One of the first things I am often asked when people know I am Mexican is what I think about Norwegian tacos and Tacofredag. My response? “I prefer not to talk about it.”

Why? Well, let me first tell you about what I, as a northern-Mexican who has travelled the whole of Mexico and聽lived in Texas, understand as a Taco.

What is a taco?

Quite simply, a taco聽is a tortilla with something inside. Like a soup or a sandwich, the concept has many variants. Fillings can be cold, but most of the time they are聽served hot. Fillings聽can be specially made, leftovers from the last meal, or even just salt!

How are tacos made?

Tacos can be made from corn or, especially in the north, wheat tortillas, and some hipsters will even use lettuce instead (rolls eyes)

They can be filled with beef, pork, fish, goat, chicken, dairy, eggs or vegetables. They can have toppings on, spicy chili sauce, non-spicy chili sauce, other types of sauce, or no sauce at all. The tortillas can be soft or crunchy, folded or rolled, deep fried, pan fried, steamed, even grilled. Most tacos are eaten with the hands, but some need聽a knife and fork.

When and where are tacos eaten?

Tacos can be聽eaten for breakfast, lunch, dinner, or a late-night snack. Breakfast tacos consist often of either steamed corn tortilla tacos, or warm white tortillas. Fillings for these are often refried beans, scrambled eggs, or some not-so-spicy dishes, which can obviously be made spicier if one opts to add chili sauce to them.

Lunch tacos, eaten either at home, at a restaurant or street stand, tend to be more complex, the kind which require cutlery because they are soaked in sauce, but many other types of tacos can also be had for lunch.

Nighttime tacos, on the other hand, are commonly bought from small stands, kiosks or trailers, and eaten either on the street, or taken home for some late indulgence. The evening phrase “let's go for some tacos” might mean something different in different parts of the country, but it will often lead to a dinner in a small place.

A cook will grill beef, pork, or something else, lay tortillas on a plastic or disposable plate, and pour the filling on top. Everyone聽then adds their sauces of choice, along with grilled onion, fresh onion, cilantro, lime or other vegetables.

Which tacos are not tacos?

Some tacos have special names, and not everybody will recognize them as tacos, even if, technically, they are. I have never, in my life, said something like “I want some cheese tacos,” for example. Not because I have not had them before, but because I use a special name for them.

Quesadillas, for example, are tacos whose main ingredient is cheese (there are cheese-less quesadillas, but the name is controversial!) These are often folded, and unlike their American cousins, tend to have little more than cheese and salt inside, and both their corn and flour variants are commonly used at breakfast, either alone or accompanying beans or other breakfast dishes.

Another well-known taco type is the burrito, a northern taco made of a large white wheat tortilla, with a warm filling over which the tortilla is completely rolled. Personally, I expect a burrito to have at least a little mayonnaise, regardless of the main dish, but that's just how I like them.

Then we have the “-adas” type of tacos, which are almost always eaten with a fork and knife because they are soaked in some sauce. Enchiladas are covered with chili sauce of varying types, colors and strengths; entomatadas, with tomato sauce; enmoladas, with the Mexican specialty mole sauce; enfrijoladas, with a thin sauce of refried beans, and so on.

Enchiladas have many local variants, which include how fried the tortillas are, if they are folded or rolled, topped with cheese or something else, accompanied by rice or potatoes, etc. Flautas have it similar. These are tacos which are tightly rolled, and deep fried, so at serving time they are a long, hard tube, like a flute. As with the “-adas” family, toppings, fillings and garnishing vary.

So, are Norwegian tacos REALLY tacos then?

Norwegian tacos remind me more of the kind of food I saw (but refused to taste, with one unfortunate exception) in Texas. What I do say to my Norwegian friends, is that they would hardly ever encounter their style of taco in Mexico, in much the same way one would hardly ever encounter a Domino's Pizza in southern Italy.

In Mexico, we use the oven very little, and certainly not for tacos. Our tomato sauces are never made with puree, and almost never sweet. Cheese is often white, either fresh or slightly aged, but not that radioactive-yellow American cheese.

With exception of some Americanized folks, taco shells, tubes and kits are not used. There's no need for them, there's no taste for the yellow corn they are made of, and they are simply more expensive than the regular tortillas we have at the table anyway. If one wanted a crunchy corn-based thing to put stuff on, one gets a tostada, not a taco shell.

Technically, tacofredag has tacos, yes. Personally I would not call them “fake” in any way, for there are little rules, even in Mexico, on what is and what is not a taco. Just don't ask me to eat them and enjoy them the same way I enjoy a grilled beef taco from the improvised stand at the corner of the block!

Photo credit:聽

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I鈥檝e always been kinda lucky when it comes to professional development. Even before 铿乶ishing my graduate program, I had already been offered a position to work in Norway.

The 铿乺st bump in the road was getting my contract, and while the Mexican postal service has improved much in the last 10 years, it is not reliable.聽I would like to stress this – it is not reliable!

So, instead of an original contract, I had to make do with a scanned copy emailed to me. With this, I was to call the . This entity only carries a limited number of services for non-Norwegians, which I am not now, and even less then. I was instead advised to contact the Danish embassy, as it seems the Nordic countries conduct many of their foreign relationships through a Danish conduit.

Listen: From Mexico to Norway

Whichever woman was in charge there informed me that the process to apply for my Norwegian working permit would take three months. Now, as my boss was expecting me the following month, three months wait wasn't a very advantageous deal for me. Luckily, NTNU found a workaround and so I came to Trondheim as a regular Mexican tourist 鈥� who can enter the Schengen area for up to three months every six months without additional visas or permits.

A simple process, but…

I arrived to the country with some money, but as it turns out, Mexican money burns quickly when put to a Norwegian 铿俛me! So, the very 铿乺st concern was to arrange my migratory status so that I could get paid. The process was simple: apply for a regular working permit (three months wait) sponsored by NTNU, and get a temporary permit while the actual is released (three days wait).

Me and Ola, resident problem-铿亁er in the Department, went to the police station and queued (queue number 666 for that day, not that I am superstitious or anything) for what was an entire morning. But it was worth it. I had my temporary working permit, a D-number, and the possibility to have a salary, a bank account, etc.

Five months down the road, I hadn't been called. No notifications had arrived by mail, nor had been emailed to me about my regular permit. So I had to go to the HR of铿乧e and hand them call the police and 铿乶d out about my application. As it turned out, it had been approved three months before.聽It was there, waiting for me.

I went yet again to the police, handed out my passport, and one week later, voila! I had another shiny, micro-printed and sealed page-wide print in my passport which allowed me to stay in the country for the entire two years my contract lasted.聽I was happy!

The extension process

A few months before I was supposed to 铿乶ish, my boss and I agreed to extend my stay for another two years. That meant to apply for a new working permit, one month before the 铿乺st one ended (I was of course two weeks overdue already).

I struggled to get all documents and ran through the snow (quite literally) to the police of铿乧e to apply for the permit before it was too late. I queued and got the 666 number again (thankfully, I was less superstitious this time, so it was kinda cool after all). After another whole morning, I was before the immigration clerk.

As expected, I was scolded (albeit very lightly) for not doing this weeks before, but I explained to them I had only had the second contract in my possession for three days. I was told it would take up to four weeks, but since my work required me to travel out of the country next month (for which I needed to show a valid permit when both exiting and entering Norway), I was graciously granted a priority application, which was not so priority as Easter came in the middle of the promised week.

Then a month passed. My international trip was next week. So I called. As it turned out, the permit was approved days before.聽It was there, waiting for me.聽Again.

I went to deliver my passport and smoothly (“Please, ma鈥檃m *sob*, I really need this now *sob sob*!!!”) talked the clerk into allowing the permit to be printed that very hour and day, instead of waiting a week. So, I sat for 20 more minutes and then received a rewarding proof I was out of the grey zone of immigration laws, back to legality in Norway.

Yippie!

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I am a Mexican living in Norway for less than three years. Though I have not yet taken any *real* course in the language, I find myself getting closer and closer to speaking fluently something so different from my mother tongue now.

So this is how it goes: before coming to live here for (initially) two years, I had the privilege of making a one-month research leave while a grad student. By then, I was already familiar with the Pimsleur method for language learning, having become more or less (emphasis on the “less”) proficient in French with it. It is an audio-mostly course which stresses repetition, anticipation, and natural context learning.

Well, before visiting, I got ahold of the first few lessons in Pimsleur's Norwegian, but it was hardly useful at all!!! While I think the courses are great (just did 25 minutes of Italian lesson 88 this morning), there was just too little Norwegian in the first ten half-hours to get me by. I did learn something about pronunciation, and the typical greetings, thank yous and so on.

So I wasn't completely disarmed when I first arrived right after May 17th, but it was an odd experience. After the quickly learnt expressions for “[do you want a] bag?” and “[do you need a] receipt?”, before my visit was over, my head had begun to hurt with all those Norwegian words coming out of the TV and being spoken in the streets. I decided Norwegian was just not worth the bother.

Boy, was I wrong.

Hardly a year passed when I found myself agreeing to my first job after graduating, a two-year postdoc contract with my then-host-now-boss at NTNU.

Well, two years isn't much. Would you make the effort to learn a language spoken so little instead of focusing in all the other activities Norway has to offer? I didn't. I decided, given my lack of faith on language courses (less than 10% of my knowledge of English, Italian and French, however small, was obtained outside of a classroom), I skipped the formal education and decided I would be satisfied with the words I could catch here and there, and maybe one or two textbooks of the ones you can get in libraries here.

How did it go? Well, it turns out I have been in Norway for more than two years now; a formal course would have been a more sensible decision had I known I was gonna stay this long. But the thing is, I didn't enrolled in anything for the last three years. I have some working knowledge of Norwegian now, thanks to my experiences with many resources.

I don't want to bore you, so I will stop here and relate my accidents with my host country's language for a second post.

Cheers!

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It might very well have been an April Fools prank.

After a Saturday above 7潞 C, in which I walked with my jacket open and just a t-shirt beneath, it came the mother of all snowfalls. Five days (and counting) of continuous snow. Huge amounts of accumulation, after spring commencement.

I was already considering taking my shorts out of storage!

(Anyway, I got it coming for trusting Trondheim鈥檚 weather)

Spring season in Trondheim is full of changing, unpredictable weather. Snow comes half an hour, stops about the same time, then it starts all over again until you slip and twist an ankle. Unlike late autumn/winter snow, however, there are no longer those little stones spread to give you purchase over packed snow. Sometimes chilling rain comes to soften snow.

Eventually, of course, windy-wet spring comes. Though bothersome, it鈥檚 not really as bad nor as chilly as the winter mix preceding it. It鈥檚 still not as cool (cool as in 鈥済reat鈥�, not as in 鈥渃hilly鈥�) as spring somewhere else (or anywhere else, for the matter.) Spring in Trondheim is tolerable if you tolerate being wet all the time.

After a slow raise of temperatures and decease in frequency in rains, summer arrives. Summer is great, actually. It鈥檚 warm but not hot, sunny with little clouds to bother your basking. In short, summer is the very best week of the year (OK, the joke is getting old, and I still admit I shamelessly stole it from a certain South-African comedian. But this is my guest post after all and I will do as I see fit)

Resuming, summer in Trondheim is warm, sunny, dry, and full of half-naked sunbathers. It also unfortunately short. Come July, you have to start taking out your umbrellas and ponchos, because rain starts pouring again. Slowly at 铿乺st, then…

No, scrap that.聽Rain resumes raging from start to end. Late summer and fall we are bathed in whatever chilly rain we missed during spring. Luckily, snow eventually arrives, and after so much rain, it is actually welcome!

At least the first few days (for all those who missed my 铿乺st guest post, my reaction to snow for the 铿乺st time of my life was like this: 铿乺st two weeks, charming winter scenery; second two weeks, crappy blizzards all day; rest of the season, meh.)

And so it goes. The weather cycle goes and goes, and those who live in Trondheim have to put up with it. In the end, however, I admit I enjoy it most of the time.

Houses, transportation and clothes are made to withstand weather, and I feel more comfortable most of the time than in the hellish hotness of Monterrey, or the not-as-cold-yet-below-zero conditions inside my parents house in Durango.

Now, if you excuse me, I have to go and plow myself a path to the sidewalk.

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A look inside working life at NTNU, one of Norway's biggest University.

The conversation goes by in a curious mixture of Norwegian, broken Norwegian, English and sometimes a bit of Spanish. It amazes me how well Ana can speak so many languages apart from her native tagalog. As she 铿乶ishes cleaning my of铿乧e, I thank her and bid her goodbye, wishing her well in her incoming travel to the US.

As I said before, I work in what is known as the 鈥渁cademic world鈥�; but as the meme goes these days, what I think/friends think/boss thinks/society thinks I do, and what I actually do, isn't always the same. A friend once told me he pictured my of铿乧e with guys running in lab coats shouting at each other all the time, which was funny because, to me, most of my work consists of sitting in front of a computer crunching numbers, or writing on a piece of paper equations that hopefully make some sense!

Doing that sort of stuff in NTNU is not really different from doing it anywhere else. The subjects might change, and the Norwegian/NTNU academic bureaucracy is still impossible for me to 铿乬ure out, but the basic activities are there.

Now, most people in Europe and the US are more than used to mingling and working alongside foreigners. For me, coming from a rather small city in a Latin American country, the occurrences of meeting someone not from Mexico were almost nonexistent before entering the 鈥渁cademic world.鈥�

Yes, there were a couple exchange students in my high school. Yes, the physics lab professor in my college was from Chile. But it was only after I was about to get my bachelor that I started to have an 鈥渋nternational experience,鈥� with my Russian thesis advisors, my leave in Texas, my 铿乺st and decisive visit to Trondheim.

I must admit, one of the most exciting aspects in working in another, so multicultural country, and in such a 铿乪ld, is the ability to interact with so many individuals with so different background. And of course, being so small, most projects I participate involve partners and conferences in other parts of the world, which usually implies exciting travel opportunities (because, if I am in 鈥渢ourist mode,鈥� I can always squeeze very nice excursions even if I am traveling for business)

There are many perk to working in this type of environment, and some are more noticeable when in Norway. The travels are just one of them. Others include the very nice salary I receive. Even though Norway is a VERY expensive country, living a simple life like mine leaves one with lots of savings, which when converted to Mexican currency means I am making more than I would back home, for less the work I would be doing there. Another good thing here is the Norwegian work ethics.

More than one, my boss included, have repeated to me that Norwegians only actually work half the year, but when they do, they do it in an exceedingly productive way! This, I understand as: if the day is rainy, work yourself longer and harder, so that when the sun goes up, you can take the day off. Sadly, my Mexican 鈥渂e at the of铿乧e all the time鈥� custom gets in the way, but 铿俥xibility is something so rare in most working environments, and I am happy to have it here.

Just as I admitted in my past posts here, there are some things I will never get used to, like the distinction between “test” and “exam”, or the way student鈥檚 progress go on. But the experience of working in NTNU has been illustrative and rewarding, and I hope my next couple years are just as satisfying as the 铿乺st two.

Cheers.

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