We don’t!

At least not the good ole’ American variety that I am partial to. I’ve been craving it lately, too. The do have milk here, but the kind they sell in the supermarkets is that processed/boxed variety that has a half-life nearly as long as that of a Twinkie (which we know is measured in light years not months).

So what other alternatives do we have?  Well, if you don’t like the boxed milk (and can we really be certain that God ever intended for mankind to drink milk out of a box?) you can buy milk in little plastic bags here.  Yeah these plastic bags look like they could also be used to store blood if necessary.  We bought a whole box (boxes again!) of these plastic bags of milk.  Maybe thirty or forty bags of milk inside.

What was really strange about this was that the writing on the outside of the box looked Tibetan to me and when I opened the box there was a necklace inside of the box with some type of amulet with Tibetan letters carved into it.  Yeah, exactly what I thought…it’s like the prize in the cereal box, only it’s a Tibetan amulet instead of a cheap Cracker Jack toy.  I started to be a little disturbed by the necklace however because I thought of all the episodes of Gilligan’s Island I’d seen where a necklace or some other artifact brought curses into the life of him/her who possessed it.  I think there was a cursed tikki statue in a Brady Bunch episode I saw once, too.  Do you see the type of paranoia television can cause after a lifetime of consumption?

Anyway, so you have an option of boxed or bagged milk.  If that doesn’t suit you there’s always the milk man…

Seriously, our Norwegian friends are patrons of the local milk man.  He drives his bycycle to our apartment complex weekly.  Strapped to the sides and back of the bike are three (sometimes four) white and very dingy looking milk jugs. They are fairly large jugs.  Back in the States, I would probably use a jug like that to store gasoline for a lawnmower.

So when the milk man comes, he brings a ladle with him.  Makes sense, right?  You have to have something to pour the milk into. When our friends were gone once, I actually received their milk from the milkman.  When he comes a’calling you just grab a jug or in the case of our Norwegian friends a wok and you open your front door.  He proceeds to pour milk into his ladle and then into your wok until he hits the agreed upon amount.

Once you have the milk in wok, you must boil the milk for a few minutes to kill off any unwanted parasites or other critters you’d rather not have floating around in your immune system.  The downside to this process (especially for our Norwegian friends) is that if you live busy lives (with three kids this is a guarantee) you inevitably let the milk boil over sometimes.  As I mentioned in another post, this happens to them quite frequently as I’m sure it would in our family as well.

I haven’t been desperate enough for milk to actually hire the milkman to bring us our weekly ladle-full of milk.  There’s a couple good reasons for this:

a.) I’m still not sure what animal the milk comes from.  You just can’t assume…
b.) I’ve seen the conditions of those jugs the milkman uses to transport his milk.  The word "cheese" comes to mind quickly, and
c.) I have a little hesitation about food handlers who look like chimney sweeps.  I know that sounds like a really low blow, but my cultural biases are harder to kill off then I thought.

Now, I know I’ve only been here a short time and that makes most things relative, but for now I am still abstaining (for the most part) from drinking milk.  At some point my resolve will likely buckle and I may be employing the services of the local milkman soon enough.  The discovery of Pop-Tarts ($5.00 for a box!) at the Import Store has thickened the plot further.  For the time being, I’ll leave the box-milk drinking to the girls.  And I’m going to put my Tibetan amulet up for sale on e-Bay!