So what did I think it was going to taste like?

I have come to enjoy seafood quite a lot over the past few years. My mom didn't really care to eat things that tasted fishy, so my experience of seafood in the formative years was largely "Calabash style seafood," i.e. deep-fried. When Inki first came to NC and we took her out to one of our favorite restaurants at the beach, she was appalled to realize that everything came deep-fried and tasted almost exactly the same -- more like french fries than flounder or scallops. As you'd expect of someone raised on the Norwegian coast, she is used to lots of good seafood, and I've developed a taste for it too over the last few years: clams, crab, lobster, fish of all kinds. I even like raw oysters, though it took a bit of Dutch courage the first time I tried one.
Here seafood is a real staple, and though some of the offerings sounded a bit, well, scary at first, I've always liked them. "Fish cakes" and "fish pudding," for instance, may sound foul, but they're basically the processed fish equivalent of salisbury steak and meat loaf and quite good. I even have some pickled herring I keep in the fridge to put on a slice of bread for breakfast now and again.
All this seafood helps give Norway, particularly western Norway, one of the highest life expectancies in the world. One of the country's much-ballyhooed longetivity secrets is a liquid called "tran," yet another fish product chock full of omega-3 and vitamins. My father-in-law, a former sailor, takes a teaspoonful a day, and we thought we'd try some for the health benefits, so I bought a bottle last weekend. They had capsules, but they were twice the price and, well, I'm cheap. Plus, hey, I liked all the fish stuff I've had here so far.
The English name for tran, if you're wondering, is "cod liver oil."
We both tried it on Saturday, and it tastes exactly like something you'd have to press out of the liver of a dead fish. Never in my life have I ever tasted anything so foul. The aftertaste, if possible, was worse and lasted for several minutes. It was like Prince William Sound must have tasted two weeks after the Exxon Valdez disaster, when the dead fish had had time to get good and ripe marinating in the crude oil.
We went straight back and bought the capsules. A real bargain at twice the price.