Reminiscing, in two ways

Thinking about Marcus is not always necessarily painful; there is also lots of gratitude for the experiences we had together. Today is that day he and I got together six years ago: Marcus, then a 25-year-old, and I going on my 22nd birthday. That time goes by is the cliché (and reality) that sometimes feels the hardest to accept. Time takes away some things away, not just pain. It also seems to want to snatch something vague but real that I still dearly want to hold on to: memories, feelings and sensations that I cling on to for a sense of nearness. I am too afraid that time might make them vaguer and paler and I hope so very much that it would not.

As I look back into this past month of mom and dad's visit so far, I think I'll let the voice from the earlier years speak to you about the places we had been, and things we have seen. As I go through time, I realize that I don't go through it unchanged. But I wish to bear with me some things that will remain a part of me.

Vrinnevi forest

“Vrinnevi Forest Nature Reserve (bike tour week 43)” (October 30, 2006)

“Bread and biking” (March 18, 2007)

“Vrinnevi forest” (April 20, 2008)

“Miscellaneous tales and pictures from Vrinnevi” (April 14, 2010)

Snedskär and the archipelago

“All for the love of Juanita" (May 2, 2007)

"Midsummer" (in Multiply, June 23, 2007)

“Swedish summer” (July 22, 2007)

The industrial landscape and Strömmen

“The Norrköping Times” (May 19, 2006)

“more pictures of Norrköping” (May 23, 2006)

“Norrköping Summer 2006” and "Winter 2006-07" (on Multiply, March 31, 2007)

“Even places tell stories” (May 5, 2007)

The city hall tower at Kulturnatten

“Up the brick tower we go” (October 8, 2007)

Autumn and mushrooms

“Autumn market and mushrooms” (September 20, 2008)

“Life as a hunter-gatherer must be hard” (September 18, 2010)

Copenhagen and Wienerbröd

“Food journal number 24: Danish, err, Wienerbröd” (August 13, 2007)

“Denmark: there and back again” (September 11, 2007)

Göta canal and the coast

“Inter-city biking (on week 42)” (October 21, 2006)

“Car trip to the archipelago” (on Multiply, June 13, 2007)

“The days are warm and the nights are clear” (July 29, 2008)

“Butterfly effect” (August 22, 2009)

Marmorbruket

“Marmorstigen” (on Multiply, April 4, 2007)

“Thursday road trip with friends” (July 25, 2011)

To you again

2006: the first, and one many pictures of us as a furball

Dearest Marcus,

I often imagine talking to you nowadays, trying to picture how it would be if you were with me and mom and dad in our activities. Sometimes I talk to myself out loud (when I'm alone), or in my head (when I'm with others); telling you what happened in the day, how I miss you and love you so much, how I wish some things turned out differently, and how I wish you were with me now. I meow to you and laugh (internally) at our inside jokes – but always feel loss at the same time. It's just not the same without the real you.

I've also gone back to sobbing out loud, sometimes in the morning, and sometimes at night, or sometimes before I take an afternoon nap, which we used to take together, cuddled up like a furball: us the two cats with no worries in the whole wide world. We would often tell each other how nice it felt to be able to feel so comfortable and worry-free with another person. Cuddled up with you, I felt instantly relaxed. It was truly a wonderful feeling. I sometimes try to recreate it in my thoughts, in order to get myself to sleep. But it’s not the same without your skin, your smell and your breath. In that way, it’s quite sad too, to recall beautiful feelings.

Anyway, mom and dad and I have been through many nice activities, partly to things we had visited together before, but also new things and places (like mushroom picking, and Copenhagen), and events like Kulturnatten and the Film Festival. It's fun but also quite tiring; I haven't had the luxury of the ”ordinary weekend” of doing nothing – taking things slow, hanging out in the living room, napping, and just enjoying each other's company in doing small things. Besides, an uneventful weekend wouldn't be the same alone. Even food experiments are put on hold a while. In contrast, my days these past weeks are pretty much filled with activity. They are all nice, and I think mom and dad are enjoying much too. But of course things would have been much nicer if you were with us, or if I could at least relax with you at the end of the day as I used to, and have you to talk with about the day's events. You were a great listener, but you often also came up with an insight, a funny rant, a joke, or just something to say. We talked about all sorts of things. Now my evenings are too quiet. So that's why I pretend to talk to you sometimes.

Today, I watched some shows from our hard drive with mom and dad. There was a series called Alan Whicker’s Journey of a Lifetime. You would have liked it, I think. The host, Whicker, is something like an eccentric but polite old gentleman going around the world interviewing people he had previously met while making another show for the BBC. In the last episode, he revisited a couple who had been living alone self-sufficiently in an island between Australia and Tasmania for the past (at the time) 36 years. The woman said that it was the greatest fallacy to think that you ran out of things to talk with your partner after 36 years alone together. The wonderful thing for her was that they could always turn a new stone. Talking about their relationship, she thought that it was pretty nice to hear the plane sputtering each time they rode one. The thought of she and her husband dying together was comforting, so “at least he wouldn't have to worry about how to run the toaster” – but also because they wouldn't have to worry about what to do when they lose the other. The couple was old at the time of the interview. At the end of the segment, Whicker disclosed that some years later, the woman suffered from dementia, and she was cared for by her husband until her death. After her passing, the husband decided to leave their island paradise to move to a care home in the mainland where he also later died.

They reminded me of you and me. We often said that there would be no other thinkable person to live with in a desert island than each other, partly because we worked really well together in a practical sense, but also because we found each other stimulating and inspiring year in and year out. And in our fantasies, as in that woman's, we also thought that it would be a comfort if we could, through some accident, die together. But like that couple too, it really seems to be the case that someone has to die first. At least, that's what mostly happens.

I felt really sad for the old couple. I really sympathized with them, and not just because I saw myself in them. When things happen the way they do, it’s quite regrettable sometimes why things just can't happen according to one's fantasy.

Thinking about the inevitability of the end of the universe, of entropy and the finitude of all conceivable things, I really do wonder sometimes, “What’s the point?”

The point was you. I can say so much, even without having lived so long. It sounds a little self-effacing to say so, but it’s not my intention to be self-effacing. What I mean is, that there are few chances in the world where you can meet a person outside of you that you really truly can live with and understand, and feel comfortable with to a degree that you and I, and probably that couple, had. I feel this to be true, and I almost know it too, because a lot of people don't even get to live with that kind of person, and in fact never find this person at all. Just that one opportunity to find someone to love this way is strong enough to leave an impression for a lifetime. It's enough to have given meaning to my whole universe, so to speak. Everything else in the future, when you've lost half of yourself, just seems too trivial in comparison, even though they might also be good and nice experiences, and I can look forward to them too in a way. That's how important you are to me. What I would give to have you back, knowing that even this is an absurd thought.

I wonder how that man had felt, as he left his wife's remains in the island that they loved. And I wonder what it must have felt, waiting for the ultimate decline after having already suffered a loss so great that really, dying tomorrow wouldn't much matter. I almost hope, for his sake, that he didn't have to wait so long. It's obvious that they must also have loved each other very much.

This week's fortune-cookie-wisdom, in the form of my calendar's quote for the week goes: “When I hear people groan that that life is hard, I ask them ‘compared to what?’” The answer is not necessarily death (the state of non-being is neither easy nor hard). But life can indeed seem very hard compared to fantasy – what life could have been, and what you would have wished it could be – but hadn't, and wouldn't come to be. I hadn't died with you, and now I even have to live without you. In that way, life is hard. It is also hard, in the sense that it is heartless.

I think about you always. I miss you and love you so much.

Your Joy

The heartache and the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to

Miracle Max: Hey! Hello in there! Hey!

What's so important?

What you got here that's worth living for?

Westley: True love!

Inigo: "True Love", you heard him?

You could not ask for a more noble cause than that.

- The Princess Bride

I've been avoiding writing in the blog for a reason, and that reason is that I haven't got my own feelings sorted out. I realize that though the days are honestly all right and some even quite good – that inside, when I'm alone with no one else to have to bare my feelings to, that the fabric of me is frayed. It seems like a giant task, too much to ask, to come out of this whole. Marcus used to say (for instance, in not regretting anything) that life was short. From my perspective, a life that seemed short now appears to be unbelievably long. To live to old age: where I'm concerned, that feels like forever. Despite being composed and mustering my strength to be normal, I often wish that I could scream into a hole; and at times, I feel like falling into it.

Except to say that, I think I will spare you from many deficient words that describe my thoughts, and take the chance to emit a sign of life from me. Because isn't it what this is all about: deciding, trying, and learning to live, without an answer to the most important Whys, and fully knowing that anything and anyone we live for – even those most important, and the most noble causes worth living for – have an end?

Mom and dad are arriving to visit me tomorrow and they're staying until November. Sigh. Gotta hold on a little bit more at a time. Time is slow, and life is long.

A letter

Your drawing of who you are, from a military (group leadership) course you went to in northern Sweden on March 2006, a month after we started to live together. (From top: The thinker -- different feelings -- a sleeping cat -- martial arts -- you and me in the center with hearts -- not knowing what to do with all your education -- and going in and out of the hospital).

My dearest, my loved one, my sweet sweet Marcus.

August 5, 2011.

We both don’t believe in afterlife, and yet for some reason it feels easier to pretend to address you in what I’m about to say. My blog entries are so thought out and, though not impersonal, were never really intimate. And I could never write otherwise about you.

It’s now been three days, and I must admit that it hadn’t gotten easier. My thoughts always go back to you. We both used to think it was hard enough just being separated by physical distance. We longed for each other, but we also knew with sweet anticipation that we would again soon meet (“and time better run fast!”). When you died, the saddest thing for me was to experience that time hadn’t stopped then either. I felt how my own life alone went on as the minutes passed – and how heavy and distinct the minute hand seemed to move! – separating me from you with each moment with a now uncrossable distance, and there wouldn’t be a seeing you again. Mornings are by far the worst time of the day for me. I feel devastated. Aside from the fact that you’re not here to curl up with me, I also soon realize that I have a day ahead in which you are nowhere to be found, and that tomorrow wouldn’t change things. We’re never going to see, touch, smell, or hear each other again, and that hurts me.

---

We were always aware of the shortness of life, somewhere in the background of our everyday living. You told me about your aplastic anemia early on, during our tour around Garisonen. The conversation itself was undramatic. When I read more about the disease, I realized that if we would be together as a couple – and how we wanted to be together so! – I would also have to be prepared to lose what I so love. You said it yourself, in one of your e-mails to me (dated August 10, 2006) after our first visit to the Philippines together and you had returned home. We waited to be reunited in Sweden after a month’s time.:

"Hello my love. I was just thinking about you as me and Per were watching some of the pictures from the Philippines. I know that this doesn’t help you very much, but I miss you, so terribly much. A big portion of every day is spent thinking of you. I imagine you in my arms, kissing; I try to imagine your warmth, your smell. You’re like a drug, a drug that I’m really hooked on. Being around you drives me crazy with happiness, being without you drives me crazy with longing. Oh, why can’t we be crazy and happy together now? Before I met you, I used to fantasize how it would be to love some unconditionally. In my fantasies, it would only be nice and good, I could never have imagined how love sticks together with pain like two sides of a coin. Sometimes, the price for our love seems to be quite high, but on the other hand, price is in this matter irrelevant. Like the drug addict, I would, without hesitation, pay anything for my fix. Joy I love you, so, so much."

To be with you, Marcus, I was also willing to pay any price. It was love almost at first sight (You’re gorgeous. I fall in love all over again seeing pictures of you from 2005, but I was even more impressed by you when we started talking, and I knew we fit like hand to glove). I would move to a distant country and leave behind my routines, friends and family – even an existing healthy boyfriend that I had before I met you – for a mortal man who made such a powerful impression on me and filled me with such awe. No matter how short our time would be together, I knew that you, unique you, was worth the plunge. I wanted your love and wanted to love you. I also wanted to care for you and make you happy. I don’t regret ever choosing you. You’re the best. You know that because I said it to you so many times. Together, we were crazy with happiness. But you were right, too: the other side of loving deep is a deep pain. There’s really no answering the question “why” when it comes to a death, but why couldn’t we be happy and crazy together right now too?

At times, we talked about how it would be to lose each other to Death. You were never afraid of death itself. The dead can’t help but being dead after all; their own demise does not affect them. But the awareness of dying was another thing. The consequence of one of us dying is an unwilling and forceful separation in which the living would suffer more and longer, and you knew this. It wouldn’t matter if we lived a hundred years more, you used to say. No amount of time will ever be enough for our love, and there lies the pain of separation that will be hurtful at any age. Sometimes, we would hold each other so tight, wishing that we could be so close to each other and meld into one being where there is both a you and a me. Separation is so unfair, when no one wills it.

---

Another one of your drawings from the course you went to in March 2006. (A cliff, probably with alligators and not knowing where to go -- taking the jump into the uncertain and finding yourself happy on a higher level)

Day 4.

Love and pain is one binary; dying and living is another.

This autumn would have been 6 years to the time we met and fell in love. Autumn would also have been five years since the day we exchanged engagement rings in this very couch I sit and write, and one and a half years since our wedding day. We lived those six years intensely. You really knew how to make the most out of life. Our small living space and meager funds at the start weren’t even an issue for living well. We genuinely felt that we were living a better life than most people, not least because we had found our life’s love in each other, and we created lots of happy memories. It was always a good life, also despite the many interruptions in the form of hospitalizations, treatments and health setbacks which, through the years and the progression of the disease, seemed to interrupt more frequently and predictably, like receiving post in the mailbox. Somewhere inside us, we hoped that we could buy more and more time: that the body could hold out a bit longer or that science could come up with something new, to stave off the inevitable and hurtful, at least for a while.

Of a lot of things that happen in this world, many are unfair. That a beautiful person like you, with so much integrity, intelligence and energy for life, should have a disease so rare, life-threatening, and with few options to cure, is pure shit. It was frustrating especially for you. You were a determined person, driving different self-projects despite whatever the world threw at you. No one who first saw you would have guessed you were sick, and those who knew about it never failed to be impressed by you. In the recent soldier’s test at the home guard just a month ago, you even jogged faster in green uniform than a whole bunch of healthy people there. You didn’t believe it was worth doing things half-heartedly and for you there was no excuse why healthy people shouldn’t give their all to what they do when they could. It frustrated you (to hell, I imagine) not to be able to do things you were passionate about to a hundred percent, such as not beginning to teach, or being able to do regular runs like we used to. But even then, you never let the disappointment get the better of you. Instead, you found other passions and self-projects and immersed yourself in them too.

You were determination and integrity personified, and thus I could imagine to feel what a blow the failed transplant last year really had been on you. If the transplant had worked, it wouldn’t just have meant a cure or a longer life together, but a real tangible chance to really fully live at your full capacity, which was an enormous one. When the depression from the shock and disappointment of the failed transplant finally waned, you pulled yourself up so well. Fucking shit. There isn’t a more determined person than you, who had a greater will to live. And that what makes me angry about you dying so young: because even when you felt crushed and death by your own hand seemed a tempting way out of your misery, you said you never could get yourself to do it because there was so much to live for. You even fought to stay awake through the last hours of your life, despite only the tiniest foothold of hope that existed there and the knowledge that our “goodbye”, and that kiss, would likely be our last. You guessed – you told me – that you were going to die that night. And yet, as a man who wanted to live, you did everything the nurses and the doctors told you to do, in the last hours as they were scrambling to sustain you.

In that tiny but existing hope for life were all your dreams of what our future would bring, where we two and our great love stood at the center. I know that part of your will to live was also to protect me, because it was always agonizing for you to imagine my inconsolable sadness. Oh, Marcus. If you could only see me now, your heart would break. Mine is also broken.

---

Day 5.

I still have a heavy heart waking up and I don't know what to do. The first thing I do in the morning is look at pictures of you (and we’ve been through a lot!). They are a joy to look at because I remember so much of you, but they also fill me with an unbelievable longing, and also sadness. I’ve also been reading and rereading our old correspondence from before and shortly after we became together. Reading them makes me remember exactly how it felt falling in love: how my chest swelled with so much excitement that it might burst; yet how sensitive fingertips touched you in all gentle carefulness, and how this tension was beautiful and strange. I also understand all the more how much we loved each other so much, even then. That we should find each other is really magical.

Here is what you wrote me on November 4, 2005. That week, I stayed in your apartment (it would be our first apartment!) before leaving for Holland, where I was to study for three months. We made sure we booked tickets to regularly see each other, and you were going to go down to Holland on the 15th, a whole week and a half from when you wrote this letter:

"... I’ve been finding suspiciously long black hairs all around my apartment since you left. No, just kidding, I don’t mind that at all, rather the opposite. They remind me of you and that your stay here was more than just a wonderful dream. Picking them up reminds me of you, and I'm a bit hesitant to throw them away. I so miss the feeling of your presence around me, and I don’t know how I will last until the 15th. The hairs trigged an unbelievable longing in me. The surge after you was almost too much to bear. That is why I had to write you now, since I can’t call you at the moment."

As usual, you feel as I feel. I feel that I'm going through the same thing right now, without you in the places we used to be. Your things remind me that our time together was more than just a good dream. It was the most beautiful and wonderful reality. Your things – and pretty much everything I see – remind me of how good it felt in your presence, and how hard it is to live in your absence. Frankly, I don’t know what to do with your things. I want them to stay where they are, to remind me of you. If only I was certain, as you were that day, that I would see you in a week and a half’s time from now. But it’s never going to happen. I can’t call you at the moment, and that is why I write you now, because it’s too, too much to bear.

I want you. I want you. I want you. But nothing can ever be able to give me what I want from now on.

I love you whatever happens. I love you always.

Yours,

Joy

Thursday road trip with friends

From Norrköping to Oxelösund and back

On weekdays, we have access to Marcus' dads' girlfriends' car – a dying Mitsubishi Carisma which all concerned are using just as long as it's is rolling. Despite all the signs that it might conk out soon, it still passed last year's safety check. But before the car retires for good, we're all kind of making the most of its last days. What better way to maximize an old car than a car trip, preferably somewhere near (in case the car decides to break down)? Our friends Per and Paulina were in a summer house down at the coast of Oxelösund, about 60 kilometers from here. We decided to visit them last Thursday and drive them back to Norrköping through a scenic coastal route.

Öxelösund is a small industrial municipality at the Baltic coast, best known for the gigantic iron works there, which easily makes up about a third of the municpality's land area. However, there are also natural harbors there, and small islands with protected forests. These nature reserves are considered important to small industrial towns like Oxelösund, as they provide oases where people can go out in nature, and wild animals can thrive. Per's family has a summer house in one of these islands, just at the edge of a protected forest. Our coastal car trip back to Norrköping started there (Labelled (1) in the map above).

So what's there to see in a small island in an industrial town? A cold war-period top secret artillery fortress!

Obviously, from our picture there, it's not top secret anymore these days. Since 2003, the Femörefortet (Femöre fortress) opened to the public as a museum, showing how Sweden was like in the cold war. Artillery fortresses like these would have protected Sweden's coastline from a possible Russian invasion. Femörefortet's radars could spot ships halfway to the island of Gotland and shoot targets up to 15 kilometers away. It's underground tunnels could even protect from a Hiroshima-sized nuclear explosion, according to the trivia on their website.

A tour group and a big gun on a hill overlooking the sea

The island of Femöre also has another, more civilian-themed tourist attraction: Femörehuvud, a light station – a lighthouse and surrounding cottages – used between 1867 to 1974. The lighthouse is most often the cover of Oxelösund's tourist brochures, and we had a good time picture-taking there.

A typical Swedish coastal landscape: sea, cliff, and red cottage

Marcus, Paulina, Per, and the lighthouse

Here we were laughing because we thought Marcus was taking close-ups of our nostrils. I must say, it's a good picture after all! :-)

Joy and Marcus at the edge of the sea

We stuck to the coastal road on the way back to Norrköping, passing small towns and forests through a really narrow, really curvy road. Lunch was at Nävekvarn (marked (2) on the map), a small harbor area that has one gradeschool, one grocery, and a camping. Here's Marcus happily eating his schnitzel in the area's only restaurant, which is simply (and aptly) named Hamnskrogen, "the harbour restaurant". The driver needs his schnitzel!

He even has a bit of sauce on the corner of his mouth. So adorable!

After more driving in the curvy narrow road, we neared Norrköping and stopped at our old favorite lookout place at Marmorbruket, an old marble mine (marked (3) in the map). It's always nice to walk around Marmorbruket and we take all our visiting friends there to see the bay into Norrköping. The flora around the area is also interesting, as well as seeing the old water-filled marble pits that I think are up to 40 meters deep. People fish herring there in the summer and the ground is covered with hepatica flowers in the spring. Also, if you're doing a car trip around the area, its lookout point provides a relaxing and beautiful picnic- and resting area.

This was our last point for a snack before heading back home. The setting sun and the cloudy sky gave a mysterious green-blue shade to the water, sailboats floated by on full sail, the summer grass bent with the wind, and four friends stood in a cliff, looking across the bay towards Norrköping.

Pussy cat, pussy cat, where have you been?

I haven’t met my sister Lea since February 2010, and as she was in London at the end of June for work, we decided to meet there after her training and be turista for four days.

Hullo, dear! Meeting Lea, near Kew Gardens.

We stayed at this centrally located ladies-only place called Hostel 4-star at Piccadilly Guest House, which is a 15- or 20-minute walk to most London attractions. It's a stone's throw away from the Piccadilly Circus station, the shopping streets, Hatchard’s, Fortnum and Mason – and is even in the same street as a century-old cheese shop, a five-story bookstore and a medium-sized grocery store. It has the perfect location, with the down side of having to share two bathrooms with about 30 or 40 girls (if the dorms are full, which they seem to be on weekends). With its corridors of bunk beds, the dorms themselves look a bit like they're out of a military movie, but it was clean and cool inside, and they provide nice home-like sheets and fluffy blankets. From our experience, the other guests were considerate about keeping their noise levels down, especially in the evenings. The hostel also never ran out of toilet paper. Admit it, it's useful to know!

Around Piccadilly Circus. Clockwise from top left: our hostel room, Lea with cheese from the cheese shop, Joy the tourist, and the statue of Eros.

We avoided bathroom queues in the hostel by starting our day at 6am, thereby beating other tourists to the usual tourist spots as well. We usually came back to the hostel after 10pm, and by then most of the other guests have also already showered. With that schedule, you can guess our days were packed!

We managed to see a lot of things in four days. A tip though: if you're thinking of spending whole afternoons in museums (which you easily can), you'll probably need to sacrifice other attractions. What we didn't see but were considering seeing were The Tower (18 pounds a head saved), the Charles Dickens house, Sherlock Holmes museum and Karl Marx's grave at Highgate. But we did get to go to most other things we wanted to go to: the Prime Meridian at Greenwich, Hyde Park, the usual tourist spots like Westminster, Downing Street and Buckingham Palace, and some museums. We had a lot of fun at the museums at Greenwich and spent a whole afternoon in the British Museum (where we almost got sick of seeing Greek vases). But we also wished we spent more time in the National Gallery and less time in Tate Modern. I found out that (1) old art works are indeed impressive in their full size, but that (2) I just cant understand abstract art.

Lines, lines, lines. The Millenium footbridge to St. Paul's seen from the South Bank, and Lea and Joy at the Greenwich line! (It's a long line to the Greenwich line, friends. And it costs 7 pounds to even get there.)

Goofing around. At the interactive visitor center at Greenwich. Trying out a jousting glove and helmet, and dressed as a ship pensioner (Lea in blue) and a ship drunkard (Joy in the yellow jacket of shame). I want a hat like that.

I got a whole load of pictures (goofy, touristy, scenic, etc.), but I guess I'll save that for my Multiply page one day. Haven't been uploading there for some time now.

The Globe Theatre remains the strong favorite for me in the trip. It's a recreation of the old Globe in which Shakespeare performed his plays, erected just 300 meters from the original site. Here, plays are read and acted as they were in Shakespeare's day (they even wear hand-sewn costumes!). Rather than the audience being separated from the actors by darkness and silence, plays are performed in natural light, and actors walk right through the crowd, even interacting with them or throwing things in their direction. We went to watch Christopher Marlowe's Dr. Faustus standing in the yard, where the “penny-stinkers” used to watch the plays for a penny. Being so close to the performers – almost being on stage and being part of the production – was a unique experience. As they say, the playwrights of those days must have written for the penny-stinkers. What's more, it only costs 5 pounds to watch at the yard, today's equivalent of a penny! I highly recommend the yard. I would watch a play there again if I ever visit London again. Better book early though, as tickets seem to sell fast.

The wooden 'O'. The Globe from the outside, and inside during the guided tour. The white space is the yard. If you don't mind standing for 2+ hours, it's the best experience for 5 pounds. And yes, there's intermission.

On our last full day in London, Lea and I discovered the cheap and great clothes store called Primark, at Oxford street. They have nice chic and feminine clothes with prices comparable with shopping in Thailand. Lea even swears than some items are cheaper! Man, I wish we had Primark. But then again, maybe I'd break my wallet buying loads of cheaply prices items. However, now I also know that if I did shop for clothes more often than I do, London would be a great weekend shopping destination. By coincidence, most other shops were on sale when we were there (first week of July). Most things were half price than if I would have gotten them on sale in Sweden! My spoils: a pair of bronze-colored leather sneakers from Clarks (to replace my Eccos) at 24 pounds, and two heavily-discounted women’s shirts from T.M. Lewin, which set me back 40 pounds (I love the well-made cuffs and collars. I became a convert to quality shirts). Lea paid for my Primark buys, heheh!

Crowds and curved lines. Shoppers at Oxford and Regent streets. (Don't you just love those curved buildings?) London is indeed as crowded and congested as they say it is. In fact, some places reminded us of Quiapo.

Well, actually Lea paid for most everything else (thanks, Lea!). I kinda feel guilty that we ended up having really expensive afternoon tea at Fortnum and Mason (since we didn’t look at the prices, to begin with!), but that experience was a highlight in itself too: eating finger sandwiches, scones and sweets to the tune of a man playing the piano and the scent of perfume. I kept on forgetting putting the filter on the cup though (the tea pot did not have those small holes at the bottom of the spout), so I ended up with leaves in my cup. And the cakes, though tasty (and adorned with gold leaf!) were really too, too sweet. I wish we knew we could order more sandwiches! More about food: there's a lot of food variety in London, but some areas seem to be more expensive than others. It was also hard for us to find an open restaurant in late evenings, which seemed strange for a city full of hungry tourists. Don’t worry though mom, we never got hungry!

Thanks again Lei, and hope to see you again soon!

A weekend in early June

Cat-Joy and Cat-Marcus. "Purrr! Feed us!"

It's two days to midsummer and the weather is gray and cold, with hardly any summery days this week. I long back to the sunshine days of early June when we tented out in M&M's countryside yard. On days like that, I remember mom and dad's visit here last year and wish they were here. It was about at that time of the year that we were hiking up in the mountains of Kolmården and Vrinnevi forest.

Well, there's been no hiking yet this year, but just backyard camping. We had done this a couple of times before, and though it's not the outdoors for real, it certainly does make for a refreshing siesta.

...Plus, you get room service with complementary G&T :-)

Upon waking up, we see a whole family of small deer across the field. Cat-Marcus decides to stalk 'em!

The deer were at the edge of the forest hiding in the tall grass, so unfortunately it was too far away for the camera zoom. We also forgot to save the pictures taken from the scope. You've just got to take my word for it that there were deer there and that it wasn't only the G&T!

Come back, sun! I want more days like this!