When living in another country, the questions about what kinda food or stuff from the store is often raised. Since Finland is not that far away from Norway, culturally,the huge Oops'es has been quite avoidable in daily grocery shopping. But when it comes to names of fish, parts of meat, berries, mushrooms and to simply ask from a customer service counter(those that serve you the x amount of that particular fish or breadtopping you want), has made difficulties.
Most people here know what salmon is in three languages, and so do I. But when it comes to all the other fish-speices we norwegians have on our plate, I have come short with both my english skills, and the clerks.
Many other funny mishaps have happened when talking about and describing berries(simply because in this home we have no clue what the berries are called in English...well, most normal ones we know okay), like
"you know that purple eyeball berry" (turns out they are gooseberries in english.)
Or when describing fish speices, like
"um, you know that silvery one that can get really big, not shark, but the other one?" or
"the one that looks like the one that killed Steve Irvin, but only much smaller and not really like that anyway but its flat atleast."
Or when describing what part of the animal you want, in a butchershop(like this last christmas, when I made traditional lambs-roll thingy from Norway), constantly pointing to ones limbs, telling and almost bringing along a chart to point at.
My help has sometimes been to check this marvelous list of
anglo-finno-russo-scandinavian list. But most often I have been in the store, staring at the fish filléts on the ice, wondering and damning myself for not having a copy of most used glossary in my wallet.
