Remembering summer

Out on the Oslo fjord at sunset--a lazy day this past September when it was still warm.

Thoughts about New York city in summer

It’s never too early to start planning summer vacation. In fact, it’s smart to start around now because if you want to get together with people you need to check in with them now because they may not be around when you want to visit. Each year I plan a trip back to New York and usually I’ve been lucky—my good friends and family are around and we usually get together. I always look forward to going back to New York each year. I land at Newark airport and suddenly I feel at home. I know how to maneuver the NJ Turnpike, how to get into the city, what the quickest route is to get to Westchester—all those things. I have driven around the NYC metropolitan area for years. When I lived in NJ during the 1980s, I was always on the road, and was a pretty aggressive driver (just ask my family and friends). I have calmed down a lot, but that is mostly due to the fact that I don’t use my car here as often as I used it in NJ. It makes sense that the more you drive, the more stressful it is to drive. And in the NYC area it’s stressful to drive. There’s always a traffic jam of some sort to deal with. The worst road for traffic jams is the Long Island Expressway. I remember it used to be called the Long Island parking lot. There was never a reasonable explanation for why there was a traffic jam at any given time. The worst experience I can remember was driving a friend of mine to Kennedy airport so that she could get a flight to Germany. We made it with half an hour to spare. It was pre-9/11 so there were no real security delays. Nonetheless, it was not a pleasant experience. It took us four hours to get from midtown Manhattan to Kennedy, there was that much traffic. But somehow you deal with it and you even end up repeating the experience of driving out to the airport and hoping against hope that there will not be traffic. Hope springs eternal.

I usually fly direct from Oslo to Newark on Continental or SAS. Newark is a great airport, with its monorail that takes you from one terminal to another or to the car rental offices. It’s very efficiently set up and it makes dealing with the hassle of traveling a little easier. I take the monorail all the way to the end—to the Newark train station where I get a train into Manhattan if I don’t end up renting a car (I haven’t always done so the past few years). Every time I do this I think about how NYC functions. I mean, think about it. Over four million workers commute into and out of Manhattan each work day. That’s impressive. That is almost the entire population of Norway. It works, despite the traffic jams, crowds, delays, and aggression. Somehow it works. And when it doesn’t, it’s irritating but not chaotic. There is usually another way to get into NYC if the train doesn’t run. There is the bus, or a taxi, or a rental car, or a ferry. And when I am finally standing in midtown Manhattan, near the Grand Central train station, I take a look around me and soak in the NYC atmosphere, the NYC life. I love being in NYC in the summer time. It’s hot, noisy, and smelly; lots of people walk about, but there’s life around you. Life is always going on. It’s warm and humid. People pass you on the sidewalk, talking and laughing and having a good time—office workers on their lunch break. It’s nice to see them. It reminds me of when my brother worked in the World Trade Center; I would meet him for lunch and he would take me to a local restaurant where we would sit for an hour or two, then go to the river park and walk along the water. That was before 9/11. I haven’t been back to that area since except once, and that was to see Ground Zero, which was quite an emotional experience for me. My brother no longer works in that area, so there is not much reason to go there anymore. But it is a lovely area of the city and worth visiting if you have the chance. He and I visited Trinity Church once, which is in the Wall Street area. It is located at the intersection of Wall Street and Broadway in downtown Manhattan. It is a lovely church and one of the oldest in NYC—the first church was built in 1698.

NYC is not an unfriendly place. No matter how often I’ve heard that or seen it portrayed as such on TV or in films, I’m here to tell you that it’s not like that. You will discover that people actually smile at you if you keep looking straight ahead and not down. I smile back. Sometimes I am the one who smiles first. I don’t feel lonely in NYC. I never did when I worked there. I feel free. There was always life, no matter the time of day. I remember taking the bus back to NJ (where I lived during the 1980s) at 2am and even though it felt a bit weird to be out walking on the streets at that time, there were still plenty of people out. That’s one of the reasons I love cities generally. NYC doesn’t ever really sleep. It is the city that never sleeps. I for one think that’s a good thing. You can always find an open restaurant or deli to get a coffee. I love going into Grand Central station and getting a train to Tarrytown where I grew up. How many times have I taken that train ride? Countless times. I love sitting near the train window, looking out at the Hudson River on my way to Tarrytown. I’ve written about this before. But it bears repeating. It’s a beautiful ride and a beautiful river.

So I am sitting here and starting to plan my summer trip and other trips as well. There may be some friends visiting Oslo this year, another friend and I are planning a trip in Europe, and my husband and I are also planning a trip in Europe. But there will also be time spent in Oslo, like last summer, and that’s always nice as well, because Oslo is another city that I enjoy spending time in during the summer months. 

A New York Summer State of Mind

Back to work today after four wonderful weeks of vacation, and it wasn’t as tough as I had expected. But of course that’s because I know that on Friday I will be on vacation again for another week, this time in New York. ‘A New Yorker in Oslo’ will be ‘A New Yorker in New York’ again for a week, visiting friends and family. I look forward to my annual trips to NY each year, and usually plan them for the middle to end of August so that I can experience a bit of the NY summer—hot, humid, and sometimes tough to take. But it’s a real long summer and it’s what I remember from growing up there. Once I land at Newark airport and step outside, it’s like being hit by a blast of hot air. But I like feeling the heat outdoors and then walking into an air-conditioned supermarket or clothing store and nearly freezing, or lying in bed and feeling the air from the ceiling fan at my friend Jean’s house blowing down on me. I like opening the door to a car that has been baking in the heat and having to air out the car to cool it down. I like the smell of sun-baked asphalt and tar—it reminds me of the boardwalk smell at Rye Beach at Playland from our childhood days. I need my dose of warmth but I also like that feeling of needing some relief from the heat. It doesn’t feel like summer if you cannot complain at least once that it’s too hot. My mother would sometimes complain, and then she would bring out watermelon, sherbet, lemonade or her homemade iced tea (nothing beat it) and we would relax and forget about the heat, at least for a while. The heat would often make us seek relief at the beaches. I can still remember long summer days together with Jean at Jones Beach or Sherwood Island when we were younger, working on our tans, listening to the radio and reading our fashion magazines. When it got to be too warm on the beach, we ran into the ocean—the water was warm but still refreshing. When we were children we often made our way to Kingsland Point Park on the Hudson River, or joined neighbors for trips to Lake Welch or Sherwood Island or Rye Beach. Now I often visit Gisele whose apartment terrace overlooks the beach, and we sit out there watching the people on the beach, sipping cold drinks and enjoying good conversation.

Now that I no longer work in NYC and no longer have to use subways or buses to get to work, I enjoy being a tourist and walking around the city in the summertime. I prefer to walk rather than take the subways or buses. The subways in NYC always seemed to smell worse in the summertime than during the rest of the year as I remember. It’s been a few years since I’ve ridden a subway during the summer, so I don’t know if that has changed or not. I do remember a few times being on a subway train where the windows were shut tight and the air conditioning was supposed to be on but it wasn’t, and it didn’t take long for the cars to heat up and tempers to flare. Someone always ended up opening the doors between the cars and standing in them to hold them open. The stream of cool subway tunnel air that flowed through the cars then was like a gift from heaven even though the screeching of the train wheels and the iron smell accompanied it. It was a trying experience to deal with claustrophobic subway cars and buses where the windows were tightly shut. I never managed that too well and would get off (fight my way off) a subway train or bus at the next stop if it was too unbearable. Asking the bus driver to put the air conditioning on always elicited the same response—it was on and please do not open the windows. We opened them anyway if we could, just to get real air. I don’t miss this aspect of NYC summers at all.

Summer storms in Tarrytown where I grew up were always intense but short-lived as I remember, with a lot of lightning and thunder and torrential rains. Sometimes there was flooding. Afterwards the storms had seldom cooled everything down, but they were fascinating and scary to experience, especially at night with all the lightning flashing about. We always took care to get indoors so as not to be struck by lightning. That was always impressed upon us by parents and teachers—how to deal with lightning storms and what to do in different situations. Oslo has not had many intense lightning storms in the twenty years I’ve lived here, but the past few years have seen an increase in their frequency. Experiencing such storms when we have been out on our boat on the Oslo fjord—with torrential rain, strong winds and high waves—is a scary experience and one I prefer to avoid. We have been lucky the two times it has happened—getting back to port or finding shelter just in time before the storm hit. That is the best way to describe it—it just hits and lashes everything in its path.

I am looking forward to my dose of New York summer—the warmth of being together with family and friends, the summer weather--all the experiences that contribute to the making of memories that keep one warm during the winter months.

Norwegian Summer Meals

July is usually vacation month in Norway. Most people take their vacation at that time, traveling to their summer cottages or abroad. Life slows down a lot, Oslo is much quieter and not so crowded with cars and traffic, and all of it is a welcome change from the rest of the year. We are enjoying a “stay-cation” this year, to borrow a word from a young Norwegian woman whom we had the pleasure of conversing with this past Saturday evening at her parent’s summer party. We are not traveling anywhere during the month of July. We are instead enjoying some quiet time at home, sleeping in a bit later, enjoying leisurely breakfasts, shopping, watching Tour de France, biking long trips or biking down to our boat, and taking some boat trips in the nice weather. It’s been a relaxing summer so far. And with free time comes the desire to try out new recipes and to make some traditional Norwegian summer meals. I love buying new cookbooks and this summer has been no exception—I’ve purchased a world recipe book on baking—from dinners to desserts. I have a list of new recipes I want to try. But the two recipes I’m including here are not from this book. The first is fried mackerel, a general meal that most Norwegians prepare at one time or another during the summer months, and the second is cucumber soup (Norwegian-style) from Magnar Kirknes’ Kokkeskolen (Cooking School) section in the VG newspaper from June 2010. Neither of them is very complicated to make and they come out well each time.

I. The first recipe is Fried Mackerel served with cucumber vinegar salad and boiled potatoes

1-2 mackerel fillets per person, cleaned and well-dried
flour, salt, pepper
oil for frying
4-6 oz. sour cream

Coat the mackerel fillets in flour, salt and pepper. Fry the mackerel in oil until golden brown and add 4-6 oz. sour cream just before serving. The cucumber salad is prepared as follows: peel one medium-sized cucumber and slice it into wafer-thin slices with the slicer section of a grater. Place in a small bowl and cover with white vinegar (7% strength), add 1 tsp. sugar and mix. Prepare several hours ahead of time and refrigerate. Serves 3-4 people.



II. The second recipe is Cucumber Soup with Crayfish Tails

1 large cucumber, peeled
½ yellow onion
1 green pepper
1 green chili
1 green apple
1 garlic clove
1 tbs. sherry vinegar
1 bunch dill, chopped (save a little to mix with crayfish tails)
1 bunch parsley, chopped
4 oz. olive oil
2 cups chicken bouillon (should be hot)
5-6 oz. crème fraiche (18%)
7 oz. crayfish tails rolled in chopped dill

Cut the peeled cucumber in half lengthwise and remove the soft centers with a spoon. Chop up the pepper, chili and apple coarsely after removing the seeds from each of them. Chop the onion and garlic also. Place all ingredients in a bowl along with the chopped dill and parsley. Cover with the olive oil, sherry vinegar, and sprinkle with a little salt and pepper. Cover the bowl with plastic wrap and refrigerate for at least 2 hours. Then place all ingredients in a food processor, add the hot chicken bouillon and process until completely mixed. Add the crème fraiche and mix until the consistency is soup-like. Add a little sugar, salt, and pepper to taste. While the soup is cooling, mix the crayfish tails with finely-chopped dill and divide into about four portions in soup bowls. Pour the cooled cucumber soup over the crayfish tails and add a little crème fraiche (in stripes) to the surface of the soup. Serve with buttered toasted Italian or French bread.

Enjoy!