Eclectic Skies:

Kebab Meat and The Wealth of a Country

PO-LAND à SCANDANAVIA, Swe-den-Nor-way-Den-mark

I slept a night in a boat on my way over to Nynasham (Swe-den)…from Gdask (Po-land). Eating at the fancy restaurant onboard the ship lost me, I believe, approximately 11.3 pounds! I really should have known better. A couple crunches later into the complimentary omelet and I was starting to regret my decision to eat at the onboard restaurant, not that I had too many other options. Then I took an orange juice from the counter thinking it would taste something like the fresh squeezed OJ you find all throughout Ger-many. It didn’t. In fact, I don't think oranges grow within a 5000 km radius of the Baltick sea through which my ship was sailing. Ferry OJ is painfully watered down concentrate or boxed in a faraway OJ factory whose only product control mechanism might include the mice that periodically partake of the storehouse boxes. Onboard I was dearly running low on the cottons which cover ones nether most regions and had to figure out a way to wash these articles before another attack from the monster of "Omelet" came. A trip onboard one of these ferries comes with its ups and its downs (that one’s for Ralph!) The scenery is incredible but the food can be less pleasing.

Arriving onto mainland Swe-den was welcome relief. And what shall I tell you about this beautiful land Swe-den. I think its massive stockpile of wealth and uniquely conservative approach to life is a fairly well established fact but little did I know to what extent that wealth made itself manifest. Again I will refer you to travel guides to get a standardized explanation of Swe-den and its rich 500 year flirtation with empire but if you would like to hear about its wealth today, continue reading.

We are always taught in school that the measure of an economy comes in GDP or perhaps in a country’s hordes of foreign currency found in its central bank’s reserves. I believe that a better, more accurate measure should start to be applied to countries. I say that you can always tell a country’s wealth by the quality of its Kebab meat. You may be surprised that my SFU education has taught me this much but Kebab's are big money and part of Eu-ropean cuisine any country you go. Kebab's, are not the shish kabab type meat and vegetable skewers we North Americans put on sticks but rather an always interesting mixture of slabbed meat rotating on a giant stick, sometimes with the juice of tomatoes trickling down from the top, stabbed into the meat. We have something we like to call Do-nairs in Cana-da which for anyone who has ever traveled to Eu-rope or the Midd-le East is a far cry from the real thing.

Well it's the Kebab meat that really can say a lot more about a country’s economy and stock market indexes than anything else. You see, in Fran-ce, we have a clear example of a lagging economy, and sluggish growth in the exporting sector. A quick trip near the Louvre to try a Kebab from the Spanish Quarter and you will soon see why. The Kebab meat from which they adorn their supposed Nh-an bread is some of the most awful stuff humans could ever be expected to consume. Traveling east towards Ger-many and you will see a much improved economy and steady growth in the labour sector. Accompanying this is, of course, a markedly improved quality in the slab of meat on the rotisserie; some of the better Kebab meat Eu-rope has to offer in fact. Take a ferry ride to Stock-holm and, behold, here one can find some of the highest quality kebab meat that Eu-rope produces. In fact, Swe-den's higher quality kebab shops did away completely with the rotisserie skewers and now only serves fresh skewered "real" meat on its pita bread. Clearly they have the money to buy a sell real meat and the kebab shops are ample proof of this. I found the same in Nor-way and was not surprised that this little mountainous country turned its nose up at the offer to join the EU. Obviously the politicians from Bruxelles had never bothered to travel to Nor-way to try one of their Kebabs before inviting this oil rich country into the union. It is no surprise then when you find the quality of life throughout Scandinavia to be much higher than anywhere else throughout Eu-rope, you need only look as far as their kebab shops to find out why.