Jul brus (Christmas Soda)


This frighteninly red soda (I bought the sugarfree version) is strangely cheaper than all the other soft drinks. It cost only 5 kroners ($1.25 SGD) whereas a bottle of Coke would cost $14 ($3.50 SGD). I wonder why? I say this because the Jul brus is manufactured by the Coca Cola company as well. Honestly, it's not bad, it tastes like...like..llike (that explains the price difference). Well it's sweet and it's fizzy. That's good enough for me.

Finally, (this is my personal favourite) Jul Milk!

Ok, ok, it's just normal milk but they changed the packaging specially for Jul. So cute. Lett is approximately 1.5% fat. They have weird milk that is 0.5% and even 0.1%. Bah, those were bad, like drinking water that was milk coloured.

Tine is this huge company in Norway, they do all sorts of dairy products (milk, cheese and yoghurt) and juice. When you go to a typical grocery store, almost everything related to dairy/juice is made by Tine. They are not however very well known outside Norway. See here for more.

Well, those were just the things I had in our kitchen. They also have marzipan pigs, see here for an example. Jose K bought me one and it was quite yummy. Why pigs you ask? I asked my Norwegian flatmate why it was in the shape of a pig and he said he didn't know. So can't help you there.