So, I am finally back home after nearly ten weeks overseas in Norway. Needless to say, it has been very rough getting back into the swing of things. I definitely could get use to the European way of living. I find that as I am getting older and more set in my ways, NYC is not as appealing as it was in my youth. The Europeans in general, and the Norwegians specifically, have a much more sane way of living and working than we do in the states. This really hit home on the way back from the airport. The heat, the stench, the traffic, the throngs of people all drove home the fact that I was back “home”.
I love New York. I was born and raised here and will consider myself a New Yorker until the die and leave this earth. But…..New York can get at bit much at times. There is alot of unnecessary drama that comes with living in the most exciting city on the planet. This is facet of New York seems that much more intense because the family and I had such a great summer in Oslo.
I was lucky that I was able to do a fair amount of traveling inside of Norway and the rest of Europe. Oslo, Berlin and Copenhagen were some of cities that I got to spend some time exploring. All of these towns were amazing and very inviting. Oslo is quiet, calm, and surprisingly cosmopolitan for a country known for having an almost homogeneous population. It is a modest sized city by European standards with a population of about 500,000 people. You can go from a noisy city setting to the quiet of the woods in about 20 minutes in most directions. The architecture of the city mixes pre-war structures with new age designs. And the important thing, the city is extremely spread out so that people are not living on top of one another like in New York. This seems to be a common theme in many of the European cities that I visited this summer.
Despite my love for NY, it was really hard to come home.