hög tid.

Mara: "My tracking cookies know exactly what I want. They're the only ones that really love me."
Me: (edits blog entry)

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OK, one last Swedish thing I have to mention has to do with the breakfasts there. I don't have time to write that right now (and actually I'm not sure how much I need to add to what Robyn just wrote about it...maybe I would just add that it doesn't seem to be nearly as strict as she suggests...), but I can mention the best sandwich I had in a week full of great sandwiches:

It's a slice of anise-and cinnamon-spiced plommonbröd (sourdough rye bread with plums or prunes), with Västerbotten cheese and a perfect nectarine on top. This bread was AWESOME, but they were sold out when I tried to get a loaf to bring home. I think this bakery's recipe was kind of a cross between trad plommonbröd and limpa bread ('nother recipe here). So good.

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gloomlifter.

This is my last post about Sweden for a while I imagine, just you know, finishing some thoughts.

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Culturally, the Swedes were an interesting change of pace. They were gloriously quiet, on the verge of uncomfortably so (especially in restaurants), but mostly it was wonderful. On the bus, in a restaurant, everywhere except a bar, there's a real awareness of how much noise you're emitting, and coming from Amsterdam, not known for its sedate restraint, this was ehhhh.....relaxing.

Also? People were generally superpersonable. I had zero non-friendly interactions with anyone, even in a bar late at night, and without exception everyone in the public/retail/restaurant sector seemed to understand that being friendly and quietly enthusiastic is not a terrible thing. I'm sure that this would change a little bit had I been in bigger cities, but as it was, it left me with the feeling that the Swedes are a placid, helpful, inquisitive, courteous bunch.

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On the critical side: there is definitely something bizarre going on here with their relationship to alcohol. I had heard via a Norwegian friend of Mara's named Fred that shit was fucked up, but I just kind of assumed it was just him. It's not.

What Fred said was that, on the weekends, the goal there is to get falling-down drunk, like toppling into a snowbank and not being found til morning drunk. But if you have more than a beer or glass of wine with dinner on Monday, people become very concerned about you. And the idea of a lunch cocktail is nearly criminal. I saw this firsthand.

This all seemed many times more alien after going from Sweden to Berlin, where (as I've said before) everyone who's not at work drinks beer all day long, everywhere. If you go into a corner grocery store and bring a bottle of beer to the cashier, they assume you want it opened right then so you can begin drinking it. And this is not like homeless person behavior...at least in summertime, which is the only time I've ever been there. It's young parents with babies in strollers, old people holding hands, etc. It seemed like a very adult place compared to Sweden.

The strict Swedish drunk-driving laws were a bit discomfiting. I believe that they probably do save lives by intimidating people into not drinking and getting behind the wheel. But as an American (an American who loves beer), the concept of monitoring your drinking Saturday night because you're scared of a breathalyzer roadblock Sunday morning at 10am? File that under This Would Never Fly In America.

Not that I saw enough policemen for this to even matter. Being on the road for roughly 14 hours, I saw two police cars, both interested in something besides my BAC.

They might have been going to put an injured animal out of its misery: in Sweden, if you hit an animal on the road and it escapes into the woods or wherever it came from, you're supposed to pull over, go to the place where you last saw it, and tie a piece of fabric around a convenient fence or tree. Then you call the police and report it. It's illegal to not do this. Then the police come and try to find the animal and rescue it, or failing that, deliver a mercy killing.

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counter-clockwise.

UPDATE: Pushed to the top due to new photos and text.

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Once again I find myself writing about a vacation in retrospect, which I guess is good because it means I was so busy vacationizing that I didn't have computer time/access. I mean I'm actually too busy at this very moment to be blogging, but I wrote most of this post in the Stockholm airport a few days ago, so I'm just adding photos now. Chronology out of joint, yo.

Retrospectivizing: on the other hand, as I think I've said, writing in retrospect be's difficult because your fresh and vital first impressions are not nearly as fresh and vital ten days later, and so every missed day's post is coming from the same, quickly solidifying post-vacation perspective, etc etc etc.

But yeah, what can we do about that now, nothing, I guess we forge ahead.

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The post-vacation me wants to talk about Sweden first. This being my worst-researched vacation ever, I really didn't know what to expect, physically (in terms of the landscape), culturally, etc.

It's nothing like visiting Italy, which you've seen in books and movies and travel shows for so long that when you finally go there you're barely surprised by anything except how much "more so" everything is than what it was depicted as.

And I guess that's why my primary impression of Sweden is one of quiet surprise: it's a completely beautiful country full of seemingly endless forests and lakes and hilly farmland, and very few people. And the light. Light like this makes anything/everything look better.

If there's anything bad to say here, it's that it's kind of monotonously beautiful, although I covered only a tiny portion of the northeastern coast, and you could probably say the same thing about many northeastern coasts around the world. But as I was driving this weekend, I tried to imagine the whole thing covered in a foot or two of snow for six months at a time and, yeah, I can't say that the abnormally high Swedish suicide rate didn't cross my mind.

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My quiet surprise completely extended to the food. I ate much, much better here than during my two-week-long wander through France a couple years ago, and nearly as well as we ate in Sardinia last year. I mean, on the page/screen, the food might not radiate excitement, but seriously, everything (with the exception of one cup of gas station coffee and a couple of pastries here and there) was very carefully prepared, perfectly seasoned, and fresh, fresh, fresh.

Admittedly, I was kind of in the palm of their hand: the food here is based on things I like. Fish, game, sausage, and liquor. But to be traveling in a foreign country unresearched and not have a bad meal is definitely noteworthy. Thinking back, some of the credit for this must go to Britt, who made 2 or 3 totally impressive dinners at home, and was constantly (quietly), off-handedly filling the fridge with a stream of preserved fish and fruit.

In kind of an Italian or French way, the quality of the ingredients pushed everything in the direction of absolute goodness. We had herring served a number of ways with potatoes, just herring out of a jar, sounds unpromising, but it's all quite a bit more subtle and complex than the marinated herring we see here in Amsterdam. These dishes were all really simple and unexpectedly delicious, and not nearly as fishy as they sound, especially the ones with caviar, which was mild, cold, refreshing, and difficult to stop eating, my favorite caviar ever.

Below: two of the many herring varieties sold by Abba (not the band); herring in dill cream and herring roe sauce with roasted potatoes; petite herring in a clove, allspice, and sugar marinade (ansjovis means sprat, not the anchovies we know) with red onions, sour cream, and mashed potatoes on knackebrod; bleak roe caviar and butter on knackebrod.

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höböcamp II.

Brandon turned out to be beautiful, one of my favorite parts of my trip. These pictures were all taken between 6am and 7am. Above: where we slept. Below: me making coffee; dried reindeer meat; tiny boat shed; empty cabins; the beach.

höböcamp I.

Above: tent, by Anna.

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I may have mentioned this: Last weekend I went camping for the first time.

People who know me well would, um, laugh at the idea of me camping. I am known for many things, but practical, survival-type skills are not on that list of things. In fact, I am more known for barely being able to survive from a practical perspective. I can turn on the stove, open the refrigerator, flush the toilet, and that's about where my practical survival skills end. Sometimes I do a load of laundry, but compensate by leaving it in the washer for a couple days.

So it was with a certain amount of trepidation that I accepted Anna's invitation to do some camping. I told her outright: "I just really hope you're not relying on me to do anything. I possess no relevant skills, unless we have to debug the campfire or troubleshoot a bear, etc. Just assume you're going camping with some creature that is nothing but liability and dead weight."

We eased into the whole camping thing by driving an hour or so north to Skellefteå and stopping for a picnic. Britt had told us that the weather up north was going to be "horrible". We kind of found that not to be the case: here is Skellefteå (above).



Our picnic occurred at a large cemetery, where there was a cafe that served these things that were supposed to be "moose poop". We had some. They were.....disappointing? Not because they didn't taste like moose poop ha ha but because they were dry as fuck.

From Skellefteå we went up to see the aforementioned burned-down summer home of Anna's family (below). When we eventually got back to Sikeå I saw some photos of the young Hillboms playing around the lake house when it wasn't burned down and it was all quite sad and nostalgic, but I won't subject you to that.

OK I show you one sad and nostalgic thing: their family's boat was still there, abandoned in a pile of weeds.

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So yes, then we spent 4 hours driving in circles looking for a place to camp, a strategy that I cannot really recommend if you want your driver and passenger to remain civil and upbeat. The problem was this: we'd seen tons of campgrounds on our way up the coast, but north of Luleå there was nothing. So we did that thing where you pull off the main highway onto a smaller road in the hope that you'll find what you're looking for. It didn't work.

It was with very empty bellies and our last remaining shreds of civility that we straggled into a campsite at Brandon (pronounced differently than it looks) around 10:00pm and looked for a place to set up the tent.

After an hour or so of determining that the campsite was closed for the season and we were the only people stupid enough to be doing what we were doing in 45F weather, we set up the tent anyway in the interest of eating sausage and going to sleep.

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garden of sweden.

Back at base camp in Sikeå for a few hours of dinner and packing before starting the multi-vehicle/multi-night trip home. Home for less than 24 hours before heading off to Berlin for 10 days.

The past 10 days have felt more than a little fairy-tale like, something that I'm sure will be cured almost immediately upon getting to the airport tomorrow morning. But for now, I'm going to try and enjoy my last few hours of Real Vacation for the forseeable future.

Lots more pics to come, but here's tonight's dinner in the yard: shrimp and bleak roe caviar with hard-boiled eggs and arugula on knackebrod; a surprisingly light reindeer stew with homemade black- and redcurrant gelees, and a lovely salad with peaches and sunflower seeds; homemade blackcurrant sorbet. It's real easy to become real jealous real fast of this house's berry production and the myriad uses thereof.

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luleå.

Luleå was (again this word) charming and totally empty during the day, but at night it became pretty beautiful, though still totally empty. The sunset was outrageous and uncapturable by my poor camera.

boden.

I survived camping. This is Day 1, Friday, in Boden to visit the place where Anna's family used to have a summer house until it burned down. These pictures are mostly taken from the car and are unPhotoshopped. That's an elk stand above.

single-bone anderssen.

Another trip to Umeå, this time to pick up the rental car. Above: the biggest rainbow I've ever seen, you could see the whole thing.

Below: dinner in Umeå here, one of the best things I've eaten in Sweden amidst a week of good eating. The menu said: Knäckepizza med confiterade tomater, västerbottensost, bakad Harr från Vardofjäll och färskostkräm.

It committed several grave culinary sins (seafood + cheese, calling itself "pizza", having carrots on it) but was cooked perfectly by someone who either really knew what they were doing or had a terrific stroke of luck. Basically: great homemade crispbread topped with parmesan-esque cheese, oven-dried tomatoes, red onion, roasted carrots and potatoes, and baked fish, with herbs on top and lemon creme fraiche served alongside in a cute little jar.

Trying to walk dinner off.

We were trying to end up in Umea first thing in the morning. Hanna, a friend of Anna's said "Yeah, you can stay in my room, I'm out of town hiking in the mountains, I have to warn you, it's a little messy."

Hanna's apartment was populated by extremely friendly militant vegan lesbians. Below: piece of art in Hanna's room with a funny text I will translate soon; a cartoon in the bathroom; the kitchen.

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how i love to taste your spicy meatball.

Above: the toolshed. Below: köttbullar, or Swedish meatballs to you and me. With lingonberries and mashed potatoes.

Below that: last night we biked 2km to what Anna had been referring to as "the sea". I was expecting waves. Instead there was an extremely clear and calm bay. The first picture is taken from the top of a ladder coming from the beach up to an outcropping of rocks where ships used to anchor. The clouds at the top of the frame are actually the reflection of the clouds in the water; the second picture is the view from on top of the rocks.

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