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Every country keeps a test for its visitors. In Kristiansand, ours came to the table.

We were staying with Robert, and the slideshow files that evening under Trial by Norwegian Food: brown cheese, salt liquorice fish, and a bottle of Råstoff Pure Liquorice.

The fish are the trick in that sentence. They are not fish. They are liquorice — shaped like fish, salted, and sold by the packet in every 7-Eleven to people who grew up on them.

The bottle is the same idea with the gloves off. Råstoff is a dark liqueur, sold as a premium shot made with good liquorice, and the caption I put on the slide still stands: it is exactly what it sounds like. No hedging, no hint of aniseed lurking politely behind the alcohol. Liquorice, undiluted, and entirely unembarrassed.

The brown cheese is the outlier — sweet, where a cheese has no business being sweet.

These are tastes a country keeps for itself and then, when it likes you, hands over anyway. That is not a culinary experience. It is an invitation, and you accept it with your face under control.

To Robert: skål, and thank you.

I have a weakness for modular design — things that come apart, go back together, and are cleverer for it. So when it turned out there was an IKEA in Kristiansand, I dragged David, his wife and Sverre along on what I promised would be harmless browsing.

We posed under the giant welcome banner. That should have been the end of it.

It was not. Flatpack engineering is difficult to walk past when you admire it on principle, and I came out with a trolley — in a box, naturally, because that is the entire idea. Robert helped me assemble it on the floor when we got back, which is the correct way to receive a guest who has bought furniture in your town.

Then came the luggage arithmetic, which is undefeated. The trolley did not come home. A thing designed to be carried flat, carried nowhere — the most Scandinavian outcome available, and entirely my own doing.

Somewhere in Kristiansand there is a very good trolley that has never been anywhere.

There are shops you visit and shops you recognise. Felleskjøpet on Karmøy — branded BondeKompaniet over the door — is the second kind.

I have spent years in Agrimark branches across the Cape, usually because something for a camping weekend or a 4x4 trip had been forgotten and the children were already in the car. You learn the layout of a place like that. So walking into the Norwegian version was pure joy: the same agricultural co-op, the same stacked fertiliser, the same rugged machinery that assumes you have work to do outdoors.

Everything was in Norwegian and none of it needed translating. A co-op is a co-op. The stock tells you what a country does with its land and its weekends, and on Karmøy that turns out to be recognisably what we do with ours.

It is also the one shop on the whole trip I walked out of empty-handed. After the trolley, that seemed the decent thing.

I have a habit I am not going to apologise for: wherever I travel, I find the convenience store.

Not the market, not the deli — the ordinary one on a corner, open when nothing else is. Ten minutes’ walk from where we were staying in Kristiansand there was a 7-Eleven, and I went, because I always go.

The pleasure is entirely in the shelves. A convenience store is a country’s honest inventory: what it eats standing up, and what it has decided nobody should ever be more than a few minutes from. Half of it is identical the world over. The other half is completely local and completely baffling until you live there — bags of salt liquorice fish, which I had already met at Robert’s table, and late-night essentials that somebody clearly needs at two in the morning.

You can read a place off those shelves faster than off any guidebook. Somebody stocked them for a real person, at an hour when that person was not at their best.

Ten minutes each way. Worth it every time.

I did not tell anybody where I was going. There is an Outland in Kristiansand and another in Stavanger — general hobby shops, board games and cards and the whole business — and I visited both, alone, with the air of a man running an errand.

What struck me was the depth of the stock. A country with that much winter takes games seriously. When the dark sets in for months at a time you need something to do at a table with other people, and the shelves say so: not an aisle of games, a shop of them.

I came home with packs of card games and a couple of Magic: The Gathering decks, because what I plainly needed was more cards.

Regular readers may recall that I wrote an entire editorial about Ticket to Ride last month. I am aware of how this looks. The long winter is an excellent excuse and I intend to go on using it.