Category: On the Road

"Don't stop thinking of me
Don't make me feel this way
Come on over here and love me
You know what I wanted you to say."
-- "Don't Be Cruel", Elvis Presley

Your first impression of a city is often the bird's eye view you get from the airplane. That initial picture can be a Welcome! postcard or a portentous vision of dread. It can be your preliminary study of an alien land, or it can be the final home frame at the end of a roundtrip. LAX is made of traffic jam strands, like endless strings of white and red Christmas lights. In my favorite view, the one by New York's La Guardia Airport, Manhattan hurls its glass and steel points at one side of the plane, the weight of passengers' craning necks seeming to tilt the flying machine into its turn towards the runway.

Once we cut through the storm clouds, Memphis was a surprise of bushy green trees, as zaftig as afros. The city has built itself quietly around the undulating curves of the puce Mississippi. It struck me that this aerial shot must have made Elvis Presley's heart lurch every time he came home.

Like so many Memphis pilgrims, the King was a main draw for me. My Pau was/is/always has been obsessed with Elvis. He was all we listened to in the car, with occasional interludes by Paul Anka and Chinese pop star Theresa Teng. And it's not like my dad was a completist, with B-sides and albums. No, he listened to all of the hits he'd been listening to since he was young, and he has listened to them on repeat ad nauseum for half a century.

So it was funny that flying into Memphis made me recall a weird obsession I had during my childhood. I thought that I was the reincarnation of Elvis Presley. The math didn't quite work out - he died a few months before I was born. But I guess like every little girl, I wanted more of my father's attention - and what better way to get it than to imagine that it was MY music he loved, that mine was the voice that accompanied him on every drive, that mine was the sound he never tired of, that I was the limitless source of joy and comfort to him.

The more often I return to California, the stronger my love for New York grows.  The sunshine makes my brain stop working.  And no, I don't think that's a good thing.  It feels like the majority of my time there is spent sitting in a car that is either A.) stuck in traffic or B.) careening down the freeway at speeds that make me anxious.  The only time I really enjoy being in a car is late at night in the cab that is taking me home when Grandma has been out past her bedtime.

There are a few things that are better in California, though.  One is the housing situation.  My cousin just moved into a cavernous, quiet hacienda-style house at the top of a hill in Echo Park for about the same amount of money as a one-bedroom highrise apartment in Manhattan with about 1/10 the square footage.

Some of my favorite features are an indoor grill with hood:

A tangerine tree heavy with fruit in the backyard (backyards!):



And this insanely cool giant cactus.

 

I've always dreamed of having fruit trees: lemons, limes, avocados; maybe peaches and plums in the summer.  But someone (who was it, Swiss cheese brain?) was telling me about the fruit tree they had in their backyard when they were growing up.  When fruit was abundant, it would thump onto the ground and lay there until the rats came to feast.  With the fruit fermenting and rotting as it lay, the rats would get drunk, stumbling and lolling in the shade.  I don't know if that's possible, but I love the image.

Sugar ban be damned, I always have to eat pang ji (or pang chi) when I'm in L.A.  These Thai street snacks are silver dollar taro coconut patties flecked with chewy kernels of corn.  The batter is scooped into little mounds and pan-fried on a griddle.  They're chewy, not too sweet, and I can eat ten of them in a single sitting.    There's something about the mochi-like, glutinous texture of them that makes my teeth happy, while the delicate lavender hue appeals to the unicorn princess in me.

On the plane from JFK to LAX.  I put my blanket over my head and managed to sleep for five hours of the six-hour flight.  When I woke up, had this convo:

WOMAN SITTING NEXT TO ME: Excuse me, have you been sleeping this whole time?

ME: Yes.

WOMAN: How do you do that?

ME: Oh, I didn't get enough sleep last night. 

WOMAN: I didn't either, but I couldn't sleep at all.

What I really said:

ME: Well, it's one of the few talents I have.

What I wanted to say:

ME: It's amazing how swine flu just completely knocks you out.

Forgive my absence.

Coming back to New York from Stockholm is a little like drinking the finest champagne while sticking your leg in a meat grinder. 

It's been glorious -- a perfect picnic with friends at Governor's Island, a tête-à-tête promenade up the High Line, tacos, buying running shoes at 8:30pm because I needed them and because I can, a grand BLT party with 25 pounds of bacon, kick ass tomatoes and four kinds of homemade mayo at Winnie's. 

But the onslaught to the senses is also overwhelming after quiet, clean Stockholm.  The noise, the traffic, the unexpected street tar that ruined my sneaks (hence the need to buy a new pair), the way you can regret opening your mouth to stick a piece of chewing gum in if you're walking down the wrong block.

To go from the land of lagom -- where life is engineered to be in the middle, not too high, not too low -- to New York, the land of Ultimate XXXXtremes! is kicking me in my callous-free gonads.  I know I've got to get with the program or New York will kick me out.  And I'm sure I'll get there.  I just need a little adjustment period.

In the meantime, I just want to say: FUUUUUUUUCK!!!  MY FOOOOOOOT!

Kära raring,

Ursäkta. Min svenska är inte så bra, men jag vill prova berätta dig detta på ditt språk.

Imorgon flyger jag till New York.  Det är jätte, jätte konstigt.  Manniskorna har frågat till mig: Hur känner du dig?  Är du trist? Glad? Ser du fram emot åka hem? 

Och sanningen är att jag är alla de.

Jag kan klyfta min tid här inte bara med årstiderna, men också med blommorna.  Krokusarna var här när jag var ensam, pionerna märkt när jag förändrade, syrenerna var när jag blev kär i dig.  

Nu är hosten på luften.  Bruna blad är virvlande och gömmer sig bakom cykelhjulen.  Kallt vinden blåser en flickas blå klänning ut och inne, som en simmande manet.  
 
Kan man älska två samtidigt?  Ja, tror jag.  Återvänder jag till New York med ett svullet hjärta -- det är full av glädje och vemod, minne och hopp, erfarenheten och undrar. 

Min svenska lärare lärde mig en bland favorit finsk idiom: "Oma maa mansikka, muu maa mustikka." Den betyder "Hemland jordgubb, annat land blåbär," eller "Borta bra, hemma bäst."  Om New York är min jordgubbland, kan du vara mitt smultronställe.  Jag kommer att sakna dig så jätte mycket...Jag kommer tillbaka, jag lovar.  En dag, vi kan börja var vi slutade.

Puss och kram,
Ganda

August is kräftskiva (crayfish party) month in Sweden!  I'd really been hoping to get an invite to a crayfish party, and my friends Joy and Otto came through with a traditionally debaucherous weekend in the country.

A little background: back in the day, you used to only be allowed to fish for kräftor, or crayfish, in August.  That meant one month of furiously scarfing crayfish as an excuse to get drunk. 

These days, crayfish are a popular menu item in Sweden all year long -- you can get them already peeled in salads, mixed with mayonnaise on toast, etc.  You can also buy frozen ones from the supermarket -- those mostly come from Turkey and China.  In August, kräftskiva-style whole crayfish can be purchased from any supermarket seafood counter.  For the party, we were instructed to get fresh Swedish crawfish, which are cooked in salt and copious amounts of dill. 

The mudbugs are eaten cold, cracked open with hands and teeth.  Every guest was given a skinny little crayfish knife to dig meat out of the slim claws.  By the end of the night, you've got cuts all over your hands, but the general idea is to get drunk enough to stop noticing.

Fixings included white toast with butter and caraway cheese, as well as a creamy västerbottenpaj, a sort of quiche made with Västerbotten cheese, a sharp, hard cheese from the north of Sweden.  Joy also got this AMAZING strawberry meringue cake from Lux Dessert and Chocolate -- feather-light fluff on the thinnest layer of sponge with a strawberry puree stripe down the middle.  It is what My Little Pony angels eat in heaven.

Besides the crayfish, the other star of the show is the snaps, the Swedish national liquor which I have totally come to develop a taste for.  It's an aquavit flavored with caraway, fennel and anise flavors.  I think O.P. may have elbowed Hallands Fläder out as my favorite snaps. 

Crayfish parties, and generally all Swedish drinking festivities like Midsummer and sour herring parties, offer opportunities to break out Sweden's numerous drinking songs, which all seem to be about drinking and lack of women.  I haven't been here long enough to make commentary about the drinking habits of Swedes.  Actually, I haven't been drinking with Swedes often enough to make any of my sweeping generalizations.  But I will say that the whole singing and drinking thing is one of the most charming parts of Swedish culture. The only song I sort of know is Helan Går, but Joy and Otto printed out a little handbook with about 30 different tunes.  

Crayfish are a lot of work for a little meat.  And every time you sing a song, you drink some snaps.  We didn't sing all 30 songs, but we got through a great deal of them. Small amount of protein + large amount of snaps = 12 very quickly drunk people.

This was really only the second time I've been really drunk in Sweden, and I really could have used my Drunk Guard iPhone app again.  The next morning I woke up in a bit of a haze, having passed out on the couch with my glasses still on.  A few choice bits I remember:

• Naked wood-fired sauna followed by skinny dipping in the cold sea.
• At around 1 a.m., we had hot dogs and chips for vikning, which is the Swedish word for post-drinking snacks.  Useful meal, useful word.
  
• I did my first ever keg stand over the mini-Heineken keg.  My frat ho fantasy has finally been realized.
  

I am totally having a kräftskiva in Brooklyn next summer.  PAR-TAY!

View Gotland and Fårö by bike in a larger map

I'm back early.  Actually, I've been back for a few days now.  Gotland was a bust.  I spent the whole ride listening to podcasts of This American Life, which was great, except when I was riding on the 90km/hr highway while listening to the story of the kid who hit and killed a cyclist.  It also wasn't so great when I was riding through the forest in Fårö (which, if movies have taught me anything, is always full of axe murderers) while listening to the story of the Iraq vet who sliced up his girlfriend and her grandma.

And maybe I felt a twinge of recognition when I was battling the wind, carrying way too much stuff in my panniers, going 9km/hour and playing chicken with the thunderstorms while listening to Shalom Auslander say, "I ruin vacations.  That's just what I do."

There were several points during the ride when I looked at Gotlandsleden, the official island bicycle path, and thought, "Aw HELLS no," and turned right back around.  Like the ride up to the Hall-Hangvars nature reserve, which was an all gravel road leading into the forest (which, we've already established, is always filled with maniacs and escaped convicts).

Don't get me wrong, it wasn't all bad.  It was just lonely.  Every time I was riding for long stretches, my thoughts alternated between, "Wow, this place is so peaceful" and "OMG, I am going to get caught in the rain with a flat tire in between one empty town and another empty town and not have enough water and I'll dehydrate and drink my own urine, which will make me so delirious and weak that I will get hit by a car at dusk when there are no lights on the road and I'll be dumped in the forest where adorable Swedish deer will pick my bones clean and if I'm lucky, the battery on my cell phone will last long enough so that they can trace my remains via GPS." 

I am way too city to go cycling through the country alone.

But if you're going to cycle around Gotland, here are my quick tips:

• I stayed in Visby for two nights, then one night each in Stenkyrka, then Bunge, then Fårö, then back to Visby via bus.  I probably could have gone longer distances between, but I'm glad I didn't because when the wind was blowing against me, boy was it hard to pedal to the next stop.  Stenkyrka Mejeri and Fårögården were the best bed and breakfasts, affordable and pretty.  Ihrebadens Vandrarhem would have been a good alternative to Stenkyrka because they have a slice of beach looking up at the Hall-Hangvars Naturreservet coastline. 
  
• Best eats were the fantastic fish soup and saffranspannkaka (a sort of saffron rice pudding pancake) with salmbärssylt (jam made of blackberry-like berries native to Gotland) and vispgrädde (whipped cream) at Bakfickan, the färskost (cream cheese) with bread and buttery bullar at Rute Stenugnsbageri, which is in the middle of fucking nowhere.  Smoked shrimp with saffron aioli at Lickershamnskrogen made for a pretty good seaside shack snack, too.
  







• Also, eat anything from Sylvis Döttrar.  I ate three bullar there in one day -- a buttery cardamom braided bun, a vanilla custard bun with raspberry jam and this vanilla custard filled bombolona thingie.  ZOMFG.  If I hadn't been bored out of my gourd, I could have stayed another two days and just eaten bullar, breakfast, lunch and dinner.
  



• The marshy eastern island of Furillen is like being on the moon -- chalk gravel roads, big chalk basins filled with water.  I thought the island was super creepy feeling, but some people love it.  There is something extremely horror film about it to me.  Fabriken Furillen is an ultra chic little hotel on the little quarry island, and the restaurant is very tastefully-decorated, but it's a major pain in the ass to get there by bicycle.  The roads are in bad condition on Furillen, and the roads leading to Furillen are not lit at all, so if you're staying in Fårösund or Bunge, you need to give yourself 45 minutes before sundown to get back to your sleeping place. This was also the place I first encountered these insane, alien Swedish mosquitoes which bit me THROUGH MY KNEE HIGH SOCKS.  For me, Furillen is missable.  I couldn't pedal away fast enough.
• If you ask me, the Lummelunda Cave is not worth the 100 SEK.  It's a ten minute dramatization movie, followed by a talky tour that's a bit anti-climactic because the stalactites/stalagmites are not that impressive.
• Loved Fårö, which is a more manageable size, with really pretty coasts and plenty of picturesque scenery.  It is what I pictured Gotland to be like.
  
• Pack light!  Next time I do one of these bike tours, I'm either going to only do the kind where someone shuttles your luggage for you from hotel to hotel or I'm going to bring just two of each article of clothing.  I had a "DUH!" moment when I realized early on that I really didn't need to lug both of my heavy U-locks around on an island you can only get to by three-hour ferry.  During a more frustrating moment when I couldn't board the bus back to Visby, I came very close to chucking everything.  Also, I made the mistake of riding out somewhere and riding back against the wind.  I think it is important to only ride in one direction, forward towards your next destination -- otherwise, you wear yourself out unnecessarily.
  
• You don't always have to take Gotlandsleden.  Sometimes, the fastest and most convenient way to go is on the main road.  Between Stenkyrka and Bunge, I took 149 and 148 all the way.  You have to be careful of the speeding cars and trailers, but it's doable and saves a lot of time if you're not prepared to ride for many hours.
• If you are planning to take the bus, you should know that you CAN take your bike on the bus for an additional cost of 40 SEK -- there are rack spaces on the back of the bus.  HOWEVER, they only allow two bikes per bus, so if the rack is full, you are SOL, my friend.  I found myself in that sitch and tried to ride all the way back to Visby from Fårö, but my legs and soul were too tired.  I wound up catching a later bus in Lärbro and totally riding like the devil to catch the ferry back to Nynäshamn, where I was the last person they held the boat for before shutting the trap doors.  And maybe that was the problem -- I spent so much of the vacation hurrying to the next stop, trying to beat the rain, trying to beat the wind, trying to beat the sunlight, that it was hard to just enjoy being there.  But if you are not as neurotic as I am, you might have a better time.
  

I'm about to go on vacation!  There, I said it.  One week, possibly two weeks without my computer.  That means I'm dropping a cover over this site and I'll be back in a week or two.  I will bring the iPhone so I can use the map function (and possibly Twitter), but that's it!  It'll be me, my bicycle, a Swedish island in the Baltic Sea called Gotland, and the crazy spiral of my mind which I will attempt to hypnotize with physical activity.  It might rain, a lot, but I'm trying to nut up about it.

It's early August in Sweden and that means everyone has been on vacation for the last few weeks.  I get tons of auto-replies that say, "Jag är på semester" ("I am on vacation").  I even received one auto-reply with the subject "Paraplydrinkar" ("Umbrella drinks")!

You American readers know, of course, that it is practically verboten for an American to actually admit in their auto-reply that we are on vacation.  Instead, we say something purposefully vague like, "I am out of the office until August 3" or even "I am working out of the office". 

Whenever I tell a Swede that we would never dare say that we're on vacation, they ogle the crazy on my face and ask, "But why?"  And I don't know why.  Why are we Americans so ashamed of vacation?  Would it be such a terrible thing to admit that we are taking time off from work?  I would like to propose a few different auto-replies for your next non-work period. 

---

Subject:  No deadbeat dad

Hi!  Thanks for your e-mail.

I am taking five days to play catch with my son who thinks that I live at work. 

Do you remember what your dad looks like?

---

Subject: Moo!

I will be gone for the next three weeks so I don't have to pump breast milk in the bathroom on my lunch break.

Between breastfeeding my child and continuing my career, I choose both.  What do you think of that?

--- 

Subject: I work hard so they don't have to 

I will be in California for a week visiting my parents, whom I get to see once a year.  I will read your e-mail on the five-hour red-eye flight home.

---

Subject: Couples therapy

Thank you for getting in touch.

I am at home this week reconnecting with my workaholic wife, but I am clearing out my inbox once a day so I don't have to go through 1500 emails when I am back in the office. 

When I come back, the world will still be turning, I promise.

---

Subject: Umbrella drinks! 

I am sitting on a beach with an umbrella drink in hand.  Don't be mad at me. You will be on vacation soon, too.  Then you can rub it in my face.  And we can all have a good laugh about how nice it is to not have to pretend that the only thing we care about in life is work.

Cheers!

 

 

On the rarest of occasions, it is possible to take a bite of something and taste an entire lifetime in it.

Sometimes it's an animal's life, very straightforward.  Sometimes it is the chef's life you taste, his memory, her touch.  Sometimes it's your own life. 

I can count the number of times in this has happened to me.  The first time was when my whole clan went to visit my cousin when she was in college.  We ordered takeout from the Thai House on Market St. in San Francisco.  My father, whose brother did the electrician work for many of the Thai restaurants on that side of the bay, popped his head into the kitchen and asked to get our food extra Thai-style.  We ate sitting on the floor of my cousin's railroad apartment in the Mission.  What I remember was a tom yum goong, so pungent and tangy, topped with blistered chilies that singed and sang.  That night, I tasted my family's life, in a moment when we were all together, just a few years before we dispersed around the nation.  I'll never forget that meal.  We still talk about it to this day.

Another time was a meal I had with my then boyfriend at Nobu.  My boyfriend wanted to impress me.  I was mostly ungrateful and unimpressed.  Until, that is, the final course came out -- a small bowl of broth, all golden clarity and tasting of the sea.  It had a few small pieces of pink and white fish, poached to perfection, with just a few sprouts of mitsuba floating about.  It made my boyfriend cry.  It made me a little teary.  We looked at each other.  We looked at the chef.  The chef nodded knowingly.  I tasted the ocean in that bowl, the Pacific ocean, the history of kelp, the bright sun that warms the upper reaches of the water. 

And then there was Mathias Dahlgren's Matsalen.  Francis and I decided to go and treat ourselves one night when he was in Stockholm.  My appetite was ample.  The little teasers had been clever and delicious -- a seascape made of paper-thin, dehydrated cauliflower floating like coral in a glass of sesame seeds, a sail of soy-seaweed paper, a crisp sheet of beet.  And there it was -- a tiny bun warmed on a charred piece of wood.  The waitress gave some story about this bun being Mathias's first memory as a child.  Yeah, yeah, I thought.  Just lemme at it.

The smell -- coal, fire, dough.  Smooth, round bread against the wavy grain of the wood pedestal.  I popped it into my mouth and clamped down.  And -- was that a gob of butter?  A little salty, and then the dough was sweet.  Creamy.  Soft.  Oh god.  My blood vessels dilated up to the roots of my hair.  There it was -- recognition.  The chef's life in a bite.

The tasting menu at Mathias Dahlgren was one of the best meals of my life.  Seriously.  Moments of true bliss followed as Francis and I chuckled our way giddily through the seven-course dinner.  A little tile of ling, a cod-like fish, and the daintiest scallop, seared with just a smack of heat, was tender and sensual against a masculine garlic puree and palate-cleansing parsley sprouts.  It lit Francis's face up.  Bling!

Raw tongue lengths of coral-colored salmon folded over bright orange whitefish roe, nestling against a creamy bit of artichoke puree and emerald green Gotland asparagus tips, all moistened by a touch of browned butter and adorned with lilac chive flowers. This dish was absolutely feminine, encompassing the delicate complexity of spring, all fertility and sensuality.  It was my favorite dish that night.

Langoustine wrapped in -- was that pure pork fat? -- pork cheek, served with an astringent lovage-pea puree.  A pumpkin porridge topped with parmesan cheese, black truffles and pumpkin seeds -- simple and earthy.  Rich saddle of lamb with fried sweetbreads were decadent but played up the complex flavors of the meats themselves.   

But over the next few days, I realized that another dish was haunting me, continues to haunt me.  It was so deceptively simple, so audacious.  A rectangle of their crustless pillowy sourdough was stuffed with cow's milk cheese, pan fried on all sides in olive oil and touched with honey, sea salt and black pepper.  The grilled cheese (because, come on, it's a grilled cheese) came with a thin, long shot glass of fermented birch sap, a lightly fizzy, lightly alcoholic translucent white beverage.  Epic sagas could be written about the flavors that came forth with every alternating bite and sip.  Honey + salt. Milk + yeast.  Tree + animal.  Age + brew.  Is it too soon to taste that again?  Will I ever taste anything like that again?  I wonder.

A visitor I had recently made the observation that Swedes wear the same standard H&M clothes that we do in the States, but they style them much more interestingly.  The same could be said of food here -- the Swedish sense of style is in play here.  Matsalen doesn't have an infinite palette of flavors.  But what it has, it uses gracefully, bringing out nuance.

Matsalen, located in the Grand Hotel, looks out on the dock where Waxholmsbolaget ferries drop anchor when they're in the Stockholm harbor.  The boats come and go over the course of a dinner as the cloudy sky fades from gray to navy.  It's a really quintessentially Stockholm view.  Inside, the dining room is chalky but warm, done up in complementary shades of blue gray, beige and white, echoing the colors of the boats and their headlights against the changing evening backdrop.  It's elegant, not stuffy, mimicking the hushed reverence and charm of a seaside chapel.

Matbaren, the more casual restaurant next door, offers a few of the same dishes on Matsalen's a la carte menu, though the food a little less interesting.  The room is a lot more casual, with wood walls, tall stools, Poul Henningsen light fixtures and a long, curved dining bar.  The unmissable: the horseradish herring was fucking unbelievable -- a cream herring, pickled but not tart, with a row of adorable, halved boiled fresh potatoes and a rope of bleak roe.  A few purple rings of onion add color and zest; underneath the stole of cream and above the brown butter slip, the herring hides tiny segments of lemon which burst with the bleak roe at precisely the right moments.  Make sure to also order a frosty shot of Mathias Dahlgren's own double-biting horseradish snaps.

And check out this dessert: a chilled 50s martini glass is filled with plain yogurt, with a soft ball of peach sorbet plopped in the middle (had to be robot-couped, it was so fine and smooth).  Around the glass, a ring of toasted, skinned whole hazelnuts (which have become a regular staple in my diet) circle the sorbet, with a little honey and a halo of fruity olive oil, topped with a pinch of sea salt.  Two temperatures, several textures, and big, bouffanty flavors.  I have got to make it for a dinner party sometime.

I will say that it's a good place to take yourself on a date.  I wasn't the only solo diner in there tonight -- two guys on the other side of the bar were also eating alone, though I think I totally out-ate them both.   

I've been considering going to Matsalen one more time before I go home, but I'm not sure I want to.  The experience was so sublime, so moving in my mind that I dare not disturb the dream.  But you can bet that the next time I'm back in Stockholm, I'll have a reservation there.

Matsalen
Mathias Dahlgren
Södra Blasieholmshamnen 6
T-bana: Kungsträdgården
Matsalen tasting menu: 1500 SEK (about $200).  Reservations required.
Matbaren 3 courses with 3 drinks: about 1000 SEK (about $130).  Reservations recommended, but there's supposedly always room for a drop-in.