Whirlwinds

Things have been kind of a whirlwind since I last posted. I spent the summer in NYC, juggling catching up with all of my loved ones and working on my MA dissertation. My plans of posting about yummy places in Prospect Heights, my adopted home for the 5 weeks I was there, will be shortened into this:

If you ever find yourself on the northeastern end of Prospect Park (maybe there for Grand Army Plaza? Brooklyn Museum? Botanical Garden?), go here for ice cream, here for tacos, here for brunch, here for lunch, here for coffee, and here for drinks.

Ample Hills ice cream in Brooklyn

After NYC, I spent two weeks in Oslo: an emotional experience after the events of July 22nd. I was glad to have good friends and family around who had been in Oslo during the attacks and was very proud of the way Norway responded to them. The summer ended with a rush to finish my dissertation and a mad apartment hunt all over London. After seeing loads of mediocre and downright depressing places, we walked into our new home and knew it was right.

Visits and the search for Key Lime Pie

Last week, my friend, Hilde, was in from Norway visiting. She knows the city well and has a much more passionate love affair with it than I'll ever have. While living here last spring, she fell hard for the big apple, resulting in her coming back to visit just 5 months after she last left. Walking around last week, she would point out all of the pretty and fun things about New York, things I tend to overlook. I guess I've been so busy trying to get settled in New York, that I forgot to look around and take in a lot of the great things about it. The visit was kind of like having a sleepover continuously for 12 days, of course with a whole bunch of food and fun and NYC mixed in.

Although there was a lot of great (and luckily cheap!) food involved in Hilde's visit, the best food day was last Monday when we went on an adventure with Alex Jones: on a quest in search of the allegedly best key lime pie in the city, possibly the world. Alex Jones had been talking about this pie for at least a month, and we had designated the day to find it.

Park Slope

The day after the filmrace (here's what we managed in the 24 hours alotted! Sorry about YouTube's bad picture quality), I needed to relax, so I went out to Park Slope in Brooklyn to visit a friend of mine that lives out there. I had no idea it's such a nice area; it's city-ish, but quieter, prettier, calmer, happier than Manhattan. It was a beautiful autumn day and I almost felt like I wasn't smack dab in the middle of one of the world's busiest metropolitans, but rather in a place where people take their time, have space to walk on the sidewalk without being afraid that someone's going to run you over, and actually enjoy life.

The Pie Shop

A few of my friends and I went out to Prospect Park in Brooklyn this evening because Bob Dylan was playing there. I'm not a Bob Dylan fan. I mean, he can be good background music, but his nasal voice has never done it for me. He was obvioulsy not playing for free, but he was playing outside, so although there was a fence up to prevent anyone who wasn't paying from seeing him, we could hear him pretty well. We sat with hundreds of people outside the fence, and basically just enjoyed sitting outside, goofing off with some nice background music. And he's a legend, and living legends are the kind of people you have to sit outside a fence to hear every once in a while, even though they're not your thing.