If I squint hard enough, and imagine the hills being a bit taller, Grillstad looks a lot like Alameda. Trondheim fjord looks a lot like the San Francisco Bay. The hot summer sun feels the same, my bike seat feels the same, the breeze feels the same. And I can almost believe that I\u2019m not really that far from my friends there. But on closer inspection the illusion falls apart; the city is in the wrong place (roughly behind me in this photo, but obscured by a hill), and the sun rises and sets at the wrong times. When I go for a run and get lost in the white pines, it feels a bit more like running with my dad in Massachusetts, until I turn a corner and hit rolling pastureland that looks like a miniature version of Tilden Park. Then the pines feel out of place – shouldn\u2019t they be redwoods? Isn\u2019t the giant cathedral-style building next to my lab supposed to be red brick, not gray? Isn\u2019t the horse racing track closer to the water? And I swear the hill up to my lab used to be a little taller than that. Am I in Boston, Berkeley, or some weird mixture of both, arranged by aliens trying so desperately to make me feel like I\u2019m in a familiar place?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
If I squint hard enough, and imagine the hills being a bit taller, Grillstad looks a lot like Alameda. Trondheim fjord looks a lot like the San Francisco Bay. The hot summer sun feels the same, my bike seat feels the same, the breeze feels the same. And I can almost believe that I\u2019m not […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1350,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"aside","meta":{"cybocfi_hide_featured_image":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1351","post","type-post","status-publish","format-aside","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-norway","post_format-post-format-aside"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/mikegerhardt.net\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/01\/224173482_4064676295300_2380141473355404774_n.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mikegerhardt.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1351","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mikegerhardt.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mikegerhardt.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mikegerhardt.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mikegerhardt.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1351"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/mikegerhardt.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1351\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1578,"href":"https:\/\/mikegerhardt.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1351\/revisions\/1578"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mikegerhardt.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1350"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mikegerhardt.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1351"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mikegerhardt.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1351"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mikegerhardt.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1351"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}