Tar: not just for paving roads anymore
Greetings from Turku, Finland, where we are trying to hide from the hot glowing ball in the sky. Not such an easy task when it is beating down on you for 19 hours a day. Not that I’m really complaining – we are still having a lovely time.
Since arriving in Finland, we have been noticing the word ‘tar’ on English-language menus here and there. “What word could they possibly mean instead?” we kept thinking, until finally we got so curious we looked it up. The Finnish word terva does indeed translate to ‘tar’. We were somewhat relieved to learn that it refers to pine tar, instead of the kind you find in cigarettes or in mammoth-eating pits, and it is used to flavor all kinds of things in Finland. Ice cream, for example, which we tried yesterday.
It tasted kind of like pine needles and mostly like smoke. Not in a delicious-12-year-old-Scotch-whisky way, but more like a get-me-out-of-this-burning-building-before-I-die-from-smoke-inhalation way. Scott and Adam seemed to enjoy it more than I did.
4 comments:
sounds interesting. Our biggest issue is that ice cream here costs more than the darn bucket from the store... Tourism.. argh!
Looks beautiful to me.
That's no fun. I guess I'm lucky to have never lived in a place that has so much tourism it inflates the ice cream prices. :)
i totally have a picture of this fish tail sculpture i took while in turku; but completely forgot all about it-
thanks :) you have inspired me to undergo the dreaded task of digging through my external hard drive's photo albums. yikes.
Yikes, indeed. I long ago gave up on the dream that I'd go through and organize old photos. For me if it doesn't happen right after the trip, it never will...
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