East End to Östermalm

Mark and Noah had barely gotten over COVID when it was time to leave for our trip—for which we already had tickets and a prepaid, non-refundable Noma reservation —for Denmark and Latvia. (Yes, this was nearly a full month ago. Yes, we took a long time to blog. Yes, we’ve been busy. Don’t judge.) On the first day, Noah got up obscenely early to get his extra-early train to Copenhagen so that he could stop by The Royal Library to spend a few hours in the archives, looking at manuscripts by composers Hans Abrahamsen (subject of his MA thesis) and Per Nørgård (subject of a case study in his dissertation). His train trip went smoothly, but Diane and Mark’s didn’t. Their train was delayed an hour leaving, and another half-hour on route, and the route was truncated to just short of the Danish border. But they made it over the bridge to Denmark eventually, and were slightly late meeting Noah for a nice French-ish dinner before we all collapsed at the AirBNB in the “Potato Rows.” By sheer ...

On Sunday the 17th, we picked up our rental car (A plug-in Ford hybrid) and headed south. Our destination: Vadstena, and its surroundings. After a stop in Norrköping to visit the Himmelstalund rock carvings and have a light lunch/fika, we arrived at Vadstena castle (too early for opera season!) and eventually landed at the Bjälbo Gästhus B&B. Michael went and petted the nearby horse. For breakfast Mark made a ham and cheese omelet from the ingredients in the fridge. We’d chosen Bjälbo Gästhus because of its proximity to Hov, where Mark’s great-grandmother Charlotta (his dad’s mom’s mom, catch all that?) was born. But first, we stopped at the church in Bjälbo, where we were told we could go up the tower—and although we couldn’t go all the way to the top, the woman who opened the church declared that “this is where Sweden was born,” and Noah was able to play the organ. We then made it a few km down the road to Hov, visited the church there, and saw some potentially relevant Holmg...

  Since we arrived in Sweden, there has been a remarkable lack of mask wearing.  The levels of infection appeared to be quite low, so we also started to unmask, Mark more-so than Diane.  But this didn't account for BA.4 and BA.5... So, the first symptom was a running nose.  It seemed like a cold.  The Covid lateral flow antigen test was indeed negative.  But, just in case, Mark stayed home (and Noah was computing away in the same room).  That night, feeling worse, Mark decamped to a spare apartment. There's a story there: Our toilet managed to get clogged and it took days for them to send someone to fix it.  In the meantime, the management gave us a key to an empty apartment.  Meanwhile, our fridge also failed, so the fridge in the new apartment was also being used. So, now this presented a third opportunity: An isolation place for wayward souls.  So, Mark removed himself to the spare apartment taking his computer and Covid test (and ana...

Monday June 6 was Sweden's National Day so we decided to take advantage of some of the special activities throughout the city.  Although I read in the English language newspaper that despite all the flags we saw and making it a holiday, it  is a failed attempt at instilling more nationalistic fervor (Mark's paraphrase). First stop was the Royal Palace  to see  Logården, a garden normally not open to the public. While trying to figure out where to go we stumbled onto a courtyard where some sort of 'Defense Music and high guard relief' was going on. We watched that for a while then left to find the garden, which frankly was a bit disappointing. But while there we happened to accidentally have a great view of the 21 gun cannon salute at noon that was happening at Skeppsholmen across the water. Then we wandered around the palace antiquities a bit and were about to leave when a women told us the mounted high guard was about to pass. So we watched that too. We not...

For 20 years we've been intermittently traveling internationally with our NJ friends Steve and Laurie.  And this year it was time to do it again.  Originally the plan was to go to Sardinia, but for complex scheduling reasons that fell apart.  So, Mark chose two locations in Italy: Camogli, a small fishing village near Genoa and Alba, a city in Piedmont.  And so, our adventure begins... Monday, 23 May : As usual, this begins early in the morning.  We had a 09h30 flight, so we were out of the house by 06h30 a.m.  The entire process wasn't a problem except for the long lines for inspection.  Interesting side-note: Sweden doesn't use millimeter wave object detection, just metal detection.  We arrived in Milano on time, around noon.  Then we obtained cash and proceeded to find the 1 p.m. bus.  Unfortunately, the smaller Linate airport is not connected to the train system, so we ended up on a bus that took 25 minutes to get to Milano Centrale....

Naturskyddsföreningen is the Swedish Society for Nature Conservation, and KTH Relocation had arranged for 4 recent guided events focusing "on bird watching and birds singing (as they are very active at this time of the year) and on the lovely flowering of the early summer." We missed the  bird watching in the forest events (one because it began at 5:30am, and the evening version because we were in Italy), but went to the other two.  Mark will post on Italy, but all I can say is that it was certainly a culture shock!  We both do love it there, but Sweden is certainly easier. The first was a trip to Fjäderholmarna (the closest island in the Archipelgo) and was very exciting because we finally got to take a boat to get there.  It turned out to be a very cold day so no sunbathing on the cliffs for us, but we still had a good time as it was nesting season (photos of goose and gull nests). Today they rented a bus to take us to Tullgarns Slott /  Royal Castle Tullga...