While the trip to Brooklyn was made much more difficult because of my own blunders (I will concede that the nice man from the NYC transit authority [MTA—Metropolitan Transit Authority] did really help out when I was in distress), the MTA did not help when, after the hellacious walk up and down 2 long flights of stairs in the Hoyt Schermerhorn station to get to the other side, I got onto the train and following a slight delay a lady announced via the speaker system that the train was now an “express train,” at which 2/3rds of the people on the car jumped up and left.
If you were, say, a New Yorker who knew what the fuck you were doing, you might know what to do. Me, I sat there dumbly wedged into my seat by my “baggage” (and perspiring at an alarming rate what with the physical exertion, not to mention the mental stress caused by the mounting fear that I’d end up in, Christ, I don’t even know where…Coney Island? Coney Island with a settee-sized suitcase and a torn rotator cuff) then immediately, but not quite before I’d wrestled my bags out into the aisle, the lady changed her mind and announced it wasn’t an express train to Scranton after all, and everyone got back on. We all continued on as if nothing had happened.
My fate is not unlearned, (See the MTA Song). I am returned to Oslo.
After a joyful reunion with the Royal Indian Mounted Food Control Police (not to mention the joyful sharing of the lugging of the suitcase from the airport), we were off to dinner in Oslo which after all is what we’re ultimately here for isn’t it? Well, I am anyway. We hiked off to Cru (it is delightful to walk unencumbered by furniture), a lovely little wine bar where pigs in a blanket were on the menu (meny in Norwegian). To me, pigs in a blanket are cocktail wieners wrapped in Pillsbury crescent dough which generally I think of as 50’s cocktail party food, I’d happily eat them but they are not something I think of as restaurant fare. Given the loveliness of the place I thought maybe they’d use local sausage (polse in Norwegian—this language is so confusing to me, oddly I know the words for menu, sausage and lingonberry, and that’s pretty much it) and their own pastry. Imagine my delight when the sausages, not at all cocktail sized, arrived wrapped not in pastry but in bacon. OK, cholestoral bombs but hey, red wine cancels it all out. Besides, they were delicious.
So was the wine.
