Summer Scand In Avia

Chandrahas Choudhury journeys across Scandinavia and finds that Nordic cool takes on another meaning in the magic of the midnight sun. 

Can life be more beautiful than on a summer’s day in Scandinavia? Answers on a postcard, please, but I have made up my mind. After a king’s breakfast at Oslo’s Hotel Continental—smoked salmon, liver pâté, scrambled eggs the colour of sunset, custard tarts, summer berries, cinnamon buns—I repair to the lobby to wait for my companion, photographer Michel Figuet. I am sitting beneath an original self-portrait of the great Norwegian painter Edvard Munch. His painting The Scream, on view less than 10 minutes away in the National Gallery, draws thousands of excited tourists each day.

Monsieur Figuet arrives, and we saunter out into Oslo. It is a Monday morning and most of the 6,25,000 citizens of Scandinavia’s fastest-growing city—in fact, with around 15,000 new people each year, it is the fastest-growing city in all of Europe—are headed to work. On the long, sinuous inclines of the streets, the archaic trams trundle, disgorging, every few hundred metres, a consignment of stylish passengers in sunglasses, so tall, lithe and athletic, one could be walking through an Olympic Village. The boulevards smell of lilac and coffee, and long before I see them, I hear the brassy, bantering accordions and violins of the gypsies, come for the summer from Romania to sing for their supper. Every surface seems in bloom—as full of colour and life as the majestic tree-sized murals that tell the story of modern Norway and its egalitarian ideals, on view at Oslo City Hall (which also hosts the Nobel Peace Prize ceremony every December). Even between the tram tracks grow small forests of buttercups: in the right light, you put them under your chin and your face turns yellow. One so easily falls in love with—and in— places like this.