cod

This museum in Bergen was the third stop on my cod tourism tour of the world. In the summer of 1998, I visited a friend of mine who lives in the Lofoten Islands, where cod are festooned all over the landscape to dry. I learned in the museums there that they export them to places like Spain and Portugal. Then last year when I went to Brazil I saw real Norwegian dried cod in the market.

So this year I filled in one of the gaps in the history of the world's cod trade: Bergen, where in Olden Times, the fishermen from northern Norway (including Lofoten) brought all their dried catch and it was weighed, baled, and shipped on to the southern lands that like that kind of thing. (This picture is a display from that museum in Bergen, which, incidentally, was totally cool - they'd set it up the way the warehouse would've been in the old cod-trading days, complete with bunk beds for apprentices and stuff.)

I thought about buying this book in the airport on the first day of my trip - clearly, I should have. In fact, if that dude hadn't thought of it first, I'd probably be thinking about writing it now.