On a recent trip to the Nordics I came across one of the greatest examples of how much many countries in Europe hate each other. This may seem like an odd topic for a blog about snacks and candy, but this feud was demonstrated to me via food, more specifically strawberries. Our Nordic adventure took us through Finland, Sweden, and Denmark.
After just having enjoyed our stop in Helsinki Finland, Allison and I were planning on what to do for our long ferry trip to Stockholm. We had an overnight ferry booked with breakfast, but we didn't have any dinner plans. We were thinking of just eating on the boat, but the price of dinner was astronomical, and with all the amazing markets and restaurants near the waterfront we thought we would make a picnic dinner and eat it on the boat. We found some wonderfully fresh salads at a local store, and decided that a box of fresh strawberries from the market would be the perfect way to finish our meal.
We wandered through the market until we came across a stall filled with every kind of berry you could imagine. Each berry looked amazing, but a friend had suggested that it was strawberry season, and that would be the way to go. The nice lady at the stand helped us pick a nice box of strawberries that would be ready to eat tonight. We had a bit of a debate about how many strawberries to get, so we thought we would ask the lady what she thought. We told her we were taking these strawberries on the ferry to Stockholm and she instantly changed her tune.
Once we mentioned we were taking these strawberries to Sweden, she congratulated us on our choice to bring Finish strawberries to Sweden, as the Swedish strawberries were awful. She went on for a few minutes about how great the Finish strawberries are and how horrible Swedish strawberries were. It was a weird tonal change in the conversation, and we decided not to tell her that the only reason we were buying these strawberries was because we wanted to eat them on the boat, and we weren't building a stockpile of strawberries to keep us going for the rest of our trip.
I will say that Finish strawberries are tasty. We did enjoy our box of strawberries on the ship, and low and behold a few did make it onto Swedish soil. This isn't the only incident of aggression that we had between these neighbouring countries on our trip. We were talking to a man working at a grocery store about our trip, and he asked us what we thought about Sweden. We told him we liked it, but we also liked Finland too. His entire demeanor changed, and he suggested that he hated Finland.
As a follow up, while we were driving through the southern part of Sweden near a town called Ystad, we discovered a road side stand selling strawberries. The minute we saw the stand we knew that we had to sample Swedish strawberries. Had that lady in Finland not been so aggressive, we might have passed this stand by, but knowing that there was a rivalry, we had to see if the Finish strawberries were actually better than the Swedish. We did buy a box at the stand, and I will say that these berries were different, but just to keep relations equal, I'm not going to talk about which were better.
We tried to find a fruit stand or farmers market in Denmark selling strawberries, but we had no luck. That's probably a good thing since I'm all about keeping the peace, and we don't need any more global conflicts right now.
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