home and away

2012-01-31T15:22:00.007+01:00

Dear readers! You are a loyal little bunch. You smile with me and keep the excitement going when I'm in my good times, and you cry with me in my hard times. What do you say about a new entry for the new year?

The step to start blogging again was harder than I thought it would be. I've been hanging out a lot with friends, exercising, started cooking food again and even been having some adventures, but somehow I haven't had the enthusiasm to write about these things. A week ago, I reread my old entries and I kind of missed being here. So right now I can honestly say that it feels nice to be writing again.

Because I write for a living (a dissertation, that is), the thought that words convey meaning shouldn't be so foreign to me. But somehow I seem to learn that better writing about my life than writing about research. Over the years in this blog, strangers had become friends and accidental passersby had become readers. And in my absence from this blog (which is the longest I've been away here so far), I got warm letters, comments and blog entries from friends but also others who basically don't know me but feel some kind of nearness. To know that you are read and that people appreciate what you write is the best reward for any writer, not least when you're writing a dissertation that you're not sure anybody would read out of interest alone. So, I just wanted to begin by dropping a line of thanks to everyone behind the scenes (or computer screens). I'm back, for better or worse, to grab some of your precious time as you read this from work or when you're supposed to be doing something more productive like doing your laundry ;-)

“Acceptance” and such words aren't really a good way to describe what I'm going through. It's more like learning to live with a situation that's kind of impossible to live through. Life just had become different. I don't just mean eating breakfast alone or hearing only my own laugh in front of the TV. It feels that I have had to figure out (and still am figuring out) a new life routine, when I basically only have myself to plan for. What to do after work? What to do in the weekends? What to do after dinner? Those things kind of just fix themselves when you live with someone. Living alone, you seem to have to put a lot more effort into just going out and doing something, since you don't have your natural socialization at home anymore. Marcus once told me of a mallard-analogy from the Home Guard: they appear to look like they swim effortlessly above water, but in fact they tread like crazy. So, keeping afloat is possible, but it no doubt takes a lot of emotional and physical work.

Projects are good, though. I have a whole list of them now: things I started on, things I'm planning to do, and things that I want to do further in the future. With projects, I feel that I could invest time and energy in another way than just doing routine stuff. “Investing” is also a good descriptive word, because I can get motivation back from the time I put in, and I can live on a good moment for days to come. In the past months, I have been in the process of applying for a Swedish driving license, so it was back to driving school for me. I've also been learning to tour skate, and the few times I have been skating on natural ice have been really awe-inspiring for me.

And so the 6 days have turned to 6 weeks, into 6 months. And time is always running forward. I can't help thinking that things would have been so much more fun if Marcus were here. And it's still unfathomable that he won't be back. But there's still fun left in the world, at least. It's hard to realize that sometimes, but I shouldn't forget it.

Reminiscing, in two ways

2011-10-11T23:27:00.012+02:00

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

2011-10-09T00:38:00.006+02:00

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

2011-09-13T08:50:00.005+02:00

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

2011-08-08T10:31:00.024+02:00

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

2011-07-25T19:53:00.012+02:00

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?

2011-07-09T20:30:00.018+02:00

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

2011-06-23T10:49:00.009+02:00

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!

more grill recipes

2011-05-29T15:47:00.008+02:00

Since the purchase of our grill pan, we've been grilling indoors two or three times a week. We've grilled bread, sausages, tomatoes, fish, lamb, pork, beef, you name it! I heard you can even grill shellfish, but I haven't gone that far... yet. And I haven't grilled shrimp yet. Perhaps a future project?

I owed mom a recipe of the Mediterranean tuna kebab I was hinting about. Here it is, plus a couple of other food pictures I thought I'd throw in as well.

I remembered to take a picture when we ate half of the lot

This tuna recipe comes from a big, heavy recipe book we received from Margareta and Mats last Christmas, with the title Maten runt Medelhavet (Food around the Mediterranean). There are really some inspiring recipes in there, most of which are not as uncomplicated as they look (Making your own paté, anyone?) These tuna kebabs are so easy I basically prepared them on a stressful evening and we still managed to get restaurant-style food in less than 15 minutes. That is one major advantage of a grill pan over a coal grill: time saved!

Mediterranean tuna kebab recipe

about 250 grams tuna - I used frozen tuna steaks, defrosted in room temp.
1 tablespoon lemon juice
1 tablespoon extra virgin olive oil
large capers (caperberries) - if not available, its OK without it
large seedless olives - mine were filled with anchovies

1. Soak some barbecue sticks in water 15 to 30 minutes before grilling (not sure if this was necessary for the grill pan, but I soaked mine. I also had to cut them short to fit the pan).

2. Cut the tuna into same-size cubes. Mix the lemon juice and oil and marinade the fish there for some minutes. The recipe says you could also add in very thin lemon peel strips into the marinade (only the yellow part, no white rind).

3. Fire up the grill in high-medium heat. While it's heating, prepare your barbecue sticks, alternating the fish, capers and olives.

4. When the grill is hot, put the kebabs in and cover with a lid. Cook for 2 minutes per side but not more; overcooked fish is dry and tough and the cubes cook easily. We served this with homemade bread with tapenade and a tomato-mozzarella salad.

Steakhouse-style steak

This was our dinner yesterday: steakhouse-style steak inspired by Chef John from the Foodwishes blog (recipe here). I told you this blog is our new favorite! Instead of rib-eye though, we had entrecôte, and instead of the herb butter, we made a red wine reduction sauce out of our unfinished bag-in-box. You don't have to make a sauce; it was a bit too overpowering for this steak recipe and herb butter probably works really well, besides being easier to make. In other respects, we followed the recipe as it looked in the site, from the clarified butter coat to the dry spice rub and the resting period. Y-U-M-M-Y!

If you're not into steaks, maybe this simple lunch is more enticing:

I know: the only grilled thing in the picture above is the store-bought pita bread that we grilled on the dry grill pan instead of toasting. If you turn the bread 45-degrees as you grill, you get that nice grill pattern that really looks neat.

I just wanted to show you this picture because (1) it had no meat at all in it! Haha! (2) I made the soup myself and it was actually quite good and filling. It's also a breeze to make and you get some soup leftovers that you can save for later in the week or freeze for a lazy day.

Cauliflower soup recipe

3 potatoes
1 yellow onion
1 garlic clove
a medium-sized cauliflower head, ca. 300 g.
1 tablespoon olive oil
1 and a half cubes vegetable bullion
2.5 deciliters (about 1 cup) cooking cream
salt and pepper

1. Peel the potatoes, onions and garlic. Cut into small pieces. Cut the cauliflower into smallish cubes and sauté all the vegetables in olive oil.

2. Add 8 deciliters (about 3.3 cups) of water and the bullion cubes. Gently boil for 15 minutes. Add the cream and let boil for about 5 minutes more.

3. Blend the soup until smooth. I used an immersion blender. Salt and pepper as desired, and it's done! You can serve it with anything, too: shrimp or crayfish, ham and bread, or salad.

Enjoy!

365 days

2011-05-26T15:01:00.014+02:00

We celebrated our first anniversary in the hospital! Nothing too serious, though. Marcus was a admitted as an inpatient to receive some antibiotic drops following an infection / allergic reaction — something he seems to get a little too often these days. His immune system hasn't recovered yet from the chemotherapy last autumn, so he needs to be rushed to the hospital when he develops a fever. This past quarter, we've been spending about a week a month in the hospital for these treatments — it's not ideal, but its necessary and we make the most we can out of it. I sleep over (we share the small hospital bed too!), we bring our hard disk with movies, and I even work from the hospital when I don't have meetings. It's pretty cozy, actually. And it just all goes back to the motto that you can always still have a good time, whatever life has to offer.

These "antibiotics visits" are also different from other longer hospitalizations because there's a lot of freedom to move. Outside the times that Marcus has to have the drops, we can walk around the forest, take a car out somewhere and take a picnic, or even go malling (making sure it's not rush hour, of course). This time, Marcus even got permission to participate in home guard exercises. Shooting rifles in the morning; inpatient at night!

No, that green uniform is not the hospital gown.

The Friday before our anniversary, we bought some food from home that we were supposed to have in the weekend: paté, cornichons, homemade bread, and wine (no restriction on the alcohol either for Marcus! But we just bought a small bottle anyway). We had a light dinner and had these as an evening snack.

In tune with the whole "hostel" feel of the hospital visit, here's how we chilled the white wine. Heheh! No, hospital rooms here do not usually have their own mini-refrigerators.

And here we are, with our goofy smiles, waiting to eat:

When we got back home, I picked up a package from Kristine at the post office. She probably didn't realize it, but it came right on time for our anniversary, so thanks! Lea also sent us a package about a week and a half before. Thanks too, Lea! You guys are so cute!

Kristine's "care package" contained lots and lots and lots of candy! Whee! Lots of candy names that I haven't even heard of: Mike and Ike, Swedish Fish (to think we live in Sweden!), Jolly Rancher, etc. etc. I just had to pose Marcus with all the goodies.

But what the... wait a minute! Marcus, what do we have here?

What a joker!

A grill pan fan

2011-05-01T21:49:00.008+02:00

We just discovered this food channel on YouTube that we already know will be an all-time favorite. It's called Food Wishes and is linked to a blog with the same name. The guy who runs the sites, Chef John, was a culinary arts teacher and is now a freelance food writer and food blogger. I highly recommend the sites. All the foods seem delicious, and nothing I've watched so far seems overly complicated. On the contrary, Chef John makes cooking look simple and genuinely full of pleasure, and he doesn't pepper his viewers with gourmet jargon that can otherwise turn a home cook off. It's just straightforward, good food, presented in an uncomplicated way.

Well, Chef John indirectly inspired us to go look for a grill pan. Or, rather, his recipe for lamb with minted honey sherry vinaigrette did. You see, we're a bit reluctant to have a charcoal grill in the balcony, but as we really wanted to make this recipe, we had to find a way.

This is the grill pan we ended up buying: an Anders Petter "Grythyttan" cast iron grill pan. By happy coincidence, we found one in new condition at the second hand store for 70 kronor – a new one costs 500 – just when we were looking for a good, solid grill pan! The pan is really heavy, and feels even more solid than our regular cast iron pan.

We followed Chef John's recipe using this video from another source as a reference on how to cook meat on a grill pan (we also used a lid to cover the pan, as they did on the video). The only significant difference was that we used the pan indoors on a regular stove. Of course, we had to open the windows to let out the smoke, but it was really worth it. The result of our indoor grilling tastes and looks like it would with outdoor grilling -- even the smoke taste! Incredible but true!

Here it was! We even grilled the pita bread on the pan!

And here's the video that we followed. The full recipe is on the Food Wishes site.

Today, we used the pan on pork. I also have a project to grill Mediterranean tuna kebabs.

Needless to say, the site and the pan are very inspiring. I'm already looking forward to an (indoor) grilling summer.

19 degrees and sun + a recipe for roast beef

2011-04-30T16:01:00.006+02:00

For those who spend the last 5 months or so in winter darkness and freezing temperatures, there's nothing quite like the feeling of sitting out and being able to report "[insert 15+ degrees or more here] and sun". Around here, that phrase pretty much means the good life.

Also, it signals the half of the year when we can use our balcony, which we recently bought new furniture for. I thought I'd share some pictures and tell you that things are just doing alright here.

Here's the new addition to the balcony since yesterday, a café table set in acacia. (Made in Malaysia. Funny to be buying something in Sweden that's made close to home!). Marcus is surfing and our plastic bird-scarer "Snakey" is doing is job scaring off the birds. For the most part, Snakey does an OK job (It even manages to shock some guests), but the birds still perch on the roof when no one's looking...

Meow? Are you talking to meeee?

Below is the view from Marcus' end of the table. The sun beds are from last year (they're from IKEA, as is the striped blue-and-white thingee). The Swedish flag is our neighbors', but if you look right under it you can see some of the river.

We tried to have breakfast out in our new table set, but I'm afraid it's still too cold in the mornings (10 degrees C) as it can still drop to zero degrees at night.Morning and afternoon fika is perfect though, when the temperature is right, which it was yesterday. We also look forward to eating some dinners out in the summer, when nights are long and warm.

At the moment though, it's raining and only 12 degrees so we're staying indoors. Because spring weather is so fickle, you understand why "[insert 15+ degrees or more here] and sun" is the perfect state of things!

Even if you can't sit outdoors, you can always eat summer food. So I thought I'd throw in a recipe of one of our favorites, roast beef. As I blogged about before, we prefer a lot of "slow mode"-kind of food in the summer months - something that doesn't require too much energy. Roast beef is perfect for this since you just rub it with salt and pepper, pop it in the oven for an hour and you're got meat sandwiches or salads with roast beef for days!

Roast beef

ca. 1 kilo beef (we used a cut called fransyska, rump steak I think)
sea salt - lots
pepper - lots
a small oven pan where the meat fits almost exactly
meat thermometer
tin foil

Rub the meat generously with salt and pepper. Line an oven pan with tin foil. I've read that it's important to have a tin pan that is just big enough to fit the meat, so the meat won't dry up. Place the meat into the pan and insert a meat thermometer into the beef in such a way that the end of the thermometer is at the thickest part.

Now, according to my recipe book:

For English roast beef: Set oven at 175 C
For French roast beef (redder center, as in the picture): Set oven at 125 C

Just pop in the pan into the preheated oven until the thermometer shows 52 - 53 degrees C. For a kilo of beef, this takes about an hour. Check the thermometer after 40 minutes, since the inner temperature of the meat tends to go up faster at the end than it does at the beginning.

When the desired inner temperature is reached, remove the pan from the oven and carefully wrap the hot roast beef with more tin foil. I do this with the help of tongs or two forks. Wrap the meat well so that it is sealed. The inner temperature of the meat will continue to go up to 60 while it is wrapped. But you needn't do anything. Just do other things for an hour more or so. Do your laundry or something until it's time to eat.

When the meat has cooled down some, you can finally reap (eat) the fruits of your oven's labour. Just slice the roast beef into thin pieces and eat on a salad, on a sandwich, or with potato salad. No effort at all!

Lund, not London!

2011-04-20T19:07:00.000+02:00

Students enjoying the spring sun, a shopping street
and the main building of Lund's University

During the past month, I've been kinda stressed out trying to juggle three PhD courses at the same time, one of which requires me to commute to Lund, which is three hours from here by express train (The Swedish express train X2000 doesn't even go 300 km/h though!). I Skyped with my parents one day to tell them I was off to Lund for two days, and they misheard that I was going to London. So I think a blog entry about Lund is in order, just to put things straight ;-)

Lund is a university city in the south of Sweden, reportedly founded around year 990 when this part of Sweden still belonged to the rival kingdom Denmark. "Lund" means "grove" in Swedish (and not field or valley as I first thought), and as with other nature words, it's also a common Swedish and Danish last name (Dad mentioned that one of the Danish detective series he watches has a protagonist named Lund). "-lunda" is also a common placename suffix, which derives from the word lund.

The city of Lund boasts of the second oldest Swedish university, Lund University, founded 1666 (The University of Bologna was founded year 1088, and Uppsala, Sweden's oldest, in 1477). Students usually say that the city seems built around the university: the oldest university buildings are scattered around the centrum, there are second hand textbook stores in many streets as well as cafés filled with students either studying or just having a fika.

As pompous as the main university building looks though, it is probably more accurate to say that the city is built around its next door neighbor, the Lund cathedral, rather than the university itself. The cathedral is much older, having been founded in 1103.

Of course, the cathedral didn't look then as it looks today. It is said that parts of the cathedral, like the crypt, could have belonged to an older church way back in 1080, but much of the cathedral was built in the 12th and 13th centuries in Romanesque style. I'm not usually the one to get curious about a church, but a classmate and I went sightseeing there after class one day and I must say, the architecture and the small details are just mind-boggling. Somewhere in Lund, sometime in the Middle Ages, real people – craftsmen – have been laboring to get those details. The details add to the mystique and awesomeness of this church. I can only imagine that Middle Age churchgoers, living in their wood shacks with hay floors, must have really felt humbled by the awful might and elaborate luxury of this cathedral as they listened to the priest's echoing voice (the echo lasts 6.7 seconds) that asks them to repent for their worldly sins.

But as I said, you can't help admiring the level of detail everywhere. One of the jewels within the church is its astronomical clock, built ca. 1424. I haven't actually heard it play, since I sat in class when it did (12 noon and 3PM), but I could just imagine that it is no less grand than what it looks like without it playing. It was filled with details from top to bottom – and the clock was huge, standing from church floor to ceiling. Here are two details: an old man pointing his stick at today's date and name day (it was Monday the 18th of April when I took the picture. I learned that April 17th is my dad's name day!), and two knights at the very top of the clock.

I read in Wikipedia that the knights are supposed to tell the hour. I didn't notice it though, but I did notice that the clock face itself showed a time one hour "earlier". They didn't have Daylight Savings in the Middle Ages, after all.

Here are some more details: a lion whose hands are bound (this is a giant detail from the bottom of the pulpit), and ram heads adorning the choir pews near the altar. My classmate and I couldn't help thinking that all details must have been symbolic – after all, not everyone was literate at that time. The choir pews in particular were all carved with biblical figures or real and imagined animals. Some pew ends seemed to portray horrific scenes like people crawling away from large beasts, and the underside of these pews were carved with miniature churches. Who knows if the common man of the 12th century could have walked so near the altar (the altar was literally half a storey higher than the nave). But I wonder what he would have thought of these detailed pews back then. Boy would I like to have crawled into his mind! The pews in the nave have been replaced by modern, simple chairs (because the sandstone floors were sinking beneath the pews' weight), so I don't know how those looked like.

A tour of the Lund cathedral would not be complete without a tour to the crypt, which is a kind of basement under the altar. This too seems to be ridden with all kinds of symbolic messages, yet less ornate. It consists of a forest of columns supporting vaulted ceilings – like a cross between a moorish palace and a mini-Mines of Moria. Small windows let shafts of light inside the otherwise dark crypt. It didn't feel creepy though – everything just felt kind of ancient.

I Photoshopped the top picture to correct the white balance – that's how the crypt looked like when I was there. Otherwise, the camera tends to give the the sunlight in the cold crypt a blue hue, as you can see in the bottom pictures.

Many of the columns look different from each other (notice the column at the back in the first picture). Some are carved as spirals, while some are carved with geometric patterns like waves or squares. They say that when the light hits the spiral patterns in the morning, the sunlight shifts as to make an illusion of the columns spiraling upwards.

The most attention-catching columns are, however, those with the human figures. These were to be found on either side of the crypt, nearest the doors. One shows a male and the other a female with a baby, both of whom are grabbing onto the columns. According to legend, the figures portray Finn the Giant and his wife. Disappointed that he didn't get paid for his help constructing the cathedral, Finn was supposed to have wanted to demolish the building and sneaked there at night. When morning came, sunlight streamed through the windows, turning Finn and his wife into stone. We asked one of the church curators about this since my classmate suspected it was probably early Christian occult, but the truth about the columns are apparently a mystery. Maybe it was supposed to portray Samson. There was also a theory that human statues were usually erected by the doors to protect the church, and that these figures might have been moved down into the crypt during the cathedral restoration in the Middle Ages.

Whatever the explanation was supposed to be, the meaning is lost to us today while the ancient symbols live on. Maybe I should make a Dan Brown-esque novel on the Lund cathedral. I'm told by the curator that I haven't seen nothing – the tunnels under the church reveal its even older parts, but it is off-limits to tourists. Who knows what was under our feet!

Saving Daylight

2011-03-26T21:54:00.004+01:00

Later this coming morning, Sweden along with some 70 other countries move to "summer time", or Daylight Savings Time, DST. A whole hour of the day magically disappears on the last Sunday of March, turning 2:00 AM to 3:00 AM. That's when the official summer time begins, in order to give least disturbance, unless if you're working a graveyard shift. Practically, it means one hour's worth less of sleep if you wake up the same time as the day before (or one hour's less of work than the previous workday, if you're in that graveyard shift). But it also means – as is the point of Daylight Savings Time – that the sun will set an hour "later" than the day before, effectively giving you an hour's more of sunlight. Say, if the sun today set at 6:31 PM, tomorrow it will set at 7:31. Combine that with the increasing sunlight hours leading to summer (at least in the upper latitudes right now), it means that we will get longer, lighter evenings – up to about 10 or 11 PM where we are.

So those science fiction writers must have gotten inspiration from these latitudes when they wrote about planets of constant daylight and multiple suns. The creator of the modern DST, George Vernon Hudson, had a more down-to-earth idea though: to give workers like himself more leisure time after work. It turns out that DST also saves electricity, and causes less traffic accidents – at least in the summer time.

In the autumn, the reverse happens: we take the clock back again to "normal time", you get to sleep an hour more than the previous day, the sun will set one hour "earlier" that afternoon, and – as the days get shorter, the sun will set earlier and earlier until it will already be dark by 3PM! No wonder that Russia, starting from this year, is thinking of never going back to "normal time"; they will have DST or "summer time" all year round from now on!

Swedish friends: Don't forget to set the clock an hour forward!
Filipino friends and family: Our time difference will effectively be an hour more!

Arbeit macht frei; Work sets you free

2011-03-22T22:39:00.008+01:00

A.k.a. "Another bunch of comics"

Nothing much to blog about lately – it snowed again last week; the streets are mushy with melting, dirty snow so we haven't began our outdoor activities; I'm doing most of my exercise at home with a yoga ball, dumbbells and an exercise bike, and it's kind of just a work-home routine for now. "The daily grind," if you will.

It suits me right now. They say that the PhD years do the best and worst for your self-esteem. Most PhD students question if the academic career really is the thing for them, while also trying to do the biggest research project of one's life so far – not to mention dealing with method / theory of science questions like the nature of knowledge and the knowledge production while doing your research – and having lots of other things going on in one's life, to boot. Four to five years is a long time in one's life after all. That's a lot of time to ponder in and out of questions like, "is this the right thing for me?". My thesis advisers attest that things can go up and down; you can reach periods of hybris as well as self-doubt. The best and worst period of your life, basically.

Thankfully, I'm in an inspiration phase in my thesis work at the moment. I'm in the middle of writing what may be my first thesis-related articles, so I'm quite happy to live a work-home life and I'm appreciating the lack of other extra-curricular activities. Who knew? About a month and a half ago, while sorting out what to do with my interview material and trying to come to terms with puzzles like the nature of "scientific knowledge" in the social sciences and the place of pre-understandings in study design, I was just about ready to apply for a more practical job (I even rang them to inquire!). At that moment, I wanted a job that at least didn't leave me pondering about epistemological-methodological questions ("what is the foundation of knowledge?") when the whole task of the job and the academic enterprise is to gain knowledge and, in some ways, profess your own results as important knowledge so that it can in turn be reproduced in classrooms and cited by others.

Another one of the seemingly contradictory things about this PhD job (technically we're not "PhD students" because we get paid according to a pay grade and get pension benefits) is this: On the one hand, there's a lot of freedom that comes with the work, both intellectually, creatively and time-wise. But on the other hand, since getting the job done is all up to you (your research plan, your data collection, your analysis, your writing, your conference presentations), there is simultaneously a pressure to be productive – "there's bound to be something that can be done, written or read today; how can I ever be an expert on this thing?". The difference with other types of work is that you don't have a real "limit" as to how much labor you should put in your work, since you drive your own project. Technically, we should work only up to a certain amount of hours a year, but it seems that we can work as little – or preferably, if we want to build up our portfolio to get a position beyond the PhD – as much as we like or feel that we need to to become "experts". But the thing is that most of the work product is not even tangible, nor does all work lead to direct results in terms of something that can be evaluated. On the contrary, it sometimes feels that all the day's "progress" in reading just make you end up getting more stumped.

Striking a balance regarding how much work to do in a day is not that easy (too many articles to read to reach "expertise," for example, especially if you really want to engage in the debates in the field. Did you know that a quarter of a million academic articles are published each year? Most get cited only a couple of times, except for the big names. We are reassured that we'll see a distinct part of the research field picture as we go along). Sometimes though, like nowadays, I manage to find it and go home thinking that I could leave stuff unread or unwritten until the next day and still meet a deadline. I even feel that it may be within reach to write a more-than-decent article after all and even have time for a couple of other things, which is really a good feeling (Another segue: Most universities today highly encourage their researchers to publish in the most popular journals to increase citation incidence, which is taken as a sign of research quality. Now that there are too many articles being published, a problem of "quantifying quality" now exists. An understandable goal, but a skewed way of gauging quality at the same time).

All this got me thinking about the love-hate nature people in general have with work. You want it badly when it's not there (reminds me of this blog entry from 3 years ago); it gives you a sense of purpose and an identity. Yet, when we do have work, we sometimes wonder why we do it besides for its own sake or the obvious need to earn, consume and save for pension "in the hamster wheel". We can even think out ways to work less and still get the same life satisfaction, or wonder if working less actually gives more life satisfaction – despite less money – if we just have our needs covered and can think of other interesting things to do for self-realization than "a job" in the standard sense. But that would be kind of contradictory with the feeling that having work automatically gives one a sense of purpose, wouldn't it?

Most of the time, I really appreciate my job for being as close to "being free" from the constraints of a bundee-clocked job as I can get. I plan my own workday and the job content is challenging to say the least, even if the job comes with its own special problems. I still have some issues to resolve about the "why's" of my job sometimes, but overall, it's not so bad. I'm not really sure if I'd want to seriously work outside the academe either. Despite my weird relation with research, I kind of enjoy it. My approach for now is try to do as much as I can while I'm still on an inspiration moment – who knows how I will feel about the thesis work a year from now! (Fingers crossed, I'll be maintaining my sanity.)

Food journal number 62: Wallenbergare

2011-02-20T13:58:00.003+01:00

Because the Muppet Show's Swedish Chef cooks them, and because of the fact that IKEA makes millions selling them for lunch, "Swedish meatballs" is an often-heard term. There are even recipes online under the label of Swedish meatballs — even if they're really just plain meatballs.

I wonder if it's the addition of milk or cream that makes these meatballs "Swedish"? Or maybe it's because of the fact that they're usually eaten with the sweet lingonberry jam? Many of the ground meat recipes I've encountered here are cooked milk or cream, and are served with lingonberry: Kålpudding, kåldolmar and pannbiff are examples. I guess one exception is the taco. Swedes eat lots of tacos. And though they eat it with sour cream, they spare the jam. Gracias a Dios!

Another dairy-combined, jam-partnered ground meat dish is the Wallenbergare. Very "Swedish" as the dish name derives from The Wallenbergs, a prominent Swedish banking family, the inspiration of the dish is purportedly French. One story goes that Marcus Wallenberg's father-in-law, who was a chef, named this fancy dish for his son in law. In another story though, the Wallenbergs arrive from France to a local Swedish restaurant and request "food as they have it in the continent". The chef whipped up veal patties and served it with pommes duchesse, or oven-baked mashed potatoes.

Today, there are many ways to prepare and serve the Wallenbergare, not least in a typically complicated French style. Some recipes insist that the veal (meat from a young calf) be ground twice, or even thrice. Some insist that, instead of bread crumbs, the inner part of a French baguette should be the filler. I made it easy for myself, and followed this recipe below (one that doesn't require breadcrumbs, either). I didn't care for mashed potatoes, but if you do decide to make them, the creamy type probably goes well with this (also creamy) patty.

Wallenbergare (recipe from Annas svenska kök)

500 g ground veal
2 deciliters whipping cream (40% fat)
3 egg yolks
1 teaspoon salt
dash of ground white pepper
2 Tablespoons butter for frying

1. All ingredients should be cold. Mix the ground veal with the cream, a little at a time. Then mix in the yolks one at a time. Salt and pepper to taste.

2. Form into 8 big patties, set aside on some wax paper.

3. Fry, some at a time, in a pan with butter, for 3-4 minutes on each side.

(I read in other sites that the patty should remain light in color, not dark brown. But as you can see from my own Wallenbergare, it was already too late when I read about it.)

4. The dish is traditionally served with mashed potatoes, peas and — yup! Lingonberry jam.

Red is the color of the New Year

2011-02-07T12:23:00.005+01:00

I too wonder what took me so long, but finally, I signed myself up as a municipal blood donor last week. The first step was a blood test. Since I haven't heard from the hospital yet since then, I assume that I had passed the blood donor criteria: they test for blood type and levels of hemoglobin, and make sure that donors don't have hepatitis, syphilis, HIV and HTLV. Now I'm just waiting for a letter when I can give my first regular donation.

The Swedish National Board of Health and Welfare (Socialstyrelsen) estimates that yearly, about 100,000 persons in Sweden need blood transfusions. It could be a case of an accident, a difficult childbirth, an operation, or chronic illness. It is estimated that about a third of all transfusions directly help save lives in acute situations. In short, a lot of people need blood. And for this, you can trust the Swedes to have an organized solution for the demand.

Basically, when you sign up as a blood donor, you agree to do it on a regular basis – up to three times a year for women and four times a year for men, granting that you are healthy at the time of donation and have read and signed a health declaration. This system is not unique for Sweden, but something that I am new to. Blood donations in developing countries are far from this systematic. In the Philippines, information about blood donation is scant outside of universities where the Red Cross can have week-long blood drives. Otherwise, relatives of people who badly need transfusions have to rally up their friends and colleagues to donate blood at the hospital in question, on a one-time basis, to replace the blood in the hospital bank. I can imagine that this system is taxing on relatives and that the blood supply is low. If there is an organized donation system and there is easily available and clear information, not only can more people be recruited (there were more than 400,000 regular blood donors in Sweden in 2009), but hospitals can also control which blood groups are running low in the municipal blood bank, and mobilize the donors with that blood group.

So I would like to make a case for seeking information yourself, if you're interested in becoming a blood or organ donor wherever you are. When it's time for me to donate my first contribution – the blood center will send me an e-mail – it would be my first time ever to donate blood. What partly hindered me before was a cluelessness, and perhaps also laziness to get information. I didn't know weather I could donate blood at all since I have had dengue fever as a child, but apparently, this was a false thought. Even if you've had tropical diseases, this does not automatically mean you're not qualified for donation. As with tattooing, piercing, etc., it just depends when you've had it. With tropical diseases, you just have to wait 6 months before donating. If you're sick, you have to wait until you're well for two whole weeks. If you've had a vaccine, a tattoo, acupuncture, or went to the dentist, you have to wait one or a few days. As long as you're between 18 and 60 years old, pass the blood test making sure that you don't have any seriously transmittable diseases, and granted that you're not anemic yourself, you can, at least some times of the year, donate blood. I also found that the information / interview session I had, which was obligatory for new donors in this Swedish system, was very informative and answered all the questions I wanted to know about blood donation, including how I should take care of myself – with regards to diet, drink and activities – before and after the donation.

An organized blood donation system also has a solution for laziness. If you can't come to the blood donation centers at the hospitals for some reason (like having no car), the blood donation centers will come to your area. There's a schedule for so-called Blood Busses, which you can see in the Swedish site, geblod.nu (literally "giveblod.now"). The bus is where I signed up to be a donor and where I had a blood test.

It's a kind of New Year's resolution of sorts. For all my stalling – and as with all resolutions – it's actually not that hard to do when you get to it.

P.S. Added 7 February 2011. I was playing with the blog layout and found out that at least one of the drop down menus had a wrong link to it (October 2010 became September 2010, so there were two September archives). I've corrected it now, but if you guys see anything else wrong, leave me a message (Note, there is no November 2010 archive). I'm trying to fix my layout to make it more user- and navigation-friendly. But it may take some time :-)

Food journal number 61: Reflections about a blue potato

2011-01-29T10:46:00.012+01:00

When we run out of inspiration to cook new food experiments at home, we usually stick with our tried and trusted easy-cooking staples. Our staples-list vary from time to time. About a few years ago, we were really hooked on fish soup and red beet salad. Then, it was chicken with pesto and pasta salad. Nowadays our staples-list includes shrimp sandwich, a créme fraishe-based pasta dish, and pork chops. And at the end of the week, if we still can't think of anything else we'd like to eat, we either browse the cookbooks or I run to the grocery and buy "inspiration". This week's inspiration is the blue potato, a variant called Blue Congo.

But first, a little about potatoes in general. They're the fourth largest crop in the world, yet seldom used in Asian cooking except as a stew vegetable. The've also got the bad rep of being fattening and unhealthy when on the contrary, potato starch has the same good qualities as fiber and (even if cooking methods vary nutritional content) more nutritious and more filling than an equivalent amount of white rice or bread:

The average baked potato provides the recommended daily intake of riboflavin (viamin B2), three to four times the necessary amount of thiamin (vitamin B1) and niacin (vitamin B3), one and a half times the quantity of iron, and ten times the amount of vitamin C. It has almost no fat or salt and offers more potassium than a banana. It is one of the easiest types of starch to assimilate and contains two and a half times fewer carbohydrates than a similar quantity of bread, which makes the potato popular with diabetics.

According to mom's cookbook The Popular Potato, where that quote was from, the bad rep of the potato derives from the traditional practice of serving them with salt and fat, in the form of fries with ketchup (fat + salt + sugar), creamy sauces, etc. I recommend a warm potato salad with a small amount of mustard vinaigrette, thinly sliced onions, and capers. It tastes much better than mayo-based potato salad, and if you make the dessing yourself with a healthy kind of oil, it should be better for you too.

Another "threat" to the potato — and other crops grown in large monocultures — is that commercial demands, by e.g. fastfood chains that demand long fries, usually force farmers to grow a single kind of potato: the Russet Burbank in the case of the US. In Sweden, King Edward and Asterix are the ones usually sold in groceries, but other varieties occasionally appear in limited amounts (e.g. Amandine, and lately, Blue Congo). The Incas however, as story has it, grew all kinds of potatoes in different colors and shapes: they were much less smooth than the potato-shape we know and prefer, and came in all shades of red and blue and yellow. This diversity made sure that, in case one variety failed due to plant disease, the Incas still had lots of potatoes to eat. It also diversified the potato gene pool.

It isn't really the time to talk about environmental-philosophical questions, but it does make you wonder about how our preferences (e.g. for round, large, firm potatoes) changed the landscape of potato varieties while also helping the potato, as a species, become the world's fourth largest crop by increasing their chances of survival. Are you reading Micheal Pollan's books yet? Do!

Back to my blue potatoes, the Blue Congo. It's exotic, it's interesting. According to internet sources, they also have higher antioxidant content than regular potatoes, and keep more than 75% of these antioxidants even after cooking. Why did I buy them? Mostly because it's interesting and I think it might be more healthy, but not for ecological reasons in mind. I followed the serving suggestion at the back of the potato bag and mixed the cooked, diced potatoes together with a green salad. We had an abundance of lemons, so lemon juice was the only dressing. The texture is a bit crumbly, and it tastes like a mild, creamy potato. The potatoes turned bright beet-purple with lemon juice.

Whether increased consumption of other crop varieties (for egositic reasons) will eventually lead to a change in the agricultural landscape (for ecological benefit) and what consequences the demand for slower-growing varieties have in terms of decreased food output on limited tillable land is likely a question that I will not have an answer to today. But did I get food inspiration? Yes. The next experiment will be to roughly mash the blue potatoes and serve it with steak.

Handball!

2011-01-20T18:51:00.006+01:00

Back in gradeschool, we usually played three kinds of "-ball" sports: basketball, volleyball and "touching-ball" — the latter being a dodge ball variation where we used an oversized hankerchief tightly knotted into a ball. In highschool, the ball sports narrowed down into basket and volley. Otherwise, we spent P.E. class learning Asian dance (I'm ashamed to say) and native games such as relay racing on stilts (in which my section, represented by yours truly and two others, won the inter-year competitions!).

In college, the ball games narrow down even more and "ball game" becomes more or less equivalent to "basketball", as it is in the rest of the Philippines. Basket is the non-official national sport, overshadowing the real national sport sepak takraw (kick volleyball), much so that the latter is rarely even heard of.

One tends to think that his or her country is the most "normal" in all the world — a feeling that is probably even stronger in island nations. So when I first heard about previously un-heard of sports such as floorball and handball here, my first impressions were that these were strange versions of (both North American-originating) hockey and basket. We know too little of European / other sports, with the exception of soccer, which is known, but not often played, in the Philippines. In fact, floorball and handball are both established world sports. The Men's World Handball Championships is ongoing in Sweden as I write, and though the fact stands that many of the teams are European, up there on the top qualifiers are Argentina and South Korea. Even the Philippines apparently has a local handball federation, but as I said, this is likely not in the list ball sports that most people know about. It's a shame, because otherwise, we would have probably have had this exciting sport for P.E. instead of Asian dance.

Since most of my readers will know the rules of basketball, I'm naming this section: The Differences between basket and handball (with pictures taken from the internet) to explain handball rules in a nutshell:

1. In handball, there is goalkeeper and the goal is reminiscent of a small football goal rather than a basket. (In our P.E. lessons, they were particular to point out that it Dr. James T. Naismith used peach baskets when he invented basketball. Why this would be important is beyond me.)

2. Like basketball, the aim is to put as many balls into the opponents' goal. The handball ball fits an open hand, so it is much smaller than a basketball and can be passed and recieved easily in the air using one hand.

3. One goal equals one point (no three-pointers!)

4. Instead of the "starting five", handball teams have six starting players in the field with the exception of the goalkeeper.

5. These other players are not allowed inside the goal perimeter, so to get a shot, the players have to fight their way through opposing team members, who in their turn try to create a defensive formation around the goal perimeter, like a wall.

6. The defensive team tries everything, short of illegal moves like shirt-pulling and injurous moves such as pulling on the thrower's arm, to stop the offensive team from creating goal chances. This is one major difference from the rules of basketball, where it is absolutely not allowed to have body contact with the opponents. When the offensive player with the ball gets "trapped" by the defense, the referee stops the game and the offensive team gets another try at a new strategy.

7. The offensive team tries to create a game play to get around the wall of defense. They can feign and pass the ball to free players (just as in basket), until they have a good goal chance or until their time is up and the ball goes to the other team. If they commit an offensive foul, the game play stops and the ball goes to the other team.

8. One of the more graceful moves in handball is when a player with a clear shot jumps and suspends in the air to throw the ball in the goal. There's a lot of explosivity and coordination in there. Once they find a gap in the wall, jumping gives them more time to aim and gives them a chance at fooling the goalkeeper, who has been actively blocking the goal from unexpected shots throughout the gameplay. They also have to make the shot without stepping into the goalkeeper's area, but by leaping, they can close the distance and try for a goal as long as their feet haven't landed yet. It is illegal to block a player with a clear goal chance.

9. All in all, it seems like a more challenging, explosive, physical game than basketball, and that's what makes it so exciting. Because of the physical nature of the game, players also change more often in order to last the two 30-minute sets (basketball has 4 quarters of 12 minutes).

Now, if you'll excuse me, there's a handball match on TV at 8:00 (Sweden vs. Poland) so I have to publish this post and eat dinner so I can watch it. Maybe you can even catch some handball games where you live, through cable TV?

Christmas message

2010-12-25T18:03:00.010+01:00

Merry Christmas! Maligayang Pasko!
God Jul! Ho ho ho!

In the Swedish Christmas tradition, a Christmas gnome, not Santa Claus, gives the gifts to children on the afternoon of Christmas eve. An even older tradtion with pre-Christian roots say that the gifts are delivered by a male goat, the Julbock or the Yule Goat.

Whoever or whatever delivered your gifts to you on your side of the world, I wish you had a happy day full of friends and loved ones around you.

There was, needless to say, no Rudolph outside the window yesterday at midnight. The pictures were taken today, Christmas day, and the deer were actually raiding the bird food.

The original picture:

They stayed a long time there, oblivious to us humans inside the house. It was a nice Nature show on Christmas.

God fortsättning! - Have a good continuation of the season. Tomorrow is Annandag, literally the second day of Christmas!

The Glass Jar Tree, a.k.a. Into the Wardrobe part 2

2010-12-13T20:53:00.007+01:00

An accidental passerby to the last blog entry "Into the Wardrobe" commented that I should have posted more pictures. Oh boy, reader demands! I hear you though, and I was meaning to post more pictures anyway, along with a story. As in frozen Narnia, the heroes observe something peculiar but interesting in Norrköping. They're not frozen fictitious animals though, and there was no Witch offering Turkish delights.

This story takes place during one of our walks, on a clear sunny day. The snow had newly fallen; the snow is dry and crisp on the ground and it crunches when you walk on it. The snow keeps cold, but the sun warmed our exposed faces.

On this day, we decide to walk around Himmelstalund field, a recreation area quite near here. In the summers, people play rugby and football there. Many sunbathe there on summer mornings and grill with their friends on summer nights. It also lures campers and tourists. The field, you see, though near the city center, had remained open despite decades of construction for one reason: a flat rock ridden with Bronze age rock carvings, smack in the middle of the field. The rugby players and sunbathers go on with their activities there, perhaps more or less aware that people 3,000 years ago have also been playing and camping right where stand. Perhaps there is a chance that they might have descended from them? The Bronze Agers, anyhow, would probably not recognize the field as it were today. According to scientists, they lived in a different, much warmer Sweden. The landscape might have no doubt looked much different; who knows if the trees and plants they knew exist in Himmelstalund today?

On this day, however, there were no rugby players, sunbathers, or tourists to the rock carvings. Neither was it warm. It was just us there, a couple of skiiers, and a foot and a half of snow.

I noticed something glimmering in the sun, just about where the rock carvings should have been. As we walked near it (which required some effortful walking on the thick snow), we realized that the gleaming things were glass jars, hanging from a tree!

Is it street art, like the knitted "lamp post warmers" which I blogged about two years ago? Whoever did it obviously put some thinking into how to hang the jars. No doubt the artist would have needed a ladder! I bet it felt a bit like decorating a Christmas tree.

Like the lamp post warmers making regular lamposts noticable, the odd jars hanging about made this tree worth walking to. It suddenly made that tree stand out from the rest, or at least tickle curiosity. It also has a name for me now: The Glass Jar Tree.

Perhaps it grows pickles, marmalade and mayonnaise?

The end.

Into the wardrobe

2010-12-10T13:38:00.011+01:00

In The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, children Peter, Susan, Edmund and Lucy walk into a wardrobe and suddenly find themselves in a frozen world on the other side. Sometimes, I think that's how it feels to walk out the apartment building door. The warm and toasty indoors can make you forget that it's a cold and frozen world out there.

Last week, when these two pictures above were taken, it marked the coldest day here (as yet) at -15 degrees C, after having snowed heaps, too. And the snow looks like it's here to stay.

Despite the cold, we made walks – sometimes around the river, about 3 km, to longer 8 km walks. A little exercise, as long as you listen to your body's limits and allow for rest, is good for both body and soul, so we have made it a point to walk almost daily. Just going out at all into the outdoor icebox feels a bit inconvenient at first, but once we're out, it feels fulfilling. I tick an item in my mental checklist that says, "Take a walk today", and that feels good.

If nothing else, the winter landscape definitely is pretty, and it changes day per day. When it's very cold, snow crystallizes in the branches, making them white. Newly fallen snow looks as smooth as fondant on the flat ground and tops everything from hedges to cars and park benches, making everything look like giant marzipan figures. On most days, the sun hides behind a thick layer of clouds, but when the sun does come out, the ground and snow-covered objects gleam with a copper tone. Today was one of those days:

The snow-and-ice landscapes are ephemeral, transitory. The next time you see it, the immaculate blanket of fondant-snow will surely have had tracks on it; the snow heaps might have changed shape in the wind and sun; the frost on the branches would have shed. And you think about how incredibly lucky you are to have seen that landscape just when you did, just when it looked like that.

On a less romantized (and rather exotified?) view of snow: Snow has to be ploughed from the streets and from yards so that cars, baby carriages, wheelchairs and people can pass (of course). The streets have to be salted or sanded, to avoid slips and falls. We with balconies are obligated to keep them free from large amounts of snow that could weigh down the balcony or cause icicle-danger to people below. And when you think about it: overall, we're talking about a lot of snow. I collected two sink-loads of snow from just outside our balcony door last week so we could open the door. I took some from the window sill too to have an unhindered view outside. Imagine the snow that has to be ploughed from yards and streets! Imagine all that water floating around in the atmosphere to create this! Then again, that thought is probably not so new if you live in a land of typhoons and recurring floods. We just get them in frozen form.

Looking beyond the black dog

2010-12-01T22:24:00.005+01:00

Lake Ågelsjön in the beginning of November

December 1. Another whole month had flown by in the blog world, but it feels rather that we trudged ‒ TRUDGED ‒ through another long month. November is otherwise anyway the gloomiest period of the year in Sweden: dark, wet, vanishing sunlight. Our attempts to go back to "normality", as we call it, couldn't have been more ill timed. The normality at the end of October didn't last, for many reasons. There were just really bad days this past month ‒ crushing, pressing and immensely tiring days where our spirits just seemed to deflate. Some days seemed to weigh so awfully. The language of gloom is so suggestive: weight, deflation, crushing. You feel quite literally weighed down. But the language, I'm afriad, doesn't quite get so close as to capturing the feeling, when every single day and hour feels like a Sisephean task.

But December‒ it will surely bring something new? Things seem to be turning again for the better and time seems to be chipping away pieces of what just recently felt like an unbearable burden. Marcus is feeling better pychologically, and I am on leave for the moment, to give myself a rest. We're getting somewhere, I guess. Activities seem more meaningful again. Heck, I've even gone back to blogging.

Today, I want to share pictures of an early November walk we made just before things started to get us bogged down again. Marcus was feeling mentally tired then but (lo and behold! It's Marcs after all!) he walked the fastest, always 10 meters in front of us. The spirit is in there somewhere. After this past month, I realized that we have it somewhere in us after all to put one step ahead of the other, even if each step might be so heavy as to feel like a trudge. My mom has a wheel-analogy to life, you know: You get bogged down sometimes, but once you're out of it ‒ and you might need a push from others ‒ things get rolling.

Here we are going up through a fissure on a rock on the way to a lookout point at Ågelsjön. Mom and dad and we walked here last summer, so it was nice to walk there again, this time with Mats and Margareta.

Once up the fissure, you're rewarded by a beautiful view at the lookout point:

Swirls on a twig: the beauty in the small things:

Hopefully I'll be back here in the blog more often now ‒ and we can continue to see things again with wonder.

2010-11-30T20:27:00.000+01:00

---There are no entries for November 2010!---

Where did October go?

2010-10-29T15:21:00.002+02:00

It's a long story. I spent the end part of September and the first half of October in the hospital with Marcus; he came home mid-October with not-so-good prospects; we had troubled nights, and there were a couple of acute visits to the hospital. It's just these past two weeks that things are going back to normal again. The whole month felt like a long, uncertain time. But we are recovering from the shock and getting to our senses to meet the future — and suddenly it's nearing November.

Big sigh.

When Marcus lay in the hospital and was in the mood for light reading, he told me he'd sometimes read my old blog entries. When I started this blog, Marcus and I had just about moved in together — so I guess you can say that this blog is ours in a way. All those five years, and great small adventures.

Today, I got a message today from someone who reads my blog, and she was asking me about something unrelated to blogging. I realized then how many people I actually met through this blog who I never would have met otherwise. I've even met some of you personally. You're not a big bunch of readers; I'm not a bestselling author. But that you can share in the things we do and see and experience is one of the strange and great things about the internet.

So I might as well say it here. The long and short of it is, that Marcus' stem cell transplant didn't work. The transplant (cord blood stem cells) did not survive, so the original diseased bone marrow grew back. They're giving the stem cell transplant a re-try — we look like we have at least a year and not one month as we first thought — and if nothing acute happens in the meantime, there might be time to look for a real bone marrow donor, or wait until stem cell research progresses.

... That's a kind of a dry way of putting it, but if you're read my blog entry on hope, you might guess all the feelings going inside me. Despite everything, life is not as hopeless as it might look.

When I talk to people about Marcus' condition, they sometimes ask if it's possible to donate bone marrow, and that I should just ring them and they'll come right to their hospitals. Realistically, the chances of an unrelated donor matching one's own marrow is very slim, even though that chance exists. So, I've always politely told them about the slim chances, plus that there is increased risk of Graft-versus-host disease with a live donor's stem cells in comparison to umbelical cord blood cells. So, I'm not sure if rallying up friends would give a solution for Marcus personally. But if you'd like to know more about bone marrow donation — it could be of use to more people — you can read up how this works in your countries. You can either sign up for a register, or if you're expecting, ask about the possibilities of donating the baby's umbelical cord blood.

Other than that, all I wanted to say was: Sieze the day!

Life as a hunter-gatherer must be hard

2010-09-18T19:08:00.009+02:00

After many years of thinking that I ought to gather mushrooms one day and learn to identify those sought-after chanterelles, I finally wound up doing it. It was an ordinary morning. Margareta thought she's take a walk, I tagged along. And she brought a basket — just in case.

I hadn't thought of bringing the camera, since it wasn't sure that we would find anything. Even though we would walk to the known mushroom spots around their neighborhood where there were good chances of spotting chanterelles, mushrooms are unpredictable that way: sometimes, there aren't many of them, and sometimes, they just sprout like, well — mushrooms. We were thinking of maybe finding one or two, but we came back with about a kilo of chanterelles.

As Micheal Pollan writes in the Omnivore's Dilemma (a very good, recommendable book), there is actually little humans know about why mushrooms grow, and why they grow when they do. In the case of chanterelles that grow year after year, they seem to grow under the same oaks, even though the oaks beside them might be bare from chanterelles. The mushrooms will remain a mystery that way, which is also why chanterelle gatherers are said to be protective about their gathering spots.

Another mystery is how to spot chanterelles at all, under all the leaf litter, among twigs and other inedible mushrooms. At first you see nothing but the forest floor. But as in a 3D puzzle, once you've seen one chanterelle in one spot, the others also "pop out" of their cover. Swedes refer to it as having your "mushroom specacles" on. Pollan describes it as having one's eyes on, which quite accurately describes how it felt like to me:

"But before the morning was out I'd begun to find a few chanterelles on my own. I began to understand what it meant to have my eyes on, and the chanterelles started to pop out of the landscape, one and then another, almost as though they were beckoning to me. So had I stumbled on a particularly good spot or had I learned at last how to see them? Nature or nurture? There was no way of telling, though I did have an eerie experience of resurveying the very same path of ground and finding a Siamese pair of chanterelles, bright as double egg yolks, in a spot where a moment before I could swear there had been nothing but the tan carpet of leaves."

True enough, after spotting some chanterelles during out walk, we found a load of mushrooms under the first tree which we thought we'd alraedy inspected!

Once you've spotted them, of course, there's also the nescessary step of identifying if they really are what you think they are, and not a chanterelle copycat. In Sweden, at least, chanterelles are the most common mushrooms to gather for the simple fact that it has very distinguishing characteristics, which make for a good beginner's mushroom. Nevertheless, I think it's best to start plucking them with someone with experience, who can guide you through the distinguishing features and point out look-alikes. I took pictures of our loot though, so I can review these features for myself and also show them here.

The big ones are funnel-shaped, although not the small ones, which are a bit button-like (second picture). But the distinguishing features are that (1) the grooves on the underside go down to the stem; in fact, there is no distinguishable mushroom "cap" (2) they are never slimy, but have a firm, leathery feel to them, and they are seldom damaged by insects. I also read a third tip on the internet: (3) That the grooves "fork" at the top.

That is all well, but you seldom see a mushroom on the ground from it's side, which is why I made a point to take pictures from the top view. The picture below shows how they could look like in their different sizes, from the button-like small ones, to the big funnel-shaped ones. From the top view, the distinguishing features are: (1) they don't have a dark halo on top and (2) they are not cone-shaped when viewed from above. To this I add to my own mental note when I was comparing it to a look-alike: (3) They are not "furry" on the edges when you look at from an angle.

If they grow under oaks, chanterelles will be an eggy shade of yellow — but apparently, there are paler variants that grow in mixed forests with pine (at bottom left). They can grow in clusters, but also as "littered" on the forest floor, as this picture taken by Mats on his mushroom-gathering excursion. Since I don't have my own pictures from mushroom gathering, I will post his:

I commented on the title of the blog that life must be hard for a hunter-gatherer. Imagine all the species of plants and mushrooms you have to remember (and find!), not to mention tracking and combating animals for food. We certainly have made life easier for us, and we neither need to do these things or even remember half of the edible species our ancestors used to know. Yet, I think it's interesting how people still pursue these activities — gathering, as well as hunting — as worthwhile hobbies, instead of activities of pure need. Maybe there's something very rewarding about going to our basic human activities. Maybe, for all our civilization, the human body needs to be in contact with his natural, vulnerable self (I can imagine that hunting makes you vulnerable in as much as it appears to be brutal). Or maybe hunting and gathering is somewhat exotified in our technological world, so we turn to them just to do "something different". Anyhow, to me, it's a bit like what they say about medieval cosplaying: what people used to do as real hard work, we now do for fun and liesure. Now, isn't that an interesting thing to think about?

P.S. Added 19 September. Liz was asking me about weather poking the leaf litter with a stick in the search for chantarelles (as she's seen done in Germany), damages the mushroom growth in some way. I don't have a definite answer to this question, but in The Omnivore's Dilemma, at least, the mushroom gatherer did this for the opposite reason: to hopefully spread the mushroom spores from tree to tree. I guess each mushroom gatherer has his or her bag of tricks. As to weather they work or not is something else altogether. As said, there is actually little man knows about the mushroom.

Really random thoughts from Lancaster

2010-09-13T14:06:00.016+02:00

Thanks, everyone who sent their well wishes by comment, mail, SMS or phone! Marcus is doing a bit better now. The worst days of the conditioning treatment seem to be over and he got his stem cells a week ago. Now it's a long wait until the stem cells settle in his bone marrow, and a long, long recovery period. Marcus is still not out of his reverse quarantine, which means that they will still be regularly checking his blood values and looking for signs of infection and side-effects. His intestinal track is a bit irritated, but he's on antibiotics and other medication. He's also on the process of changing his blood group as the new stem cells take over. But today, at least, all seems well. I visited him over the weekend and we talked by phone today. Unfortunately, I developed a sore throat yesterday, so I can't visit until I feel well again.

So, I'm at just at home and I thought I'd write an update about my previous week, when I was in Lancaster for a conference. I realized that it was ages since I travelled alone – four years ago to be exact, when I travelled back to Sweden! Managing solo travel gave me a confidence that I could still handle unexpected events by myself (I arrived in Copenhagen to find out that my original flight to the UK was cancelled; I got re-routed to Brussels), but I must admit, travelling with a partner is much more rewarding, and less mentally taxing, in that you split the thinking between yourselves.

Besides, travelling alone, there's no one to talk to! Instead, I had a soliloqy by computer. Here's what I wrote in my room in Lancaster the morning after I arrived. One of the joys of travelling? You can write about the small things:

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Got up at 3:50 AM yesterday to catch my 5:15 taxi to the airport in Norrköping. Flight from Copenhagen to Manchester got cancelled. Got rerouted to Brussels airport where there was a three hour wait for the connecting flight. I had brunch there, bacon and eggs and bread and coffee. For paying 10 Euros for that, it was really sloppily made. The chef looked like Manuel from Fawlty Towers, and cooked like him too. When he was struggling to crack the eggs open, I was a bit suspicious. Even more so when he poured a load of oil into the egg form on the grill skillet – Gordon Ramsey would be horrified that they cooked the eggs there instead of on a pan! – and the oil was enough to deep-fry the eggs. The bacon was as brown and crisp as crispbread and there was some raw egg on the corner of the plate, which I reminded myself not to touch with the fork. Unlike other airports, they had no McDonald’s or Sbarro’s or that kind of thing, so, I was hostage. After brunch, Herman Lindkvist’s book on Japan made time fly. Thank goodness.

Three take-offs in one day really takes its toll. I wonder how the flight attendants take it? My veins were running on coffee, but I never drink more than 4 cups (the Swedish average!). Thankfully the train company extends the tickets when the flights are delayed, so I didn’t have to buy a new train ticket for the one that I missed. (Funny details was that it was that a man drank strong beer in the train – not taboo! – and that the doors said “smile, you’re on CCTV!”. The English to me, seem very safety conscious! But these little things remind me that I'm abroad).

At Lancaster, I met Ayeray at 3pm for fika instead of at 12ish for lunch (it was Starbuck’s). The city center looks nice, like a big shopping district. Went to university at about 6pm by bus. The streets of Lancaster are curvy and narrow – so narrow that, when cars are parked on one side, only half the lane becomes available for the bus. Combined with left-hand traffic ("driving on the wrong lane"), I always had the illusion that the other cars were going straight for us! I had to struggle not to jump off my bus seat! I walked around campus looking for the Conference Center. The campus is huge and the buildings don’t have big signs, so it's good to have a map. I think I’m getting better at directions.

Was at my booked student room, finally, by around 7PM (8 Swedish time), which means I’ve been up for 16 hours and on the go for 14. Bought mineral water at the nearby cafeteria (water is not potable, they say). The student room is about as big as a room in a cruise ship to Finland, except there is a desk on the other side instead of another bunk bed. I did some short emails, and then washed up.

The sink is strange (or just typically English, I've heard). It has two taps, one has ice cold water and the other one has scalding hot water, but they don’t mix in any way and there are a few inches’ gap between the two sprays. So, I can’t wash my face with lukewarm water. Either one hand gets burnt and the other one gets icy, or I scoop cold water in my cupped hands, and then hot water, in a matter of half a second. Of course, the idea is you'd have to mix water in the plugged sink, but I'm reluctant to do this where I just brushed my teeth. Thank goodness that the shower has a blender though! Otherwise, I would have to shower turning around, like in a rotisserie :-)

Nice touches: they had free soap and shampoo for conference guests, and a towel. Which is good, because I didn’t occur to me to bring a towel, and who knows what would have happened if they didn’t provide one! Yikes! The scenery from out my window is also nice: green rolling hills with properties divided by low hedges.

I was dead tired after my shower, so I decided to plop into bed. After all, I was awake the whole day! The sheets look nice and thick and … Oww! The bed turned out to be so hard it actually hurted to plop on it! I could feel the fat, sturdy springs with my fingers. There was no mattress; just the bed spring bottom covered with a flat sheet. As long as I didn’t move so much, it was alright. Then I slept from 9pm to 6:30am. It’s 7:35 now. I don’t know what time breakfast is served at the cafeteria, so I might as well go there now.

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So much for those random thoughts. Next time, I will really get back to blogging about Sweden more, and those mushrooms I've been talking about!

The meaning of life?

2010-08-30T21:16:00.015+02:00

Again, readers – sorry for delayed posting. I promise to post something about my first experience of mushroom gathering this autumn, as soon I get the pictures. Right now, I was just overcome by the urge to write.

Since 2006, this blog has been a way for me to discover Sweden, discover myself by setting new challenges (like, not least, cooking) and to discover new things. Most of my posts deal with activity – all sorts of activities. Life, of course, isn't always exciting, but I think that if you keep your eyes and mind open, you'll see that life constantly offers something to wonder at. Wonder – how many times did they tell us, that wonder is the beginning of Philosophy? Questioning opens the human person to Being – that's what we do all the time when we ask questions in pursuit of knowledge. The human person, unlike other animals as far as we can tell, is the only one who asks ”Why?”. We can wonder at, and about things, or about ourselves.

Marcus has been in the hospital since last Monday, for his stem cell transplant – which probably explains my reflective mood. He'll be there for quite some time. There are many questions that run my mind sometimes; there is much promise, but also an uncertainty of not exactly knowing how things will turn out.

I came to think of these thoughts after reading a friend's (Cheryl's) blog entry where she writes (she is in love!):

Ever wonder why things happen the way they do? I was reminded once again that we are exactly where we should be. The future is vast and incalculable. What makes us think we can dictate every single detail we want to happen? There would always be better plans for us, plans we couldn't have even begun to imagine. I mean, a year ago, I wouldn't have thought I'd be on a dusty, sweaty jeepney ride from Mandaluyong to Stop & Shop. But that moment, I knew it was the best place to be. :)

And so I think, instead of going crazy planning our lives and putting up timelines, that we ask instead for the grace to be open and make the most out of whatever life throws at us, and to ask for wisdom to enjoy what we do have right now.

I agree, and yet I disagree. I believe in the vastness of the future, and I'd like to believe I have the wisdom to enjoy the present. However, I can't really get myself to believe in the fatalism of always-better plans. If there was a better plan out there for human beings, I would say that it would have been beyond our human condition to know that such a plan exists. To say that we are “exactly” where we should be presumes a knowledge of a completeness and a sense-of-life which, as finite beings, we would never really know. Life happens, and weather our life story is plan or not is something we would never be able to objectively tell. A plan also assumes a “planner” – perhaps one assumes that he or she has insight to those plans. But I'm a believer that all we really can know is the past, and the now – and even then, just its bits and pieces and never the whole, unprocessed truth, if such a thing even exists. So I agree about the openness to make the best of what life gives (or rather, what life is), and living in the present. A bit of planning doesn't hurt to have some kind of self-direction and a dream, as long as one is adaptable.

Where does this reflecting lead to? Here I am, sometimes full of anxiety, sometimes taking a let-it-be attitude. I can't control the flow of things, even though I can help with my presence to cheer things up. Worrying, although originating from love, doesn't really help with anything concrete. While some human persons are relatively helpless in the situation, others – the professionals – have more control. Yet, no one really has full control. Maybe that's why so many turn to religion, since it's a scary thing to realize that Life has no mind, and therefore, no will.

In contrast, humans do have a will, and we have desires that we really want out of Life. That is why we plan, and why do things out of our lives, sometimes with others. And this is also why, in times when we realize the limits of our agency to fulfill our will, we hope. Hope makes sense even for one who doesn't believe. But it isn't hope in a sense of a wish that can be granted by something or someone if you wish hard enough. We can't will certain things to happen that way, no matter how important this wish is to us. Rather, hope is a strong, almost uncommunicable desire of how we so very much want things to turn out. It can be a hope pinned on people – in this case, that people do their best jobs in the process; a hope that they know what they're doing. It can be a hope on things – that medication works as it should so as to make a scientific feat work as smoothly as planned. It can also be a hope for the sake of other people – that they may be well and fulfill their own hopes in turn. We can't really hope for more. If we knew, after all, that all things turned out well in the end, there would be no sense in human hope. Christian hope doesn't make sense that way, for how could hoping be true hoping if one already sees him- or herself privy to Life's "good plans"? Life is uncertain. That is why hope is real.

A cool family vehicle

2010-08-15T18:29:00.004+02:00

I saw one of these family transport bikes on the way to the grocery the other day. I've seen it on before on the Copenhagen Cycle Chic website, but it was the first time I saw one for real. Apparently these bikes are common in Copenhagen, which makes sense since the terrain is much flatter there. I didn't take a picture, but here's what it looks like:

Picture from the bike manufacturer's site, Nihola.

Isn't it cool? And it's actually being sold as a family vehicle! The manufacturer says it can fit up to two children, up to 7-8 years old. Obviously, it also fits other things like groceries for your whole family.

Well, our bi-weekly groceries fit into two regular-sized bike baskets, we don't have children and 11,000 Danish kronor (starting price, without accessories) sounds too steep for a bike. So, this is not for us. But it's still a cool thing.

Ahhh... but wait a minute! I knew this reminded me of something when I looked at pictures of the Manila pedicabs!

Bag of baguettes

2010-08-08T11:00:00.001+02:00

Edit. August 10, 2010. I meant to link to the site with a kneading video, but forgot to. It's there now, under the heading "kneading". I also put a link to "pre-ferment" in wiki.

We haven't been much of bread-eaters until recently, when we discovered how to make our own baguettes. The recipe is from our friend Per, who makes all sorts of complicated breads. This recipe is relatively easy to follow though, and make lots of good, dense baguettes – perfect for dipping in olive oil with a pinch of salt.

My sister Lea wanted to try out the recipe after I told her about it, so I'm posting it here with some notes about the baking process:

Poolish. The new thing about this recipe, at least for me, is making a so-called poolish, a kind of pre-ferment in baking. Basically, you make a yeast culture overnight in the refrigerator using a bit of yeast, water and flour. You let it grow in it's container and, mixed with the rest of the bread ingredients, it will act as the main yeasting agent. The use of pre-ferment supposedly has several advantages, such as making the bread last longer, and giving the bread more flavor. Pre-ferment and even spontaneous yeasts are currently the "in" thing in baking right now. Anyway, since it doesn't really take much effort to make a poolish, we thought, why not try?

Rising. What does take time in this recipe is the rising. Rising time is 90 minutes in the bowl, plus an additional 60 minutes after shaping. Needless to say, you will be spending the better half of your morning making these baguettes, so unless you wake up super early, I think it's more realistic to have the first baguettes as lunch- or dinner bread (Alternatively, make pre-ferment before work, bake in the evening or have the bread the next morning). The remaining baguettes can be frozen in a bag without a problem, and can defrosted in the same bag in room temperature the night before you're planning to eat the baguettes for breakfast.

Kneading. Kneading is another issue that turns off some people from home-baking if they don't own a kitchen assistant. Don't worry: we don't have one either (and neither does Per, from whom this recipe was from)! In short, if we can do the kneading, you can too! For this recipe, you'd have to knead until the dough becomes supple and pliant. The dough might have an odd texture at first, but resist the temptation to add more yeast or water, and with enough kneading, it will become supple. Remember that the purpose of kneading is to get as much air into the dough as possible, so you can knead the way this video recommends (it's from a home baker's site, scroll down to see it). I did something similar, but kneaded it in a big bowl instead of on a surface. I also used medical gloves while kneading. It just makes it a lot easier to clean my hands that way. It's not a necessity, though.

You don't need a fancy baguette tray when making this recipe. Just shape the baguettes as long as your baking plate is wide, and leave enough room between them (I bake 3 baguettes per oven plate). For more accuracy, you can weigh the ingredients using a kitchen scale. I used a converter from the net, since I only had deciliter cups (we finally bought a second-hand kitchen scale today, but the deciliter method works too). Yield is 6 baguettes or more.

To the recipe!

Day 1, poolish:
1. Take 5 grams of yeast and dissolve this in 300g (3 deciliters) water.
2. Mix in 300g (5 deciliters) flour. Let stand covered in the refrigerator for 3 hours or overnight in the refrigerator. It should look bubbly and smell fresh.

Day 2, dough:
1. Dissolve another 5g of yeast in 300g of water. Mix in 700g (10 deciliters) flour, plus all the poolish. If you wish to replace some all-purpose flour with graham flour (whole wheat), the graham flour should not be more than 50 grams (0.8 deciliter)
2. Knead as much as you can until the dough is supple, or run about 10 minutes in a kitchen assistant. (The second time I made this recipe, I let the dough rest a few minutes when it was beginning to get firm. I added some salt and continued to knead. I read in a baking site that this addition of salt makes the texture of the bread better. The original recipe is though, completely without salt. I just wanted you to know that both variants work well).
3. Let rise for 90 minutes in the bowl.
4. Form baguettes, 6 or more, and let rise for another 60 minutes on oven pans lined with wax paper / baking paper.
5. Bake at the bottom of the oven for 200 C for 25 minutes. To get a better crust, start the first 5 minutes at 225 C, and lower the temperature to 200 thereafter. You can also spray the oven with water from a spray pump directly before putting the breads in and before closing the oven door. This will give an even crispier surface. (I've seen recipes where they also put ice cubes at the bottom of the oven right before baking, to achieve the same effect, which can be good if you don't have a spray).

The medieval and ultra-modern roll into one in Tallinn

2010-08-01T11:23:00.011+02:00

Our first trip together abroad as a married couple was not to the beaten paths of honeymoon-cities such as Paris or New York (though I would gladly go there some other time), but to Tallinn, the capital of Estonia. Exotic as Estonia sounds to my ears – I've only been living in the northern part of the globe in the last 5 years and didn't even know where Estonia was located until recent years – it appears that it is not too off the beaten track after all. According to Estonian tourism statistics, the country accommodates something between 1.5 to 2 million tourists yearly. Cruise ferries from Finland and Sweden, flying on the Estonian flag, arrive to the capital Tallinn daily, carrying with them a year-round stream of day- and weekend- tourists. Norwegian and German tour companies also operate in the city, bringing more tourists by boat- and bus. This week, we were two in the crowd. The itinerary was two nights in a cruise ferry (one night to, and one night from Tallinn), and a night in a hotel.

The charm with Tallinn is it's old town, a medieval city on a hill, overlooking the Baltic. Like Visby in the Swedish island of Gotland, Tallinn was an important trade port in the 9th and 10th centuries. When parts of Visby got destroyed by the Danes in the 1300s, Tallinn's importance increased, becoming a part of the Hanseatic league in the 15th century. Many of the buildings that stand today are from that period (although some structures still stand from the 13th century). The town's St. Olaf's Church (above picture, to the right), was between 1549 and 1625, the tallest building in the world.

Walking around the old town really did feel like walking in a foreign destination. Imagine going back in time, to a city built 500 years ago and seeing, despite that, things so familiar from this decade: caffè lattes, video cameras, even tourists with belt bags. It's exotic on its own to experience this odd time warp, where something – either the people, the surroundings, or you – seem almost out of place, but the parts fit unproblematically together at the moment somehow.

What better way to live this time-place warp than to eat Tex-Mex burritos in a veranda of a medieval building? (We did). It might seem a bit odd, but all in all, the feeling was right.

The menu picture portraying a portal to Texas, and a burrito mix plate with chicken, beef, ribs, salad, pickles, onions and deep fried jalapeños (which was hotter than I could take! Yikes!)

Prices of food and drink in Tallinn are cheaper than either in Finland and Sweden, which makes it an ideal long-weekend tourist destination, where people from those two countries are concerned (An Estonian kroon is about 3 Philippine pesos, for those curious friends). For this reason, alcohol shops bloom by the port, where it is not unusual to see tourists rolling along strollers full of loot, namely a tower of beer boxes, behind them (they're about 20-30% cheaper than back home). Eating dinner out also costs about 30% cheaper than it does in Sweden, for meals that are big, filling, and well-made. As usual, we researched about places to eat. Most restaurants in the Old Town seem to have internet addresses and menus online. Marcus looked at these menus beforehand, and I also surfed around for cafés I remembered reading in others' blogs. We love Tex-Mex and Greek, so Texas Honky Tonk and Artemis Greek restaurant (both on Pikk street) were almost obvious choices. Both places have mix plates on offer that can be shared by two people. I love that idea, by the way. I like the feeling of sharing a meal rather than eating separate orders. Maybe it's because I'm used to that system in Chinese restaurants back in Manila.

We also spent a coffee break-turned-lunch at Pierre café and chocolaterie (addres: Vene 6, in the courtyard) where we had a super duper chocolate bomb of a meal consisting of a glass each of hot chocolate mixed with Gorgonzola cheese and grappa, a slice of chocolate cake spiced with caramel and chili, and a small cup of coffee. The hot chocolate with Gorgonzola wasn't at all bad. The saltiness of the cheese made sense in the dark melted chocolate and steamed milk (they don't use powdered cocoa, of course, as this is a chocolaterie)! I warmly recommend it, even if their prices are a bit expensive. They didn't seem like they scrimped on chocolate.

Taking sips of my chocolate and Gorgonzola drink in Chocolaterie Pierre's charming courtyard

For the hotel night, we stayed at the cruise company's hotel, Tallink Spa and Conference hotel, right between the port and the old town, and a walking distance to a grocery (where we bought water, as Estonian tap water is said not to be potable. We also bought some bottles of stronger stuff there. Hic!). The hotel room had a view of the large indoor pool below, which is free for guests. There was both a fun pool and a saltwater pool with a year-round outdoor pool, several types of saunas and a hamam. We had a lot of fun here, and I experienced first-hand the logic of dipping yourself into a pool of cold water after warming up in a steam sauna. After the cold shock, there's nothing that feels more natural!

Remember what I said about time warp? About the old and the new fitting together in a somewhat odd, but also natural way? It seemed to us that this wasn't just a character of the old town, but also of Tallin's modern city center. Just a few minutes' walk from the old town, you'll find a town with ultra-modern and experimental architecture – the kind of architecture that you'll never find within kilometers from Stockholm's old town, probably – mixing together unproblematically with buildings in classic style, and even older wooden structures.

A skyscraper with a wooden shack in the foreground, and a glass-and-steel mall smack in the old town, contrasting with the old city walls.

The old and the new were side by side in a kind of unplanned plan that looked kinda bizarre but also refreshing and unique. I wondered if this mix of old and new in the city didn't also reflect Estonia's history in some way. This young state is both a product of its Hanseatic past, a series of colonizations from its neighbors, unification with the USSR, and recent "Europeanization". Walking around Tallinn and seeing its buildings seems to be a reminder of this, and how a city can change (and change hands) and still remain itself.

Near our hotel, we found this structure that seemed to be a grand unfinished project, like a concrete ziggurat of sorts, with outdoor steps leading up to a platform, unseen from below. We climbed out of curiosity and found that, at the top, you had a pretty good view of the town on one side, and the sea on the other. It was an impressive structure though worn by the elements, and far from being empty, the locals seemed to know the secret of this place. There were groups sitting and reading, talking or resting on this abandoned building slash concrete park with a view. It was rather peaceful there. Joggers used the steps for stairs-training; the steps were uneven from wear and plants were growing between the cracks. Nobody seemed to mind the large graffiti or the collapsing walls. It was kind of urban and artsy, looking rough at the edges but still somehow feeling relaxed. We went down as the sun was setting and retired in the hotel. We still don't know what that building was supposed to be, but it was cool nonetheless.

Good eats in Gothenburg

2010-07-22T10:07:00.011+02:00

Ooh I love Gothenburg! I'm in agreement with others who write about Gothenburg's plus-sides around the net: It's large enough to feel like a "big city" yet small enough to bump into a friend on occasions; it's lovely and walkable; there are things to see and experience for all tastes and ages; people are friendly and engage you in chit-chat, etc. On the list of pluses, I also add the abundance of restaurant choices, many of them with reasonable lunch prices. For dinners, you should be prepared to shell out a bit — dinner out is expensive in Sweden anyway — but the variety is enormous and the quality of food out is better than anything here in Norrköping we could afford. Like I do, Gothenburgers delight in seafood, so seafood- and sushi restaurants are also in abundance. Food, relatively cheap, mostly seafood... what's not to love?

So, I was thilled that our sociology conference last week was held there. Because my hotel- and trip expenses were covered by a grant, it meant that our own money could be used almost exclusively for food. The task of researching good places to eat fell into the hands of my spousal side-kick, Marcus, who tagged along the conference week. Here are some of the places we ate in, that I think are worth recommending. Note, I got the pictures from the restaurants' websites; it's too much work to bring our camera wherever we eat!

Haiku Sushi Lounge
Drottninggatan 30

Picture from http://www.haikusushi.se/

Haiku sushi lounge boasts of the city's first kaiten (conveyer-belt) sushi. They have regular nigiri, but they also have fusion-type maki rolls (with cornflakes, roasted onions, etc) and things that I rarely see in other sushi places, such as inarizushi, sushi salad bowls, tamago, and something that resembles lobster claw but tastes like scallops and has the consistency of squid.

On weekdays, they have a lunch offer starting at 65 SEK for 6 pieces (3 plates of two), including miso soup and tea. They also have an à la carte menu on evenings and an all-you-can eat buffe on weekends. Note that the per-plate option is more expensive on non-lunch hours (25 SEK per plate), and that you also pay for soup (10 SEK) and drinks (5 SEK) off-lunch. So, for the same 8 pieces with soup and drink, we paid 170 for a weekday lunch and 250 for a weekend lunch for two people. The place is also small, so come early for lunch.

Havet
Saluhall Briggen, Nordhemsgatan 28

Picture from http://www.saluhallbriggen.se/havet

Just a few streets away from Järntorget is this lesser known saluhall (indoor market) that has lunch offers. It's less congested than it's bigger Saluhall cousin in Kungstorget, and more cozy, with less bright lights on the food, and more spaces to eat. Havet offers lunch (both fish- and meat dishes), including coffee and bread, for 75 SEK. If you live in Gothenburg, they can also arrange caterings or seafood sandwich cakes. We ordered an east-coast specialty of fried Baltic herring with Havet's own mashed potatoes, with a little lingonberry jam on the side.

Bommen Restaurant and Bar
Torggatan 1

Picture from http://www.bommen.nu/

We didn't actually sit inside the restaurant — it was hot and everybody ate al fresco — so my memory of Bommen restaurant was outside on the sidewalk table, sitting on a garden chair and happily eating the best shrimp sandwich I've ever had. Shrimp sandwiches are a big deal in Gothenburg; it might as well be the unofficial official food of the city. More or less each restaurant will have its own version of the basic open-faced sandwich heaped with shrimp.

I like shrimp sandwiches a lot, but not all shrimp sandwiches are made equal. The bad extreme can be bought wrapped in plastic film from gas stations and pastry shops. The better sandwiches are made on the spot, in restaurants. Prices also vary a lot from the plastic-film sandwiches, which costs about 50 or so, and "real" ones, which could go up between 150 and 200. But you could be sure that these really do taste like shrimp (in comparison to the cheaper ones), and that even the other ingredients are good. Bommen's deluxe sandwich (there's only one kind) costs 165 SEK. It has hand-peeled shrimp and poached egg resting on fiber bread and topped with slivers of cucumber. The mayo is served on the side, not on the sandwich itself. 165 kronor sounds steep, but it will be 165 well spent. I'm still daydreaming about that sandwich.

The Old Beefeater Inn
Plantagegatan 1

Picture from http://www.beefeaterinn.com/

When we wanted a rest from seafood, we went to this place called The Beefeater Inn. They serve simpler dishes like hamburgers, chicken sandwiches or fish and chips, but also beef off the grill served with vegetables, potatoes cooked the way you want, and a sauce of your choice. The grilled sirloin steak was really good (medium rare, what else?), and the stir-fried vegetables that came with it were crispy, just the way I like it. At 179 for the steak, it wasn't so much more expensive than the deluxe shrimp sandwich at Bommen, and this too was worth the price. The interiors are cozy (like all other pubs they have a collection of kitch hanging on the walls, but I found some of the kitch here amusing. The entrance door resembles a telephone booth when you look at it from the inside). The owner was also pretty helpful and service was great.

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I won't hide the fact that eating out regularly in Sweden, especially dinners, is expensive (two dinner orders cost about the same as our monthly electricity bill!). But if you're out anyway in Gothenburg, you may want to consider one or some of these places to eat. If you have tastebuds like mine for seafood and steaks, memories of eating these food would make you happy for weeks. I'm still dreaming of sushi conveyor belts and such.

Previous Gothenburg-related posts:
48 hours in Gothenburg
Pictures
Liseberg theme park

A Swedish camping classic at home

2010-07-04T19:19:00.003+02:00

We have been having summer warmth here for about a week now, and I tell you it is crazy HOT out here. The nights are almost tropical, and yesterday – the hottest day yet this season – temperatures peaked at about 31 degrees C. I actually woke up from my outdoor siesta panicking from the warmth. I can't imagine how hot it must be down in central Europe right now. How are you, mom and dad?

Anyway, this is just a short entry on the topic of warmth, and eating sweet stuff (which kind of go together for me).

This is an oven-made version of a classic camping dessert that's supposed to be prepared on a campfire grill. Maybe it's the only kind of banana dessert that Marcus would eat (he's not a fan of bananas), and it was a great way of getting rid of leftover baking chocolate that we had lying in our refrigerator.

As all camping food, it's pretty straightforward: Bananas sliced lengthwise, chocolate pushed in the banana halves, marshmallows (if you have it) put on top. It all goes into the hot oven in a dish, until the marshmallows get some color, and voila – instant dessert! (I thought the McFlurry Meringue Swiss tasted familiar! It tastes a bit like this, actually. If only we had ice cream to top that off!).

The leftover baking chocolate came from our wedding cakes last month. We had a couple of homemade Black Forest cakes and some chocolate fudge cakes then – Just inserting that little info here since a guest asked for a recipe of the fudge cake and I forgot what the blog entry was called just then. Just click away!

And that's the end of the short entry. Too much warmth makes it so hard to concentrate!

"Slow mode"

2010-06-29T20:51:00.007+02:00

We've through some big celebrations weekends here in Sweden lately: The fifth marked Sweden's national day, the crown princess got married on the 19th, midsummer was last week. At the same time, June also marks the beginning of the big Swedish vacation period. If you lived here, you'd notice how gradually, over June and July, Sweden would go on slow mode. Most offices will soon be closed or trimmed down for the summer holiday – without contest THE most awaited and important holiday period of the year. That summer is so long-awaited and short probably explains all the celebration, too. If you want to celebrate out in the sun, it's really now or never. Everybody knows that the sun in northern altitudes is only up this long for a short, short period of the year.

So for how long exactly is the sun out? Well, about 19 hours. Maybe more.

But I'm telling you, they are long, relaxed days.

Trying to take maximum advantage of each long "day" is probably the closest we would get to prolonging the summer. Summer evenings are particularly lovely. They're like an extra day within the day – the only difference being that you've already been to work.

I love summer nights. They're quiet and cool, sounds are muted; everything is in Swedish "slow mode" – even the sunset! There's no pressure to do anything at all during this part of the day; yet you could still do what you wished if you wanted to, since the sun's still up. Wonderful!

We mostly sit out in the balcony these weekends and evenings, staying clear of celebration obligations and just using the time to enjoy "slow mode" (Since our move at the end of January this year, we had been fixing our balcony just for enjoying it this summer). We're not even in the mood for cooking heavy food, so even our lunches are prepared slow mode-style (eaten "slow mode" too, for sure):

The only thing that's NOT in slow mode these days are plants. They grow like adolescents in puberty with all this sun. I just took these plant pictures a week ago, and already we've already grown about 6 more cherry tomatoes (none of them are ripe yet though) and we've grown about 5 more chilies. They could be more; I stopped counting since a new one seems to sprout every day. The jalapeño in the picture had grown to more than double this size.

I should go out now, water them, and ask their opinions about summer evenings.

Let the reminiscing begin!

2010-06-17T18:48:00.022+02:00

There are too many stories to tell about mom and dad's visit that I would probably have blog material for months to come. I think a good strategy might be to save some for those days when I can't blog of anything, at least if they're not somewhat of färskvara, a "perishable good," metaphorically speaking: that is, an event that'll become irrelevant to talk about about a few week's time.

Well, this story is at least just a few days old, from a certain point of view. From another, the story is exactly a hundred years old.

The story of a hundred years begins, obviously, in 1910. The man in the picture, Carl Cederström, became Sweden's first aviator. Eventually, he established a flight school in Malmen, located in Linköping. 1910 also marked Sweden's first airshow (in Stockholm), and in the same year, a plane was manufactured in Sweden for the first time (in Skåne).

A lot has happened in Swedish aviation history those hundred years. Throughout the cold war, with Sweden as a neutral country that had to defend itself, SAAB (based in Linköping) designed and produced a number of military planes. SAAB's newest military plane, the multirole JAS Gripen (Griffin) is still in use by the Swedish, Czech, Hungarian and South African air force.

One wishing to see these planes can just go to the Air Force Museum which is located, aptly, in Malmen where the story of Swedish aviation all begins. The museum, which I wrote about in 2008, has recently been renovated and expanded.

An even better alternative is to catch an airshow and see these planes in action – in their element. And where's a better place to see this than in the home of Carl Cederström's old flight school, and the home of SAAB?

Anyway, that's what we did with mom and dad on their last weekend here last July 13.

We mostly watched the first part of the airshow, when helicopters and smaller planes were on demonstration. The big planes and the other SAABs came later in the afternoon, so we missed that. We did see the JAS Gripen though (below). It made a thundering noise as it swept in circles and waves on top of our heads, before disappearing into the wild blue yonder!

I must say that the most theatrical part of the airshow has been provided not by Swedes, but by Frenchmen. (In fairness, the the Swedes tried to match the theatrics with a mock battle involving army trucks, tanks, an unmanned reconnaissance plane and the JAS Gripen. The Gripen "rockets" were nothing more than smoky firecrackers, though). The French group, a 7-man stunt team called Breitling Jet Team, performed dangerous-looking maneuvers to the tune of lively, ala-Top Gun score and a narration by a Frenchman. (The link above takes you to their official site. More about them in Wiki here).

Super camera zoom!

Milliseconds before a cross-over

All of Breitling Jet Team's symmetric plane formations and stunts had names (such as "Blackbird", etc). The best stunt – in the dangerousness scale, as it seemed to me as a spectator – also wins the best name: PacMan! Five planes going in one direction spread out and "eat" up two others going straight at them. Picture of the PacMan here, to make up for my confusing description. If words alone got you curious, there's also a YouTube clip of the plane formations, from someone who was also in Malmen. It's a joy to look at, and the formation transitions are so smooth, the team make the planes look as graceful as birds. Someone else also managed to get a video of the PacMan stunt.

A day to remember!

Just before the airshow began and before loads of people flocked to the airfield, there were also displays of different kinds in Malmen. Walking around there was enjoyable in itself too, I think. I do think mom and dad had a blast! (No pun intended there about the following picture:)

Small lady with a big gun. Mom insisted that the flag should be visible in the picture. Man, was she agile in climbing that truck!

Mom and dad in a helicopter. Dad's shy to pose, but once he was in the helicopter, he seemed alright with the idea!

Marcus also had fun at the medics' demonstration, where he experienced being strapped to a vacuum mat. :-)

And here's yours truly, a chick on a truck:

As I said: A day to remember!

Two good excuses for not blogging the whole month

2010-06-13T22:04:00.006+02:00

Mom, and Dad.

After a whole month of Swedish adventures and experiences, they will fly to Germany on Tuesday morning. In Plankstadt, they'll be with my sister's family until mid-July, before leaving again for Metro Manila — their home sweet home, halfway around the world.

The month felt long, but strangely — as their departure date nears — also short in some respects. There's always something you can think of doing before it's time to pack your bags.

Yet, the month was far from uneventful. Among the happenings these past weeks were the most memorable ones in my (our) life: the day we got wed; a reuinion with my highschool friend Kristine; long car trips in an old SAAB. There were also tiring days; but on the whole, the month has been rather good to us.

The month has not only been good to mom and dad, but also good for them. Through their daily walks and our excursions, we also saw mom greatly improve from hardly climbing to the top of stairs, to insisting on jogging uphills — not to mention going up and down steep ladder steps in a submarine and walking up a steep pass in Ågelsjön, 171 meters over sea level at the highest point. Her "Swedish fitness program" culminated in a 15.6-kilometer trip around the lake Nedre Glottern — and she felt well the next day! Dad — the boy scout at heart who once said he'd want to live in the wilderness of Alaska if he were to do something so unthinkable as to leave the Philippines — was in wonder of all the new plants he saw around him. It was fun to see his curiosity about species (even though we couldn't answer all his questions) and see the look in his face when he heard the Aspen trees rustle at the sound of the wind for the first time. Recalling our adventures at the end of the day over beer and some whisky will always be memorable — as is mom taking a liking to drinking Martini and snaps!

I feel happy to see that Sweden has grown in them, just as this beautiful country — cold as it may be when we complain in the winters — has definitely grown on me.

Rökstenen, revistited

2010-05-15T17:14:00.006+02:00

One of the extra perks about doing an interview study for my dissertation project is that I get to go all around Sweden in the company (university) car. Because the partricipants all don't live in this county, and since I find that interviews become better when I don't have to run to catch the train, the institute has agreed that I could book the university car on interview occassions. Marcus acts as my driver as I don't have a Swedish driver's license (yet!). But I pretty much enjoy being with Marcus on the job and being able to just "turn off" and relax on the way home, especially after long interview days.

On a trip to Västergötland county — about three and a half hours' drive away on highways — we took a little stretch / toilet break in Röks church in Ödeshög, where the largest rune stone in Sweden is to be found.

The name Rökstenen (Röks stone or Rök runestone) didn't sound familiar to me until we got there, but I soon realized that I had already been in this place 5 years ago. It was one of my first outings with Marcus and his godparents! Marcus and I had just met 3 months before then.

As I sat in the backseat then and knew zero about Swedish geography, I didn't even pay attention to the roads we were taking. I didn't recognize that the roads were the same as 5 years ago (although I remembered that it was the road we took back from Gränna in our 2008 camping / road trip). The stone is unmistakable though, so I remembered it at once:

I even remembered how I posed! I got the side wrong though.

Was I extra interested in runic inscriptions, I might have taken extra note of the fact that RRökstenen is one of the most famous runestones in the world – and not just read about it in Wikipedia later on. Heheh... oh well!

The runes were dated to be from ca. year 800, but the stone itself wasn't rediscovered until sometime in the 1600s when an antiquarian noticed it at the side of the old Röks church. Apparently, back in the 12th century, it was quite common to use rune stones that were lying around in the landscape to build churches (Interestingly, later on in Swedish history, it wasn't too uncommon to use stones from churches to build castles).

It's likely that the original placement of the stone wasn't so far from where the church stood, so when they tore down the old church and extracted the stone, they turned part of the new church grounds into an exhibit area. They also found out, during the stone's extraction, how unique the stone really was. All of the sides, including some parts of the top, had inscriptions on them – a total of 760 characters. One interpretation is that the stone retells a story from Nordic mythology; another interpretation goes that it is a glorification of a tribal leader's son's death using mythological reference, or a challenge to others to seek revenge for his son. One of the translations / interpretations of the runes could be read in Wiki.

Food journal number 60: Beef Wellington

2010-05-07T20:18:00.008+02:00

Framed by a placemat, and ready to be eaten! Ha!

Beef Wellington. A fancy name for what in plain Swedish, would just be called a baked-in tenderloin, literally: inbakad oxfilé. And as that name suggests, Beef Wellington is nothing else than tenderloin wrapped in something. The outer layer consists of puff pastry; the middle layer can be anything from paté to duxelles (another fancy name for mushroom paste, which is what we made and used). But Mmmm! If something so delicious hides under that generic name, we might as well call it Beef Wellington to give it some recognition it deserves.

The first time I heard about Beef Wellington, I was watching Gordon Ramsey's Hell's Kitchen. Beef Wellington seems to be almost a staple there; like half of the guests order it. I had no idea what it was until they showed the dish coming out in plates, and the mystery dish... uh, looked like something we cooked before! It resembled inbakad fläskfilé, which is — guess what! — baked-in pork loins (that is, instead of beef tenderloin). Now only baked-in beef tenderloin can be called Beef Wellington, for obvious reasons. But one major difference is that, instead of having a wet mushroom sauce inside the dough, Beef Wellington calls for a dry mushroom paste. Beef Wellington also doesn't have to cook for so long as inbakad fläskfile. The beef can remain red, which I suppose would be another reason not to put a sauce that could boil inside the dough.

If you have a couple of minutes, here's a short clip on how Ramsey does his Beef Wellingtons. He's making something here for one or two people. We had about a kilo of tenderloin to bake though, so ours was pretty much a "family size" version of this one.

I used a recipe from our trusty, heavy Stora Kokboken (literally, The Big Cookbook), which even recommends making the dish with tomatoes provençal — basically tomatoes with the seed house taken out and stuffed with bread crumbs, garlic and herbs. It makes a super side dish; you don't need much else, actually.

Beef Wellington, a.k.a. Inbakad oxfilé
4-6 portions

600-700 g tenderloin, well trimmed
1 T butter
1/2 t salt
pepper to taste

For the mushroom filling:
1 shallot
200 g fresh mushrooms
1-2 T butter
100 g cooked eller smoked ham
2 T tomato paste
a dash of pepper
a dash of salt
1 egg yolk

For wrapping:
puff pastry sheets
whished egg or whisked egg whites

1. Trim the tenderloin really well. Sear it in a pan with butter to seal. Spice and let cool.

2. Finely dice the mushrooms and the shallots. Sauteé them in a pan with some butter until all the moisture has evaporated (takes some time, and some mixing). Finely dice the ham and mix it together with the mushroom paste and spices (I blitzed it all up together and further evaporated the paste). Let cool completely, then mix in the yolk.

3. Let the puff pastry sheets defrost a bit and roll it into a rectangle that could fit the tenderloin, abut 30 x 35 cm. Spread a little of the mushroom paste on the dough, lay the tenderloin on top and smear some more mushroom paste around it. (The cookbook recommends cutting folds into the loin and stuffing those with filling too; I skipped this part since I didn't want the meat too cooked).

4. Wrap the dough carefully around the tenderloin to create a packet. Make sure the sides are folded tight. Roll the packet so that the big fold would end up on the bottom, not top side. Make three holes on the dough and feel free to decorate with the remaining dough from the packet-folding, as I did here:

I wasn't that creative; I just copied the decor from the cookbook picture. Those are leaves, in case you didn't see it ;-)

5. Brush the packet with the whisked egg or egg whites and let rest in a cool place for 15-20 minutes before baking in a preheated (200-degrees C) oven. Depending on the size of your tenderloin and how rare you want the meat, bake for 30-40 minutes.

And there you have it! To quote from Ramsey: "Done!"

Trees in bloom

2010-05-01T08:37:00.006+02:00

... in more ways than one!

Yesterday was rainy and gray, so we watched the Valborg (Walpurgis Night, witches' sabbath) festivities from our balcony, where these fireworks pictures were taken. The trees looked like they were in bloom – and in fact, they're really starting to bloom too, with leaf buds – which I thought was an appropriate image for this pre-Catholic spring festival.

The festivities, which are practiced all over northern Europe, involve the lighting of a big fire (like this one from an entry 3 years ago), using old twigs, leaves and branches that have fallen through autumn and winter. People gather around the fire as if it were a big campfire, enjoying its warmth in the chilly spring night. According to the old practice, the fire would ward away the evil spirits and witches. In the Christianized tradition, the festivities were linked to St. Walpurga, a lesser-known saint who apparently has the honor of being the patron saint of (and I kid you not): people affected with rabies. Burning witches? Curing rabies? Same, same!

We could see the fire from where we stood, but it wasn't as interesting in the the fireworks show that came later. Other events happen throughout the day, depending on where you live, are carnivals, choir singing or contests (Norrköping had an urban orienteering event). Some people also wear their student hats, a tradition from the time when people used to wear hats to show their status or occupation. And in general, people are merry. Valborg is another spring sign, after all. It's a tradition Swedes need to remind themselves that we are getting close to the better times, the lighter times, and the warmer times. Trees are in bloom!

Miscellaneous tales and pictures from Vrinnevi

2010-04-18T16:59:00.016+02:00

Moose! ... or not. It's a metal painting representing a (very small) moose in Vrinnevi forest.

I blogged before about Vrinnevi forest in Norrköping. It's a park built around a largeish cultivated forest, located a convenient biking distance away from the city center. Many go there on weekends to do walk dogs, go mountainbiking, do orienteering, ride horses, walk or run. It has a mini-golf course, as well as a number of forest trails from 800 meters to 10 kilometers long, their paths zigzagging through the trees, fields and wetlands. You can read about previous entries about it here (spring 2008) or here (autumn 2006). Today, we biked to Vrinnevi and walked the ten-kilometer "green" trail — each trail is marked by colored dots on trees to prevent people from getting lost or merging into a different trail.

The first kilometer of the green trail runs a bit parallel to the 800-meter trail, christened the "Experience trail". It's new from last year and it has interactive signs informing guests about the different animals and plants that can be found in Vrinnevi. If you're observant, you can see the "animals" hiding behind the trees!

Wild boar! Yummy.

If you walk off of the beaten trails, you may even see signs of real animals, like this patch of deer poop.

My first thought upon seeing deer dung for the first time years ago, was how closely it seems to resemble a rabbit's...

... Except that deer dung is much larger than the rabbit's.

(Uh huh!)

We had planned to picnic somewhere in the forest, so we found a height where we could lay our picnic mat (Later, we found the deer dung some meters behind us). Chocolate chip cookies and hot chocolate taste so much better outdoors than it does in a kitchen!

Plus, you have this great sky view. Seeing how sunny it is these days, it's hard to imagine that there's a layer of Icelandic ash up there, 6-8 kilometers from the ground.

All around us, there were signs of spring, as well as reminders of the long winter that had just passed:

Snow, packed into ice, still layer some shadowy parts of the forest. On the sunnier spots, windflower (vitsippa) remind us that we're coming out of the dark times. They are among the first flowers to bloom in spring, and a field of them really creates a spring landscape. I thought that the purple flowers were liverwort (blåsippa), but it doesn't quite look like it. Anyone knows?

The past winter brought a humongous amount of snow, which left reminders of itself in bogs like these — the melting snow had nowhere to go, sinking a green trail sign. It seems like the bog existed before the sign sank in though, judging from the plants.

(Did you know that 'humongous' was coined only in 1963? That's what you get to know when you spell-check by Googling. Not surprising though, with all the words we coin nowadays.)

And just because I have to end this entry somehow, here's a picture of another vicious animal...

Ahem. Just after watering the plants and being ambushed by a certain photographer.

Forgive me for offending your sensibilities. :-) Marcus should almost be punished for taking this picture, but the timing was just too great I have to post it to make fun of myself. Hah!

Greetings

2010-04-04T10:50:00.006+02:00

... And my first cupcakes, without frosting (didn't have cream cheese at hand and was too lazy to go to the store)

Glad Påsk!
Happy Easter!

And advanced happy birthday, mom!
As they say up here, may you live to a hundred years!

What I think about after Waffle Day

2010-03-28T21:07:00.005+02:00

Every March 25, coinciding with the Feast of the Annunciation (vårfrudagen) is the more secular, almost-namesake Swedish feast, Waffle Day (våffeldagen). The emergence of Waffle Day came supposedly by mistake. Vårfru (virgin) became confused for våffel (waffle), which was served on feast days. And to make the long story short, it resulted in that one day in the year where waffle mixes and waffle irons disappear from store shelves into the arms of customers who think of nothing but eating waffles for lunch or dinner. Waffles and pancakes here are – it may surprise you – anything but breakfast items.

You bet I've been thinking about eating waffles all week long. I was thinking about it when I read ads for cheap waffle irons; I was thinking about it when I passed the local café specializing in waffles; I was thinking about it when we gave a waffle iron to a colleague as a bridal gift this week. Waffles were on my mind on Waffle Day, and even after Waffle Day passed three days ago, when I was contemplating on my waffle-lessness. I thought: I must eat waffles! I want a waffle maker!

Marcus was on my side on this one too, and we decided to buy a waffle iron today totally on impulse (or was it?) as we were taking a walk. As I've always tried to remind myself, it's dangerous to go walking, exercising, or shopping while hungry: you think about all possible things to eat, most of which aren't exactly the healthiest. But our stomachs won over our brains yet again. Thank goodness the waffle maker was indeed cheap. It was a no-brander that cost 175 kronor, so we threw not less than three waffle mix packages in the bag, overoptimistic that we'd be eating waffles several times in the next month. I felt so happy I was skipping.

... Later, after dinner ...

... And after gobbling up four waffles each topped with cream and cloudberry jam, I must admit that there are really drawbacks to overdoing things. I'm just up to my throat with waffles right now I can't even think about waffles anymore. Just making that picture above was hard (Plus, that's probably exactly how I look like right now, which doesn't help!). What's more, we've only just consumed two-thirds of one waffle mix package, out of the three we bought. Uh-oh! Good thing those pre-fab powders last a year. Because now I'm thinking, I don't want to eat waffles again for a loooong time, man! No wonder there's only one Waffle Day in a year.

Meanwhile... cakes!

2010-03-12T19:55:00.005+01:00

During the time I was blogging about the Philippines trip, Marcus turned 30 and we had a party in the apartment. Happy birthday, Marcus! The "decade" birthdays are a big deal in Sweden, but I (we) hadn't planned for anything big, having come back from 2 weeks in the Philippines and returning with colds. We planned a small get-together in our apartment anyway, and celebrated with homemade cakes.

The cake bottoms were not from scratch, but we made "everything else", i.e. the filling and decoration. We browsed recipes and let ourselves be inspired, but we didn't follow any any recipe in particular.

This is our adaptation of Black forest cake, without the expensive hazelnuts. It has two layers of (store-bought) plain meringue bottoms slathered with Nutella and sprinkled with slivered almonds, and a filling of whipped cream, stabilized with an egg white and vanilla sugar. The icing is made of the same ingredients as the cream filling but topped with cherry preserves, almond slivers, chocolate panels and shaved chocolate. The chocolate details were made by melting baking chocolate and then either letting it cool flat or shaving it into ... well, shavings.

This cake was definitely the better one between the two we made. After a night sitting in the refrigerator (to let the flavors blend in!), the meringue acquired a melt-in-the-mouth texture but maintained the meringue taste and crunch. "Real" Black forest recipes with meringue bottoms require nut meringue, but I think the plain one works just as well. If leftovers are any indication about the "saleability" of this cake, we could have made a profit if we charged our guests :-)

The second cake was a Nutella chocolate cake, which we whipped up because we (rightly) didn't expect the Black forest to last for eight people. It's a three-layer cake using store-bought yellowcake cake bottoms. For the cream layers, I used a recipe from The Big Nutella Cookbook (In German, which I got as a gift from Liz and Rob years ago). It's just cream whipped with powdered sugar or san-apart (a German baking product for stabilizing cream) mixed with half a bottle of Nutella. The result tastes like mocha cream with a Nutella aftertaste, and it has a nice firm-foamy consistency that supports the cake layers well enough.

We ran out of cream to top this cake, so I used the remaining baking chocolate and butter we had in the fridge to make a "glaze", that I read about belonging to another cake recipe. Actually, the glaze was too hard over the soft cake, so the glaze layer cracked in pieces when we tried to get a slice (It was really more like a chocolate shell around the cake). Afterwards, I browsed through some alternative recipes for what could have been a better frosting. One idea is to mix a dash of cream (which we didn't have) into the melted chocolate and butter, to make some kind of runny glaze. So, although this cake wasn't as much as a bestseller as the Black forest variant, I must say it's a pretty good breakfast with a mug of strong coffee mixed with an equal part of hot milk. Beats porridge any day!

The bonus for making our own cakes, aside from getting to eat the leftovers, is that making two of your own complicated-looking but easily-assembled cakes costs just a little more than one plain Princess cake ordered from a bakeshop (Flour, cream and butter are all still pretty cheap around here and both wheat and milk and produced locally).

So:

Cake ingredients for two cakes: 240 kronor.

When your friends say that your cakes look almost professional: Priceless.

Philippines 2010, part 3

2010-03-07T16:38:00.017+01:00

Just about this time of the year in 2009, I was attending a course on Ageing, Body and the Life Course as a newly accepted PhD student. A British professor came by invitation to talk about the narrative – the telling of life stories – as a qualitative research method, and on the first day she asked us to bring an object that told us something about our lives. Instead of bringing a book or a picture, I settled for a map of Metro Manila, which I had given to Marcus on our first year together. It was an apt biographical object, I thought, since that's where majority of my twenty-something life has been spent. My school- and work years were mostly within a 6-kilometer radius in Quezon City. Later on in the course, we reflected on how one's life stories were as much stories of other people, of places and objects in time significant in one's life. And – well, here's where I'm coming to my point – I realized that Metro Manila, or Quezon City in particular and the people I know who populate it – is the Philippines for me to a great degree. They're what I talk about when I talk about "home", such that it sometimes seems to me that the Philippines really isn't a place, but a network of connections that I in turn associate with certain places and events in my life.

I stop at that. I have no deeper conclusions. Here, instead, is the last part of my entries on our Philippines 2010 trip, featuring many of the people that have made this trip more than just another winter escape to the sunshine. Thanks a million!

Family! Friends! Fun!

Feb 20, Day 10: Brunch at Jeline's with our mutual friends in the guest list. Lawrence, who was also in Manila for field work, should have also been there, but was unfortunately sick (Hope to catch you next time!). Val was out of town and my mother was too tired to go, so it was PJ, Peachy, Jeline, me and Marcus. Thank you, Jeline, for organizing this! It was nice to see you again after our (all too short) time together in Sweden. I wish we had the time and the money then to bring you to more places we think you would have wanted to see – then again, you're always welcome to visit us in the future ;-)

Brunch. Translates to breakfast, lunch, and lots of stories to tell!

Smiling with mouths full – of corned tuna, puto, mango float and cupcakes. PJ owns an online cupcake shop, Chipper Cupcakes. Visit the site and order for you and your friends!

Feb 21, Day 11: No pictures! We were planning on maybe jogging this day with my brother Jon this day. Since it was a Sunday, the University of the Philippines oval would have been more empty than usual. However, Marcus woke up feeling feverish and had sore throat. We stayed at Jon's anyway to watch silly movies and YouTube clips, and Marcus got to nap. For dinner, Jon warmed up some bottled pasta sauce comfort food. It was quite tasty, actually.

Feb 22, Day 12: The Monday of the week we're leaving. Day 12 of 14. I suddenly felt that my time in Quezon City was ticking, and that I still had friends to meet. Cheryl, who works in the afternoons, dropped by our house in the morning and ate lunch there. Hey mom! Cheryl wanted me to mention that your pancit tasted great. You probably didn't notice, but she ate about the third of the batch, hehehe! Marcus, who was still feeling sick and feverish, was napping in the next room and I had to leave him there while I met Val in Tomas Morato for a meryenda (that's a snack or a fika) that lasted two hours.

I don't think I have pictures from this day either, but I wanted a picture of Cheryl in the series, so here's one from when we had lunch at Cyma. Bad hair day for me. Cheryl's hair looks nice as usual

Feb 23, Day 13: Lea landed in Manila from Bangkok during the night. It was nice to get to see her too, and since she's working in Thailand now I wasn't even sure that we would meet during my two weeks in Quezon City. What can I say? I shared a room with her almost throughout grade school and high school, we had the same leisure activities and we even bought matching clothes and shoes. We cosplayed together in our anime days, we swooned over Gundam characters and we did things like applaud after watching an LOTR special feature. I think many of our Manila Kendo Club friends thought we were twins (In fact, Lea's 8 years older)! So of course it's always nice to see her, and it's exciting to hear about her new life and travels abroad. The cat bell is hanging by our kitchen window, Lei!

Lea, wearing a shirt that I got from Cheryl for Christmas once upon a time. It fit Lea better. Sniff!

In the evening, I invited my high school friends home instead of going out with them, so that I could also look after Marcus. Grace and Rhea are hardworking people – Grace had just passed the medical boards; Rhea works long hours for a TV company – but they're hilarious as ever. We laughed with mouths open when we remembered our make-believe clothes design company StarJar (Sorry, this is real girly highschool stuff. Tee hee!)

With Grace and Rhea. Poor Rhea had to get back to work editing for TV after this dinner! Grace passed the medical boards two days after we met.

Feb 24, Day 14: Our last full day in the Philippines. It felt a bit sad to know that we were leaving. Though the two weeks were great and fully packed, I suddenly thought of more things we could have done just when it was too late to do them (which is what next times are for, right?). Like, next time I want to take my parents out to dinner – you have to remind me next time, mom! Neither Lea nor Jon was at leave from work, but we wanted a family lunch so we organized one at Jon's place during their lunch break. It was a take-away lunch from Max's Chicken, one of the oldest Filipino chicken chain (as Marcus observes, we're not short of chicken chains). Mom must have been happy to see, short of Liz, almost all her grown-up kids together. Don't worry, we ate your share, Liz :-)

Dad and mom taking a micro-nap ("power nap"?) in Jon's day bed after lunch

Jon, with his and his girlfriend's cat Yoshi, who here is doubling as a microfiber mop

On the last evening in Quezon City, PJ and Val came to the house to say goodbye with some pizza. Heheh! There are no words to describe this night without breaking into laughter. We probably woke some neighbors up with our cackling :-D Awww, I miss you guys! It was very reassuring to laugh with you like I never left for years. And PJ, I won't publish your "face of the night" picture here in case you decide to sue me. Tee hee!

See, with people like these, it's great to plan for vacations. Ano, Bangkok next year? :-)

Metro shopping fun a.k.a. Philippines 2010, part 2

2010-03-02T18:03:00.017+01:00

When I wasn't meeting friends in the Philippines, I did what most Filipinos do on their home journey: shop. Since this trip was limited to two weeks, and limited to Manila and Quezon City, shopping was, I guess, a must. It's the local Manileño pastime! Everyone goes to the mall, even just to kill time and even if they aren't buying anything. One obvious reason is the airconditioning. Another, sadly, is the lack of free recreational activities in the city that does not require one to have a car. But malls are also all-in-one places. Folk meet, eat, read, study, watch movies, exercise, watch concerts, go to conventions — and nowadays, even see their doctors in malls. Little wonder that malls are everywhere in Metro Manila. Our newfound favorite was one called TriNoma, just across SM City, my old favorite (Sorry SM!).

What I found out was that, generally, branded items costed just a little more than half of what they would be sold for in Sweden. For another, no-brand basic items (undershirts, socks, underwear, jeans) were not only cheaper, but of better quality than the mid-range no-brand stuff in the Swedish malls. Books were only slightly cheaper than they are here, but eyeglasses were a pure steal — titanium frames, multicoated lenses and a cleaner spray for a price of basic steel frames! Mall competition meant a wider array of choices, in both food and clothes, in all price classes. Shopping was a joy. It was also a reward, since I more or less abstain from shopping here. The last time we bought the bulk of our clothes and underwear was four years ago on our last Philippines trip. That should be a testament that those stuff last long!

As far as we observed, only two items were more expensive in the Philippines than in Sweden: pizza (costed at least a third more), and oatmeal (seven times more expensive). Oh, need I mention that alcohol is, in comparison, dirt cheap in the Philippines? Rum and brandy are also available at any drug store, which in the Swedish alcohol-monopoly point of view, is beyond bizzare.

Itinerary! Meeting friends! Shopping!

A recap of days 5 to 9. Little digestible bits do the trick!

Feb 15, Day 5: After the Chinatown trip the day before and hanging out at my brother's place the previous evening, it was time to... Guess what! Go shopping. We needed some more clothes for our stay. We met my gradeschool friend Cheryl at TriNoma, where she treated us to Greek food at Cyma, at the top floor. Listen, Cheryl! Marcus thanks you for the best restaurant food he has ever had (Lamb souvlaki)! He describes it as perfectly seasoned, juicy, with a good balance of meat and vegetables. He even forgives Cyma for serving healthy pita bread, heheh! I would definitely eat there again myself. (Next time, Cheryl, I can treat you to that lamb souvlaki). Cheryl was, otherwise, also a great resource to ask about which clothes botiques to buy from, and which botiques not to buy from. You kinda lose that skill if you're away from the scene for some years, you know. Thanks!

The praised lamb souvlaki (450 PHP). If pictures could spring out of the screen, I'd grab this.

Feb 16, Day 6: A visit to the eye doctor to get a new glasses perscription for Marcus, and thereafter to... Guess what again! Go shopping! Actually, we did have a shopping budget (and stuck to it!) as well as a shopping list (which we also stuck to!), but honestly, a day or two simply isn't enough to browse, fit, look for shops, compare prices, and decide on purchases. That's not to mention that walking for hours (albeit indoors in and between shops) can be quite demanding, especially if you're carrying shopping bags, too. We simply couldn't shop for everything in our list in one go. Good thing that in a mall, you're never really far from someplace to sit and eat. Or a taxi line to catch a taxi home. Taxis are the most convenient means of transport in the Metro, and save you the hassle of driving in that chaos yourself. We never spent more than 200 pesos on a taxi anywhere we went. Distances in the Metro aren't actually that great; it's just the traffic that slows you down.

The view of Quezon City from the eye doctor's office's 16th floor corridor. Actually, it's floor 15, since buildings don't have the "unlucky" 13th floor. Elevator buttons skip right up to 14 from 12.

Feb 17, Day 7: We didn't have any plans for this day, so mom and dad took us to La Mesa Ecopark, a relatively newly developed park by La Mesa dam, a protected area where the Metro gets its tap water. There's an entrance fee of 20 pesos for Quezon City citizens and 30 pesos for non-QC residents, but it's all fine once you're inside. The park wasn't particularly large nor wild nor away from traffic, but for residents of the bustling city, this is probably as much green and wild as you can get without leaving the Metro, so it's a very welcome public space. Trees grew much taller in La Mesa Ecopark than I usually see them in the city, and the foliage denser. Pretty cool. It was Marcus' first time to see an acacia tree. If you you have a car to get to the La Mesa area and some picnic food in the car trunk, the place can be an alternative to passing time in a mall (they have a swimming pool by the way, which one can use for a fee). The sun though, was blazing hot, so if you ever go there, don't forget a hat and an umbrella!

Dense foliage and tall trees in La Mesa Eco Park.

Picnic! You're guaranteed never to go hungry with mom and dad

Siesta! Knocked down by the food and the heat

Feb 18, Day 8: Mom cooked a really good lunch with steamed shrimp (bought alive, with their legs still moving when they got home), mussels with vinegar dip, and a meat-and-vegetable stew. As usual in our household, there's a lot to eat! For dessert, there were bananas in syrup, fresh pineapples and ripe mangoes. I ate to my heart's content, especially since some vegetables are hard to come by here. But there was a limit to my stomach, after all, which I hit after the third or fourth serving. In the evening, there was more — you guessed it! — malling in TriNoma before going home to freshen up and having dinner with PJ and Kapi in Gateway (another shopping mall, this time in Cubao where the two metro train lines meet).

The now-cooked shrimp and a vegetable stew. In our household, people usually fight over the veggies and the meat sometimes gets left over for the cats!

From the top floor of TriNoma, an artificial park. Mall designs are incorporating more gardens lately

Feb 19, Day 9: No pictures. The shopping is tapering at this point, and we were only in TriNoma this day to get Marcus another pair of glasses made. We had problems with the lenses they made at the first store, Sarabia (first, their machine scratched the lenses; then, when they cut the lens manually to prevent this problem, the unpolished edges let in light, which created a dizzying effect). We found a seemingly more professional store in the same mall, called Vision Express. It's a bit more hard to locate, but had undoubtedly superior service to Sarabia. Mom took the chance to buy a discounted pair of snazzy frames at Vision Express (Hey mom, I hope you wear them soon! You deserve the update!). Then we went to Yellow Cab Co., also in the mall, to eat my dad's favorite fastfood: pizza. An 18" NY Classic, which only has salami ("pepperoni") and cheese.

I think the next and last part will be dedicated to friends, since I mostly did catch-up stuff in the next days in Quezon City.

Until then...

Philippines 2010, part 1

2010-03-02T07:55:00.019+01:00

Zoom! And we're already back in Sweden!

I don't know where I would have found the time to blog during our two-week stay in Quezon City, which is why the last entry proved to be the only one in February. Just when I was getting used to the big city rhythm in Metro Manila, it was suddenly time to go back home. As nice and relaxing as it is to be back in our own apartment after two hectic weeks, it also feels strange to be suddenly back doing Swedish routines again. And we haven't even been gone for that long.

My worries and mixed feelings about "having changed" in friends and family's eyes were, in hindsight, really unescessary. What I found out was that friends and family welcome you anyway the way you are, and that maybe I (and family and friends) hadn't really changed as much as I thought I (we) would. After just a few days of getting used to my childhood home again, I actually began to feel like I never left the place. It hardly felt that I was gone for four whole years! It was the same about meeting friends: it felt same as usual. We have jobs and other new events in our lives now though — but basically, it was as if nothing had changed, even though we lived years of our lives doing separate things. Granted, I never saw some of my friends for more than a few days in a year even when I was living there anyway (hi Cheryl!), but what the heck! This trip showed me that distance and proximity, although they matter, matter little when you're face to face with a friend again laughing your head off.

So for two weeks, I was Quezon City girl again. The changes around me — roads were widened almost beyond recognition, drivers which I percieved to be more agressive, new giant malls, new billboards and new TV shows — were negligable, superficial changes. Everything, although slightly different, was warmly familiar. And that's a great reassurance for me, who at one point, used to wonder if it was really possible to keep two homes.

Itinerary! Observations! Pictures!

Here's a recap of days 1 to 4, which is all I have time for before I spring to work.

Feb 11, Arrival day: No pictures! The heat is always hotter than I remember it to be. I suddenly remembered why people use umbrellas in Manila rain or shine. Nowadays, it seemed even acceptable for men to carry umbrellas. That El Niño was in the region didn't make it any better; even the "locals" were complaining about the heat. Indoors in our Quezon City kitchen, it was +31 Celcius. All around the city, it's campaign period and there are lots of hung campaign materials. All overpasses have banners saying "Thank you Madam President Gloria Arroyo for this overpass!" as if she paid for them personally, and not the taxpayers. In the afternoon, we went to SM City shopping mall and shopped for a set of clothes, as we only had the ones we were wearing. Our pale winter faces must have made us stick out; hordes of SM salespersons were trying to get our attention and they were hard to shake off, even if we were buying something as mundane as sport socks!

Mom and Dad grow tomatoes in two sizes. One sort is the size of a ping-pong ball. The other sort, which tasted really good despite its thick skin, was no bigger than a chickpea.

Feb 12, Day 2: Marcus' suit-ordering day. We went to the large market district in Manila called Divisoria — a half-slum, half-street market, half-mall area where a suprising amount of money gets exchanged every day. It is known for its cloth market, and we bought Marcus' suit cloth from a trusted Chinese guy Benson. In the afternoon, we delivered the cloth to the tailor's, Simon's. In the evening, we ate out with my brother and my dad at an Ilocano restaurant (Northern Filipino food) where we had salty stewed veggies and crispy fried pork. Yum!

At the Ilocano restaurant. It happened often that, when the food came, I forgot all about the camera and started eating. So, no pictures of the food this night!

Feb 13, Day 3: We jogged around the University of the Philippines oval at 6AM with Mom and Dad. Lots of joggers there, although none of them seem to be giving it their all in the morning heat. We felt like pros overtaking the joggers — if they only knew how untrained our legs actually were off running season! Only three people overtook us, but they looked pretty hard to beat and were probably in the end leg of their run. That afternoon, we joined a guided tour about Imelda Marcos and 70's Philippines arranged by Carlos Celdran in the Cultural Center of the Philippines and surrounding areas. This is my third Celdran tour — he's amusing and informative, and his tours are always thought-provoking. Each of his tours leave me feeling hopeful about Manila, though what exactly about Manila, I don't know. After the tour, I met my college friends PJ and Peachy over some sweet, cold Filipino dessert, halo halo. With all that sun and sweat, sweet and cool make perfect sense.

The Philippine International Convention Center (PICC), built for the 1976 IMF-World Bank meeting as one of Imelda's projects. It was Asia's first international convention center. Imelda put the Philippines on the map back then, although she did use agrarian reform funds to build her projects.

Feb 14, Day 4: Hotels and restaurants lost a holiday this day, because Chinese New Year and Valentine's day fell on the same Sunday. We go to Chinatown, a small part of Manila. It appears half-slummy, but has surprisingly one of Manila's highest land value. The Chinese have occupied this part of Manila even before Spaniards were in the picture, and going there is a bit like going abroad. Newpapers are still printed in Mandarin, Chinese drugstores sell crushed sea horse, there are street temples, and crispy duck take-out stores are in almost every street corner. Round fruits, symbolizing luck (actually, money) were sold everywhere that day. Dragons (also luck-bringing) danced the streets and stopped in every store to bring the owners tidings for the new Chinese year. We ate in the Chinese tea house President. Loved the dumplings! Loved the noodles! Loved the lychees! I love Chinese food! Almost had pigeon, but the waiters were honest enough to admit that the pigeons they had on stock weren't good anymore. For another day.

The gate to Chinatown

Cars and dragons. Here the dragon is on the way to the intersection to perform a dance.

Lots of people! (Most were in red, the lucky color)

More to come. Work calls!

At last, a recap

2010-02-06T12:17:00.013+01:00

Hello dear readers!

White winters can be beautiful, but it can also be so-so. The snow hasn't disappeared yet as I write and it has stayed on for nearly 2 months now. We also had a snowstorm. The layers of snow has caused car accidents, train delays, roofs caving in – heck, even walking puts you at a risk for slipping on ice, and taking dogs out for walks put them at risk of freezing their feet!

The lasting snow has also given us lasting cold, as you can probably imagine. Last Sunday, Linköping broke a 1941 record when temperatures dropped to -28.9 degrees. And in January, Norrköping had 21 straight days under zero degrees, breaking a record from the 1980s. It's definitely one cold, long winter season, and although we can agree that it's pretty, I'm sure many are longing for the spring to come. Hopefully, the drains can stand all that melting snow by then.

Moving on.

During this long, cold winter season, we moved apartments. Yes. Again. It's a smaller, more modern and smartly layouted place which saves us from paying for all the dead space of the previous apartment. We have a glass-ceramic stove, full sized freezer and refrigerator, our own washer and tumbler in the washroom, enough storage, plus fresh wallpapers of the color of our choice, a tiled balcony, and perfectly functioning radiators – all for a price cheaper than our old rent. To top it all off, this new place is 4 minutes away from work. Moving in the dead of winter was all worth it, even though, sadly, most of our plants were damaged by the cold on their way here. I'm counting on their recovery.

Also, like I told you guys before, I continued swimming classes. We had a surprise test last Thursday – the kind 5th graders usually take to see their ability to swim, which was to swim 200 meters on breaststroke, without rest. The swimming association declares one "officially" able to swim after this. Or at least, passing the test raises your chances of surviving in water. After that, we were asked to tread water a bit and resumed with a second 200-meter test of which 50 meters had to be backstroke, the so-called Vattenprovet ("Water test"). I don't think I've swam that long on any swimming class. And okay, it's not really a big deal if 5th graders are expected to do this kind of thing, but for someone me who had been deathly afraid of deep water until recently, swimming 400 meters is a miracle! (Although it helps with strong legs and good cardio!) I'm proud. And most of all, I'm having fun.

On Wednesday, we finally get to escape some winter again, as we go for 2 weeks to the Philippines. It's going to be a short, hectic stay, but I'm really looking forward to it...Whee! So, watch out because the next entries could be written from there. We might even be jogging down there. It's been impossible to do that here with all this snow, and I haven't given up on running yet.

Until next time!

Warning for icicles

2010-01-25T20:36:00.014+01:00

Even when there are long and very cold winter seasons that gives thick layers of snow for weeks, you know that snow's not going to stay on forever. At one point, when the temperature just gets a few degrees warmer – even though it's still minus zero – the snow slowly, slowly, slowly melts in the sun.

Icicles. They form under the eaves, slowly growing by the day as the dripping water freezes in the air. The picture above was taken from our kitchen window.

Below, on ground level, this is the result:

That poor plant, carrying the weight of all that frozen water on its thin branches!

The kitchen window icicles were quite huge. Not surprising that the landlords put a warning by our door to watch out for falling icicles (istapp – a handy Swedish word if you want to know what to look out for!).

Not too long after I took those pictures, the landlords hired someone to chop the icicles away. Thicker than fingers, and surely longer than a forearm!

The istapp warnings are not to be taken lightly... I've got more pictures to convince you.

What do say about these giant icicles on a building of Marcus' old high school? That one he's looking at can almost be as long as Marcus is tall.

Here's another warning for icicles:

You see these a lot in this weather, especially on the south sides of buildings where the sun shines the longest...

... Not that the warnings can save you from the icicle you see when you look up:

That.

That would be a terrible way to die.

Same building, on the west side. Ouch.

If you ask my humble opinion, they should chip that away, man!

Yet, as I found out when I looked out the kitchen window today, merely chipping the icicles away is not a guarantee that they won't grow back again. Slowly, but oh so surely, icicles grow back.

There's only one sure way to stop the icicles from forming, and that's to shovel the snow from the eaves.

Just make sure to watch out for those ice blocks.

Frost

2010-01-21T17:11:00.005+01:00

Haven't been able to upload these frosty pictures from last week. In the meantime, Norrköping is back to 1-digit degrees below zero, and there's sun. Watch out, it might be icicle pictures here next, if I manage to catch those in photo before they fall to the ground!

Frosty grass. Looks like seaweed.

Frosty plants. Looks like tempura.

Frosty Rowan (rönnbär), or at least that's what I think it is. Looks blurry.

Frosty bikes. Looks cool.

That bump, my nemesis

2010-01-15T10:13:00.006+01:00

That small bump on the border of Mats and Margareta's yard, between their wood shed and the field where we ski, is my enemy!

2007:

2008:

2010:

... At least I'm learning how to get up faster!

Counting 2006, and maybe even 2009 skiing with Jeline, the scoreboard seems to be:

The evil bump: 5
Joy: 0

I have no smart ideas how to beat the undefeated champion, at least not right now. But one day...!

Those white things on my hair? They're not signs of age. It's my own frozen breath on my hair.

The bump aside , on flatter ground, the skiing was all good. This year's winter has been long, cold, and snow-covered. Instead of the usual winters where the snow melts to slush within in a week, we have had snow that stayed on the ground for a month or more (and it's still there).

If anything, the snow makes good winter photos... if your feet and hands can stand the cold.

With skis you float on the upper part of the 20-centimeter thick snow. It's much better and faster than walking on – or rather trudging in – the deep snow cover (Trivia I heard from the radio: the crunching sound you hear when walking on newly fallen snow are actually snow crystals rubbing against each other!)

With better skiing technique, you can even go on "third gear" when the landscape goes even slightly downhill.

The long and constant coldness have led to a bit of strange animal behavior. At the countryside, we spotted a deer sleeping by the outer wall of the house, probably seeking shelter from the cold winds (cold + wind = more cold!). Margareta thought of giving food to the poor thing, but just the sound of the door opening was enough to scare the animal away. So, not all things are fun with a cold, long winter.

I have more winter pictures to share, but I can wait with that until the weekend. For now, have fun wherever you are!

Food journal number 59: Taco pizza

2010-01-09T21:11:00.007+01:00

This year's New Year resolution is to eat more and varied greens and fruit, and to eat well but in moderation.

So, where does this Taco pizza fit in this picture?

Nowhere. Or possibly, if you stretch it, it fits the criteria thanks to the addition of (for me) newly discovered and tested dinkel flour (a.k.a. spelt, an ancient species of wheat), which I added to the dough to give it some, uh, let's say, health points. Dinkel is my new savior against too-unhealthy food! :-)

Besides that, taco pizza is exactly as the name proclaims. A strange Scandinavian cross between the taco and the pizza - two import foods the Swedes love. I'm pretty sure that this bastard son of a dish would be disowned by Mexicans and Italians alike. In Sweden though, strange pizza toppings like bananas, curry, eggs, as well as sauces as garlic sauce and Bearnaise find their way to the regular pizza restaurant (I wrote about this in my first pizza entry here). There may not be another place in the world where they have kebab pizza. Or taco pizza, for that matter.

Really, you should really open your minds to this thing called "fusion food". ;-)

Here's the recipe for the dinkel (spelt) pizza dough and the tomato sauce. The toppings were ground meat with taco spice, jalapeño peppers, tomatoes, onions and cheddar and served with sour cream with garlic.

You don't need to make a taco pizza out of the recipes below of course. Learn from the Swedes: the topping possibilities are more or less endless! To bake the pizza, just pop in the oven at 250 C for 15 minutes.

Pizza dough with dinkel flour (spelt)
(for 4-6 pizza bottoms)

25 g yeast
5 dl water
2 t salt
2 T oil
ca 15 dl flour
of which I used:
6 dl dinkel (spelt) flour
8 dl wheat flour + 1 dl for kneading

Crumble the yeast in a bowl and add some of the finger-warm water. When the yeast is dissolved, add the rest of the water, salt and oil. Add the flour in batches while stirring. Knead until you have a supple dough that doesn't stick to the edges of the bowl, about a couple of minutes. Cover and let rise for 1-2 hours. After it has risen, knead a bit before rolling into circles, squares, or whatever shape of your choice. The dough can be made thin or thick depending on your preference. (Dinkel makes the dough very pliable so I didn't need a lot of flour for further kneading / rolling when I was at the rolling stage).

While the dough rises, you can prepare the sauce so it has time to cool before you lay it on:

Tomato sauce for pizzas
(from Mat för liv och lust, which is a cookbook I won at a contest!)

1 finely hacked yellow onion
1-2 finely hacked garlic cloves (I used 3)
1 T oil
1 can crushed tomatoes
2 T tomato paste
1 vegetable broth cube (I used half)
salt and pepper
oregano

Warm the oil in a pot and sautee the garlic and onion. Add the crushed tomatoes, tomato paste, broth cube and spices. Let boil and simmer for ca. 30 minutes. When done, purée the sauce with an immersion blender if desired. Alternatively, you can pass the sauce through a sieve.

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See Tags: Food

Anecdotes

2009-12-30T22:55:00.014+01:00

Part 2 of my account of Christmas in Gran Canaria

Edit (January 9, 2009): I've uploaded more pictures in Multiply but completely forgot to link them. You can view Day 1 and 2 pictures here; Day 3 and 4 pictures here; and finally Day 5 and 6 pictures here.

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Yes, my dears. Still more Gran Canaria, I'm afraid. But before you jump to the next blog, let me assure you that this is easy, reader-friendly reading.

I don't read my previous travel blog entries all that often, but I would guess that I've mostly written them in themes – talking about places, history, food, activities – or chronologically. Somehow, I just don't think that style suits this case very well, which is why I have been taking days reflecting about how to blog about this experience. Everything in this trip could be characterized by a word: spontaneity. Last minute booking, no specific plans... Heck, we didn't even know what hotel we would end up in (nor part of the island we would be shuttled to) until we got there! The lack of expectation surely contributed to the fact that we were pleasantly surprised with the whole vacation, but it's not enough to explain why Gran Canaria really made an impression on us.

How to blog to reflect the positive in the unplanned and spontaneous? Like when we talk about our stories, not – at least not completely – as we would write about them. ("Anecdote", from Green an- and ektodos, incidentally literally means "unpublished"). So I opted for this freer form, mostly of short and funny incidents, seldom chronological and never consciously with a overarching theme – or any full sense.

Here goes!

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1) A lechón in the bush (recycled from a family e-mail)

The Sahara sand in Maspalomas is very, very fine. I'd say it was even finer than Boracay sand or any white beach sand I've been to (we had to clean the camera after our trip there by blowing sand from the crevices of course). It was very windy on the day we visited the dunes, which is very unusual for the island. The sand was like a thin mist in the air, making some pictures there blurry. The sand in the air gets into our clothes and shoes without us even sitting on the dunes. I can just imagine how eye-irritating a real sandstorm in the Sahara would be and how much sand you get into your clothes after that!

To our surprise – clothed from top to bottom as we were with a sunhat and socks, no less; it's the desert after all – there turned out to be a lot of (I'd guess Norwegian and German) nudists by the edge of the dunes, in the half-desert area where bushes grew. Each of them would find his or her little thorny bush to hide in. They hid quite (but not totally) effectively, since you don't actually see them until you come close enough to the bush to notice a sunburned lechón-colored body. I swear some were really so bright red it looked unhealthy for them to sun some more, but that's their own business. Anyway, they must all be partly exhibitionist since a walking path actually goes through this half-desert half-bushy area – the only existing walking path if you want to avoid walking through the dunes. Marcus and I would walk and talk some and then turn our heads each time we saw these "white aborigines" appearing from nowhere, sitting in strange positions, trying to tan their butt crack or armpits. Of course we never moved close enough to invade on their privacy – they were more like 25 meters away from the path – and neither did we take pictures. Still, funny to have to turn your head suddenly away in the middle of a conversation at the sight of a lechón-person in the bush. Crazy sun worshipers!

According to an article Marcus read, it turns out that, aside from nudists, there were a lot tourists making out in the desert bushes. It's a common enough incident that the local government had come out with a statement frowning upon this. Not so much because it bothers the pedestrians in the path but because it scares the wildlife.

(2) "Agua! Agua!"

The southern part of Gran Canaria boasts of 350 sun days and a mere 15 days of rain. Just our luck that we got to experience four out of those fifteen days. On the third day of our trip, when we were about to go and walk up the mountain near our hotel, we woke up to heavy rains. "It's the worst weather we've had in the island in a long while," the receptionist was telling us days later. Our scheduled trip inland had to be canceled completely, which is why we held ourselves to the somewhat sunnier coast instead.

As it turned out, it wasn't just the occasional heavy shower; there was a storm passing through the Canaries. Beaches had red flags denoting that bathing was at one's own risk, and waves that splashed the rocks reached several meters high.

On our last day there, when we took a bus to Puerto de Mogán. Bus rides there are, by the way, a thing to experience in itself. The highway has two narrow lanes that twist along the mountain's edge. Though it differs from driver to driver, the buses usually go precariously fast. And some turns are so sharp, the bus driver has to honk while taking the corner – a car and a long bus can't fit in the same turn. Pure roller-coaster sensation.

Since it has been raining on that morning we went to Puerto de Mogán, the bus driver seemed to take it (too) easy. He was talking to a female passenger (possibly a friend of his) in Spanish, laughing out loud; turning his head to reply to her, and from time to time looking at the road. Somewhere along the road, he stopped on a bridge and seemed to jump in his seat, pointing at something. "AGUA!", he cried, pointing at the canal. His confusion to find water gushing from inland caused him to miss the next stop. A local passenger blurted out what seemed like curses; the bus driver said something back and stopped in the middle of the road; the passenger was let out jeepney-style. I understood then. It must really be true, what they say about the fifteen rain days a year.

(3) "Kaere Cristina og Marcus," or Our room smells like old toilet

On Day 4 there, when it has been raining for two mornings, the strong smell of sewage seeped from our bathroom (Hey, alliteration!). I'm a deep sleeper, so typical of me, I didn't really notice until Marcus woke me up. The smell was already kind of lingering there before we went to sleep, probably caused by the unusual amount of rains, but now the odor seemed suddenly... sharp. Alarming. We decided to change clothes and alert the reception upstairs.

The Spanish receptionist had his eyes pinned on us from when we left the elevator. "Tell me."
"Our room... it smells like sewage," Marcus explained.
"Eh?"
"It smells like, uh, sewer."
A confused look.

I racked my brains for sewer- and sewage-like synonyms. I thought of 'trash smell', which isn't quite the same thing, so I tried the next thing that came to my head.

"Our room. It smells like old toilet."
"Aaaah!"

We slept again with the bathroom door closed and we tried to avoid our apartment that morning. As promised, when we came back from our shopping tour, the technician had already done something to fix it, and the smell was gone. Someone rang the bell – another receptionist – and she presented us with a bottle of the hotel's wine and a letter in Norwegian thanking us for our understanding. "Kaere Cristina og Marcus," it introduced, addressing me by my first given name. Well. All's well that ends well, and in the end, in pseudo-Spanish, no problemo!

(4) Beware of gift-bearing salespersons, or how we took a free taxi

The Canaries strikes me as a very safe place, but if there's one thing that smells of a scam there, it's pronounced "timeshare". We were pre-warned not to be lured by timeshare salesmen, but we didn't realize it was that common until we met the salespersons.

In a nutshell, the salespersons try to sell you "membership" to a hotel or apartment, which is "yours" for one week a year. There are variants of the offer; some offer discounted stays in luxury hotels around the world for a week a year, some offer a cheaper stay in the hotels if you buy the "membership". They cost an arm and a leg, and they want you to pay on the spot, without time to think about your purchase.

We met X, a salesperson for a timeshare somewhere during one of our excursions. Actually, he realized after he tried to smalltalk us, that we weren't really the type to buy timeshares. For one thing, we're not in their age group target. For another, only one of us is full-time working. And, thirdly, neither of us are really impulse shoppers. Having no money that amounts to an arm and a leg is only one more guarantee that we can't get talked to signing anything.

"But here's the thing," he said. "You – pretend you're 29. And you – tell them you're working full time. This is only really for my points, you understand? Then you get a free taxi from here to hotel X, they give you free soft drinks, tour you there for 90 minutes and get a free gift at the end of the tour. You don't even have to say yes or sign to anything. These are only for my points. You know, my points. Okay?"

He knew from our smalltalk that hotel X was just a couple of hundred meters away from our own hotel, so what he was really trying to say was that, for getting him points, we could get a free taxi ride home to fool his colleagues into thinking that we were potential customers.

Poor, desperate guy. He was nice though. As for us, we got our taxi ride, our soft drinks, some bottled water and coffee, and two free tickets to a whole day jeep safari, all for free. Just remember never to sign anything (not that you'd buy something for 200 thousand on impulse, right?), and not to disclose any contact details. Anything they give you for free as bait to their hotel doesn't bind you to say yes to their sales offers.

The jeep safari was canceled because of the storm, but that part's not really their fault.

(5) And Christmas?

So, you must be wondering after all this: How was it to spend Christmas in the Canaries? All these stories don't seem especially Christmas-y to me. Well, you're right. Actually, Christmas seems to pass almost unmarked in the island. I say 'almost' because... well, what's the yardstick? Who said that Christmas everywhere has to be spent with shopping to intrusive music, living up to the Christmas stress, trying to beat traffic – for a fancy dinner? I'm not trying to defend my lack of Christmas socializing, but anyhow, it seemed comforting there to realize that Christmas can be spent in a somewhat – for lack of a better term – understated way.

There were some Christmas-y things, but all in kind of underplayed in comparison to how I remember it to be at home. We lay notice to locals carrying big golden boxes of something that I imagine could have been cake (in my mind, fruitcake). In the big grocery in Arguineguin, the Spaniards seemed to stock for Christmas dinner. They too decorate their houses (Santas climbing windows were the most common), and they play Spanish versions of American Christmas songs. Aside from this, the everyday pace didn't seem to change much from one day to the next. I just remembering thinking one morning, "Oh. It's Christmas eve!"

The day before Christmas eve, we walked to the summit of a nearby mountain in the morning, and in the evening, ate a huge platter of locally caught fish and seafood in the town. Everything was really good – just grilled plain, with two dipping sauces. My mouth still waters thinking about them. The service too was unbelievable – with three people serving us – and this was a mid-range restaurant! In the corner, the owner was toasting to friends, mixing business with his pre-Christmas get-together.

Christmas eve itself was spent in the quiet of our room, eating a very simple light dinner and drinking a small bottle of sparkling wine with our chocolate. Then, direct to sleep. The flight back home was on Christmas day.

Sällskapsresan

2009-12-30T13:00:00.013+01:00

Part 1 of my account of Christmas in Gran Canaria.

Sällskapsresa (-n [definite form], -or [plural]. Noun). (1) A trip arranged for many people to a common destination, e.g. from a travel agency that organizes tours; (2) A group vacation or charter trip; (3) A conducted tour. Etymology: sällskap (company), resa (travel).

The classic Swedish comedy film Sällskapsresan (1980), sometimes described as reaching a cult status in Sweden, has this for a first line: "Swedes don't travel to something. They travel away from something".

There's a lot of truth in that line, which explains why even the average Swede would have been well traveled. A full-time worker in Sweden is entitled one to at least four weeks of paid vacation a year. Kids not only have Easter-, summer- and Christmas breaks, but also have an autumn break just when the skies begin to turn dark before winter and a so-called "sports break" starting sometime in February, just before the skies begin to lighten up again before spring. A lot of this vacation time is spent in a warm place (400,000 of the 9 million Swedes travel to Thailand every year, making it a charter favorite besides the Canaries, Egypt, Morocco, Greece and Turkey). If you moved here, you'd quickly realize the ubiquity of "charter trip". And you'd discover that, in these parts, solresa – literally "sun trip" – is a real word. What Swedes escape from with all this free time are rain, snow, and the darkness.

The theme song from the comedy movie Sälskapsresan, sung by a fictional travel agency called Sun Trip (they're in Gran Canaria too, by the way, which was one of the first charter destinations from Sweden).

---
"Welcome to our island, stop thinking about rain and snow.
Sunbathe, swim and have it cool, with Sun Trip over Yule!"
---

Our own trip to the Canaries was "classic" and like the movie in many ways: fully-loaded charter plane, Swedish co-passengers taking advantage of the relatively cheap alcohol prices already in the flight down, Swedish-speaking guides meeting the gang at the airport (and non-English speaking bus drivers taking us to the hotel), sunbeds with pale Swedes gradually rotating during the day to always face the direction of the sun. It was everything we expected but also – pleasantly so – more than we expected.

So, here follows a two-part account from one very happy charter trip traveler. We traveled last-minute too (unsold plane seats and 2-star or up hotel), which made this trip relatively cheap! We're more than satisfied with the whole vacation, despite having the weather (and temporarily, a weird sewage smell) against us. More about that later in the second post. To keep you in suspense ;-)

Continent in miniature

For being a small island, Gran Canaria is often called a mini-continent. It has mountains, ravines, a desert, a temperate climate in the north, and a dry and hot climate in the south. The landscape varied wherever one went (even though we actually just explored a small portion of the island's south coast). So did, to some extent, the fauna. Just exploring the different towns of the island was (with some imagination), almost like traveling to different countries. One time, the mountains looked like how I'd imagine South America to look like. A few hundred meters away, there was desert resembling the Sahara. The villages looked either like they were from Brazil or Italy, and some hotel strips looked like they could be in Las Vegas. The food, place names, people, and the language, though, are Spanish. But the tourists – they come from precisely everywhere.

Maspalomas was hands down the most exotic place we visited in our short stay. In this small volcanic island, just seeing fine white sand is exotic enough, but even more exotic is the fact that these dunes – kilometers of dunes – had been carried by the force of the winds from the Sahara. In fact, when I think of it, "forces of nature" seem to be all-present in the island. It makes itself known in the way the cliffs have been carved by the sea, in the way dry rocks chip off the bare mountains, and in the way that, slowly but surely, the dunes shift in the wind. The desert is a changing landscape.

Then, there were the mountains. Though we must have climbed about 300 meters above sea level, those mountains were just hills in comparison to the ones further inland. Even so, the climate already changed; plants turn from spiky robust cacti-like plants to lush round bushes, and, to our surprise, rocks started to grow moss, which was unexpected coming from the desert-dry sea level.

One thing that we liked the best was to walk aimlessly, exploring the town. There, you'll most likely find everything you need cheaper than you would in the established tourist areas. Our hotel lay thankfully away from Gran Canaria's party region (the infamous Playa del Inglés) and was located in a quiet area called Arguinegin. The town center was small, but it had an authentic feel. It was refreshing to see, in contrast to all the posh hotel development around the coast, houses where the locals seemed to live themselves. We loved walking in these in the towns that we went to. I loved the way the narrow alleys seem to sprout into unexpected directions, how the houses looked so unique, how their terraces looked alive with hung laundry and water drums, and how, from afar, the villages followed the contours of the mountain.

There's just so much to explore.

My next account will have to wait though. To give your eyes a rest ;-) Until then, happy New Year everyone!

The Canaries, Christmas and cats

2009-12-25T23:00:00.010+01:00

Hej och god fortsättning! As I write this, it's still Christmas day in Sweden. We came back to this quiet, dark and snowy land this afternoon – it's such a change from the climate I've been exposed to all week. In the plane, as we stowed away our straw hats and sunglasses in canvas bags, out came our down vests and thick fur hats. Donning them was like a mental preparation to come home; our bodies, however, could take more time getting used to these cold surroundings we choose to live in.

I didn't feel for a thorough entry right now so here are just some cat pictures from our trip. We saw lots of cats in the island, many of them seemed unafraid of humans. Maybe it's the fishing industry that lures them out of their homes and into the town streets. Anyway, these may not the best pictures to show island life with; but don't worry, there's time for that later! I did put down where in the island I saw the cats, though!

White spot and chipped ear, Puerto de Mogán

Cat sleeping under tree, Arguineguin

The sign reads "Port fishing", Puerto Rico

Hmmm. I realize the titles sound like something out of a haiku. The weird thing is, I even tend to speak like that sometimes when I try to point something out in a hurry ("Hey look, the sun shining spots under the trees!"). Here's another one:

Black cat lounging in pearls shop. Puerto de Mogán

I don't even think that cat belonged to the owner of the store. It was raining a bit, so the cat decided to go in the store and lie down on the shop's rug. It might have heard something about jewelry and fur being luxury items.

Just to throw a couple of more things in – and in the tune of Christmas – are these pictures:

These were some giant blocks in a reclaimed area between Puerto Rico and Puerto de Mogán, taken from a walkway in the cliff. Each block was a bit taller than a man. Someone got inspired to paint them like presents.

And finally, here's something I thought was funny. In the Canaries, not a lot of the locals know how to speak English. I imagine the conversation behind this sign went something like this:

"Eh, How do you spell 'Christmas'"?
"Ahhh, just put Xmas."
"Okay."
HAPPY EXMAS

I'm dreaming of a warm Christmas...

2009-12-18T10:14:00.006+01:00

...just like the ones I used to know!

Yes, we're going on what thousands of other Swedes do every year: Fly charter. To somewhere warm. To the Canary Islands. It warms my heart in this -8 Celsius winter coldness to think of sun, beach, and the possibility of going out without wearing 3 layers.

The Canaries are a group of islands that belong to Spain, located some 100 kilometers from the coast of West Africa. The islands are volcanic, but there's a lot of sand, taken by the wind all the way from the Sahara. The island which we'll be staying at is called Gran Canaria, a round island sometimes described as a "mini continent" because it has all four climate zones. About a third of it is a national park. The rest of the island, except its capital Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, is inhabited by tourists. The reason for their invasion is the stable, year-round warm weather, which has been its selling point since the boom of the charter industry in the 60s.

Looking forward to meeting the sun and to test my (heheh!) new-found swimming skills. If I don't appear in the blog within the week, you know where I am: in the beach, with sand between my toes. We're leaving in a bit. Until we return,

Happy Holidays!

A scared cat no more

2009-12-13T11:58:00.003+01:00

It's time to bring this picture back out.

Remember Joy the Cat? Fifteen weeks ago, I couldn't swim to literally save my own life. I panicked as soon as I had to tiptoe in a pool or swallowed pool water by mistake, and I wrongly thought that I had to thrash my arms wildly just to keep afloat. Since then I:

1. learned breast stroke and back stroke
2. learned to tread water – for whole minutes!
3. felt how it was to hop into a pool feet-first
4. could retrieve stuff from the bottom of the pool (shallow end)
5. learned (in principle) how to do a flip turn at the end of the pool
6. learned to swim with clothes on – good to know in case I fall in
7. And most importantly, I lost my fear of water!

Did you read that? I'm not afraid of water anymore! It just happened suddenly in one of our swimming sessions. One week, I didn't dare to swim into the deep end; by the next week I was doing two laps! It's crazy.

(This is the 25m pool where I overcame my fear, photo from their site)

An unexpectedly negative thing about swimming is that some of my nails have become brittle at the ends. I don't know if it had something to do with swimming with nail polish, but I consulted a manicurist about it and she says it just happens sometimes when nails get into a lot of contact with water, and you later go out into the cold. The nails get dry and brittle and start to look like they're peeling layers – which is exactly what happened to some of my nails' tips. As a "cure", she sold me some jelly-like nail strengthener that don't make the nails hard. I also have to oil my nails and cuticles several times a day to keep them from drying out.

I hope they heal until next semester's new round of swimming lessons. I'm already geared to re-enroll and learn new things, and I've even met new friends there who are also re-enrolling next year. Maybe I can even take the 200-meter breast-and-backstroke test eventually. Freestyle swimming though, is an even further goal that instructors say we can learn first after a year and a half of swimming (at least), when we can show that we're as comfortable in water as in land.

Got a Chinese food craving, part 2

2009-12-07T23:11:00.003+01:00

After talking about how I would learn to make Chinese food, these gorgeous pork-and-shrimp dumplings came out of our kitchen this weekend. From scratch. After lots of hard work and salivating. In the end, all our slave work – chopping everything to a mince, forming the dough into circles 50 times, filling the dough 50 times, closing the dumplings 50 times, boiling everything 3 times in 3 batches – was all worth it. They were so delicious it was hard to believe we we actually made them! I love you, Linlin's cookbook! I wonder though... is there a machine for all this work?

Food journal number 58: a better recipe for saffron buns

2009-11-28T20:58:00.006+01:00

...and an ever better way to present it!

The recipe for saffron buns (Lussekatter / Lussebullar) that I shared last year required quark, which is difficult to find in some countries. Quark is a cheese product, so it makes the buns more protein rich while also making them more fluffy. But looking at it from another angle, quark is also a baking "cheat" since its another purpose is actually to make the dough easier to knead. Baking saffron buns without quark is not only possible – the result is actually more delicious (and traditional!). These are definitely the best saffron buns I've made so far. If, like me, you don't have a kitchen mixer, be prepared to knead for 30 minutes. Some regard it as therapeutic ;-)

Saffron buns without quark (Lussekatter / Lussebullar utan Kasella)

Makes 30 -40 buns. Finished buns can be frozen and then defrosted in the microwave for 10-15 seconds.

2 packets saffron (2 x 0.5 g)
1.5 deciliters white sugar
150 g butter
5 dl milk
50 g yeast (jäst för söta degar)
1/2 teaspoon salt
16 dl flour
raisins
1 egg for brushing

1. With a mortar and pestle, grind the saffron finely with 1 tablespoon sugar.

2. Melt the butter on low heat, add the milk and warm to finger temperature (37 degrees C).

3. Crumb the yeast into a mixing bowl, add the saffron and some of the butter-milk mixture and mix until the yeast is dissolved. Then add the rest of the butter-milk mixture, sugar, salt and almost all of the flour (save about a deciliter for kneading / shaping).

4. If you have a kitchen mixer, mix with dough hooks on low speed for 6-8 minutes until the dough becomes smooth and shiny. If kneading by hand, it takes around 30 minutes. The finished dough should feel supple, but not hard, and it should look shiny. If the dough is too soft, add some more flour. You can do a windowpane test – taking a marble-sized piece of dough and stretching it out until you can almost see light through it without the dough breaking apart – to test if it's kneaded long enough.

5. Let the dough rise under cover for 60 minutes in room temperature or overnight in the refrigerator.

6. When the dough has risen, transfer to a floured board, cut into two pieces, and then into rolls, until you form long logs as thick as your thumb. Form them any way you like. I made some into braids, some as traditional S-shapes ("cats", thus the name Lussekatter), and I shaped the rest of the dough into a long braid that I connected together as a wreath. Decorate with raisins.

7. Preheat the oven to 225 C and let the buns rise for 30 minutes under cover

8. Brush the buns / braids / wreaths carefully with a whisked egg before baking in the middle of the oven for 7-8 minutes.

9. Let cool under a baking cloth. The buns will get a better "bounce" to them when allowed to cool completely for some hours.

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See Tags: Food

The price of immunity

2009-11-25T19:39:00.012+01:00

(That's not my arm, FYI)

As some of you might have already heard, a number of countries, including Sweden, have bought in H1N1 flu vaccines for their whole populations in anticipation of a possible next wave of (a stronger variant of) the flu. The risk groups – children, health care workers and people with chronic illness and their relatives – were the first to be vaccinated, and the rest of the population will start getting in line for it in the next few weeks. Even the university will vaccinate all students, teachers, guest students and guest lecturers. You bet they're really taking this seriously, even though (for now!) the threat still seems distant and conspiracy theories abound about the mass vaccine, not to mention news mistaking the temporary side effects of the vaccine for the real deal. In October, already a million (a ninth) of the population received their H1N1 vaccines; in our region, they said as much as 35% are already immune.

Marcus and I had our shots yesterday. The vaccination itself went fast and smooth, with not much of a queue either, as we would have expected. After filling and signing some papers, the whole affair was done in 4 minutes. What side effects were we told to expect? Well, aside from possibly having harmless cold-like symptoms, the nurse said a lot of people reported arm pain for several days. Several days!

We walked out of there thinking that we would probably have pain just on the spot where we got the injection. But now I realize that when she said arm pain, she really meant arm pain. I feel that I've been lifting heavy dumbbells all day with my left arm. Or got a bad punching. We read online that lifting stuff with the affected arm wouldn't cause any problems despite the pain, but right now just lifting the arm is an inconvenience; I don't feel that I have so much energy left there. It's also extremely sensitive and hurts when I put on clothes, soap the area, or move my shoulders. And last night (an experienced shared by many who already had their vaccines), we woke up several times oww-ing every time we had to turn in bed. Ha! You should have heard us, we were groaning like two old people with arthritis and I couldn't help chuckling through the pain. But this feeling for several days, huh! That's the price for immunity, it seems.

Got a Chinese food craving!

2009-11-23T19:02:00.007+01:00

I love, love, love Chinese food. It doesn't matter what cuisine it is (Sichuan, Cantonese, etc.). I'm pretty sure that I could eat anything. Except chicken feet. And frog's legs. And snakes. But you get the picture. As long as it's normal Chinese food, I'd love to eat that.

I guess I've been spoiled by the relative abundance of good, cheap Chinese food in Manila that tastes – as far as I could tell without ever having been to China, if that were possible – authentically Chinese. Chinese food in Sweden, in contrast, is... well, decent, but it just doesn't seem to taste Chinese enough. I'm not just talking MSG. Unlike the wide variety of Chinese food you can get in Manila, it doesn't seem to matter where in Sweden you eat Chinese because the menus are pretty much identical. The staples include chicken-and-vegetable noodle stir fry, beef and broccoli, and fried shrimp balls (yes, to my disappointment, not real shrimp!) with sweet-and-sour sauce. Most "Chinese" restaurants don't even specialize in Chinese cuisine but serve Thai- or Indonesian- inspired food with curries and peanut sauces along with the Chinese-inspired stir-fries. And only once, up in Ljusdal, was the dessert a familiar piece of buchi (bean paste-filled balls wrapped in sesame seeds, yum!), rather than vanilla ice cream, which isn't even particularly Asian.

Of course, it's great that we have Chinese food at all around here, but I just think that the Chinese food front here would definitely win from having a few specialists who really know their Chinese cuisine, instead of dishing out a standard line of Westernized Asian dishes. If you know of someone opening an authentic Chinese food restaurant (hopefully near where I live, pleeeease?), that would be culinary heaven for me and I'd be so thankful. Just make sure they also serve beef wonton soup and shrimp dumplings (hakao), okay? (See the links to the pictures? They're killing me!)

Since I don't personally know a Chinese cook or know of an authentic Chinese restaurant nearby, I'm my own best alternative. Sad, but I can live with that. Actually, I used to feel bad that there weren't real Chinese food around here (as in no steamed dimsum at all!), but until recently, it hadn't occurred to me to cook my own. Three of my MA classmates used to do that, cook their own Chinese food. They actually were Chinese, though. But still, it challenged the idea that cooking authentic Chinese in "the West" had to be complicated or watered down. It seemed that all one needed were some basic ingredients (i.e. a good Asian store) and a good "authentic" Chinese cookbook (my classmates used the Chinese Google, but not that I could understand the recipes).

Good "authentic" Chinese cookbook: check!

Because he really understands how my mouth salivates with the thought of Chinese food, Marcus gave me this book for my birthday: Kina, matens rike (China, the Kingdom of Food) by Linlin, a Chinese chef that, interestingly, hosts a TV show in China on how to cook "real" Western food. As I understand it, this is the author's first book on Chinese recipes, and it seems authentic enough: she travelled around China asking chefs to cook their specialties, and tried to put cup- and spoon- measurements into what chefs explained to her as a matter of intuitive judgement (Similarly, all housewives that cook well, including my mom, seem to claim that exact measurements are unnecessary, but obviously, we beginners have to begin with some basic measurements so as not to get things wrong!). The book has a good variety of recipes representing different regions in China (and has lots of interesting facts about both the food and the places), using ingredients readily available at a Swedish grocery, with only some speciality items that can be bought from a well-sorted Asian shop. Actually, stores here in town are also expanding to include more Asian vegetables and condiments – and not just those pre-made mixes in bottles – which is a great thing. So, I might soon be expanding my Chinese cooking from the stir-fry category. I can see my own dumplings coming out of the kitchen within the week! :-)

Chinese condiments: check!

One thing that Linlin, the author of Kina, matens rike emphasized, was that you don't actually need a lot of basic ingredients to cook Chinese food. Still, because I couldn't keep my excitement, I visited a well-recommended Asian grocery in Stockholm on a recent trip there. It's called China Market (Olof Palmes gatan 12), but actually they specialize in both Chinese and Thai condiments. I spent a good part of an hour browsing through both familiar and exotic ingredients, and I really had to help myself not to buy things that I didn't need but might one day have a use for. I had a basic checklist from Linlin's book, but the only thing I can't seem to take hold of is chili bean paste (I should really have asked the clerk if I missed it, but oh well!). Otherwise, the store seemed very well-stocked. Besides Chinese and Thai, they even had a fair amount of common Filipino condiments, so I indulged some on buying tapa marinade (tapa are thin slices of fried beef usually eaten for breakfast with fried rice) and caldereta mix (caldereta being a thick beef- or goat stew). There wasn't any bottled crab roe, unfortunately. But that just makes the hunt even more exciting – I'll definitely be back in the area browsing the Asian groceries there!

Oh yeah, I know. Some people just insist on eating the food they've always been used to when they're abroad, even if – let's face it – it may not really be practical because most ingredients are hard to find. Partly, the urge to cook the familiar may be because (as was true for me in the beginning) the local ingredients may be really new to one. Well, after years of learning what local ingredients are good for and learning to cook Swedish food (which isn't all that bad, actually, depending on what you cook), I think it's actually great to rediscover Asian cooking, even by the long route. Besides, if you've had "authentic" Chinese food, you know that you can't really blame me for my cravings! Since I still have the palate for it, I think the cooking experiments will end up quite good...

...Then again, I think I'd still be really thankful if someone opened a dimsum and noodle shop in town.

Seasons change with the scenery

2009-11-06T20:04:00.008+01:00

November 4, 2009

There are some things that never ceases to amaze / surprise / baffle despite all the years here, and one of them is the first snow of the season. Every year, even though we're already freezing in our clothes for weeks and complaining about how the radiators don't seem to compensate for the cold, there it comes, a messenger of colder days to come. "What? Snow! Already?"

Another thing is (and I really can't get over telling people this), how my body clock gets confused a few days after we move to winter time (which is actually "normal time"). After lunch, I do something for a few hours until it begins to be pitch dark out. I always think, "Better wrap this up in time for dinner!" or "Oh, I should prepare for bed soon!" and I always get a shock when the clock actually just reads 4 PM.

Today, when I looked out the window, it also surprised me how the trees, in a matter of a few weeks, already lost all their leaves. They were all thick and red when I was writing my blog posts on hiking; now it's a completely different landscape out there. I can see through the trees! I can even see through people's hedges!

(Yes, it's snowing in the second picture)

In the spring, I'll get surprised again when leaves and flowers start sprouting out of nowhere (but that's literally months and months from now!). Interesting though how the change of seasons – or rather, the change in scenery – makes the passage of time so tangible in a way. You can hear, feel and see passage of time, which otherwise remains invisible and abstract.

---

November 6, 2009

This weekend, I turn 26 – another marker for time other than the seasons, I guess you could say. There are some things I'll also need getting used to: From then on, I'll no longer become eligible for youth discounts in the national train system. Four years more and I'll hit my 30's! My passport, with those visa stickers from all these years, looks like one of those interactive programs where you can change people's hairstyles and eyebrows. I can also judge that I begin to look, slowly but distinctly, older! Well, it's another ring in the tree of life for me. And, as a quote from Marcus' grandfather goes, "growing older is better than the alternative."

Oh, I bought myself an early birthday present, which I admittedly partly bought mostly to battle boredom in the train, even if I've been meaning to buy it since I've heard about it: Haruki Murakami's memoir, where he talks about running. I'm glad I bought it. It was funny, and at the same time that I felt I could relate to some things he described (through training for races), I enjoyed reading about the out-of-my-league experiences of a more superior, more disciplined runner (and he started marathons at 33! It's not too late!). Besides, I generally love reading about stories of self-inflicted marathon-, ultramarathon- and triathlon pain in Runner's World and similar magazines. This one was written in a similar style: the tempo, the asphalt, the pain and the mind's constant effort to keep the body going are just so immediate in the way they describe their runs.

Well, Murakami also talked about some analogies between writing novels and running, but since I'm not really a writer, I'll leave the artists to judge how he describes the pains of the writing process. However, he did also touch on growing old. Like the seasons, training for the yearly marathons were his measure for time passing, but eventually, as time did pass, he found it ever harder to beat his older results no matter how hard he trained. Like the rest of us, he's also getting older (come to think of it, it's easy to immortalize sports heroes, but they get older too). I dunno, I think the reviews at the back cover didn't give justice to that ageing perspective in the book. In fact, I think that's the real drama in it that makes it this an impacting memoir: this flesh-and-blood althlete who has a talent and love for running (which he even met relatively late in life), despite his worsening race times and ageing body, continues to run because he finds it better than the alternative. It's something of a smaller tragedy, but in it there's also something very inspiring.

microwave lunch

2009-10-28T14:23:00.002+01:00

Fiskgratäng = White fish pieces in shrimp-dill sauce, in a bed of baked mashed potatoes = Salvation for the lazy and hungry.

See Tags: Food

Nature near you

2009-10-20T22:34:00.014+02:00

It may not seem like it when the thermometer reads 8 degrees C outside at noon, but autumn is a really good time to be out. Provided that it doesn't pour down rain, it's a perfect time for biking or hiking. The air is clean (pollen- and mosquito-free!), it has a little chill – but the sun might show up to share a little warmth and even light the autumn trees bronze! It's a beautiful season, and it's a pity to spend much of this precious golden time indoors, especially since the days are getting shorter and there wouldn't be much to see out in the darkness in a few months' time.

One thing that I absolutely love about being in Sweden is the ability to move around in nature in a place near you live. "Tame" nature or "wilder" nature, just pick a place and a bus to take you there, and in less than 20 minutes' time from leaving your cozy apartment, you can find yourself hiking on a forest path or making your own forest path. And we've been doing one of either of that for the past three Saturdays.

I haven't been bringing the camera in our longer 6- or 7-hour hikes where would have been a hassle to carry a camera bag, but to give our feet a rest last Saturday, we took what we thought would be a somewhat shorter tour near Jursla, a subdivision north of the city located at the foot of a mountainous forest. I'm happy I brought the camera with me because there were so many things to see and it had been the most varied hiking tour we had so far. Aside from just walking up and down for hours, we also got to see out from some lookout points, visited an old iron age house ruin, and even had to climb up some rocky hills. Marcus used the compass more actively to look for routes along the roads less traveled; we crossed bogs and we struggled through twigs, branches and undergrowth. The whole tour didn't take much shorter than our other hikes as a result. We crossed a smaller distance but had to pass through more "jungle".

Pictures of dense forests tend to look all the same after a while, especially when you're not in them to experience how forests really are different from each other. Some forest ground are mossy, some are wet and slippery, some are dry, some are littered with rocks, some feel nice and bouncy. Different shades and shapes of moss, small plants and mushroom grow in different places. Forests also have different light, and indeed different temperatures depending on what trees are growing and how tall or spread out the trees are. There's really nothing like experiencing it. And come to think of it, it's strange to feel lucky to have an opportunity to walk in nature when the history of civilization is more or less that of people wanting to live out of it.

Without further ado, here are some pictures of the fun parts of our tour. No pictures of jungle though, but just the parts where we dared to take out the camera!

At the edge of the forest (in Kvillinge, north of Norrköping)

Coffee breaks (yes, even hikes have fika) are a good time to take out the camera! As a rule, we take a break every 50 minutes to take a warm drink and something sweet, and to change socks.

Going down a smallish cliff where a rope was affixed for hikers' convenience

Sometimes, there were no ropes, but hands, feet and a good balance do the trick.

Ruins of a fornborg (Iron Age hill fort – the link takes you to a wiki article; more on Swedish fornborg here). There are three such hill forts near each other in the Kvillinge-Jursla area.

Yxbacken ski slope north of Jursla, on a very windy day. Our last stop before going down and taking the bus back home

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Norrköping municipality's website has maps and descriptions of nature reserves and hiking paths in the municipality here. If you live in Sweden, your municipality may have a similar list. "The green map" that shows details in the geography (altitude, landmarks, roads, paths and land use), which can be bought in outdoor-gear stores should also come in handy if you're considering to do a longer hike for the first time. Get good boots!

Monopoly - and Mellanopoly

2009-10-15T19:08:00.014+02:00

As we were cleaning out Marcus' dad's old storage room looking for old stuff that used to belong or have been handed down to Marcus, we found, among other interesting childhood memorabilia like old handwritten projects (in the days before everybody had printers), a very old Monopol board in a yellowing box.

It's the very same thing as Monopoly, but in a Swedish version licensed under a company called Alga-spel. The streets here all correspond to actual areas in Stockholm, with "Centrum" as among one of the most expensive places to live.

Everything about this board is so vintage-y (or retro-y?). The Chance and Community Chest cards look like they've just been created with a typewriter – they look a bit like those old library catalogue cards from the past, but in faded pink and blue!

The houses and hotels are all made of wood. The playing pieces are plastic; only the train and the limousine remain from the set, though.

When I was in high school, my siblings and I used to have a tradition of playing Monopoly after dinner while waiting for the New Year. There was lots of banter and laughter – until people started getting bankrupt. Obviously, at one point in time, the richest players would continue to get richer as they accumulate assets and buy the others, who also have to pay more and more rent, off the game. Makes you hate capitalists, really.

As for me, I loved playing the game – when I was earning the most money, of course.

The guy in the middle is RJ, our family friend, who was happy being the small-scale capitalist. It wasn't going that well for my brother, on the other hand, as it was for me.

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About a year ago, surfing for some Sweden-related sites, I ran across this fun online magazine for non-Swedes, The Turnip, which now seems discontinued. (The yellow turnip, or rutabaga, is also sometimes called swede). Most articles there poke fun at very typical Swedish things from the foreigner's perspective – kind of foreigners' "inside jokes", in that some require some familiarity with Swedish objects or culture to see the humor in them. Among the things that made me laugh was their new Swedish take on Monopoly, the Mellanopoly – "the Swedish property trading board game where the aim is to have roughly the same as everybody else"!

Mellan means "middle" in Swedish. The rules of this "new" game, which you can read about in full here, make reference to the so-called Swedish model, believed to be the third way between capitalism and communism, of giving security to all citizens through high taxes ("Super Super Tax" in the board). Swedes are believers of equality and fairness – sometimes exaggeratedly so. So, the game also pokes fun at the Swedish jantelagen, a belief that everyone should strive to appear like everybody else. "Perfectly normal, successful Swedes go to great pains to appear to be no better than anyone else because this would not be fair or equitable," my Swedish culture book reads. "It extends to the way people dress, their cars, their demeanor in public, and their inability to accept compliments gracefully."

Just look at Ingvar Kamprad, the founder of IKEA and one of the richest men in the world at one point in time. In an article about frugal billionaires, I read: "Even though he is worth approximately $31 billion he still wears very casual low cost clothing along with decorating his home with low cost furniture from his store. In addition, he still drives a 1993 Volvo!" From another article: "An April 2008 article in London's Daily Mail described the Swedish billionaire, with his faded coat and scuffed shoes, as looking like 'another pensioner scraping by on a tight budget.' Kamprad takes pride in furnishing his home with IKEA items he assembled himself". He also insists on traveling economy class with the rest of his employees. What's good enough for his employees should be good enough for him, he thinks. Or vice versa: he doesn't think he deserves anything more than what an ordinary employee does.

Is that Mellanopoly, or what?

Kidding aside, Filipino politicians who actually do think they're something could learn a thing or two from Ingvar. Do the filthy rich really have the right to flaunt their assets (if they were indeed accumulated in a fair manner), when there is tangible social inequality? Like the way Monopoly works, generations of rich groups will continue to have an advantage over generations of others who have virtually nothing, which really makes one think of what assets we "deserve" from birth, inheritance, or socialization. Are higher taxes, and consequently, less money for each individual's personal spending in order to give security to others the solution? Probably only if people, not least the politicians who manage the tax money, have a philosophy of mellanopoly, I think.

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Marcus and I have since played two games on the old Monopol board, both of which I had won. Because we were only two players, it became obvious that the game was steered by chance, mostly through what we drew from the Chance and Community Chest cards, but also based on who lands on whose property more times until the game becomes too unequal. I was pretty happy with myself, but if you're the bankrupt one too many times, I can understand the game play does get pretty damn irritating.

One of my favorite things

2009-10-09T14:48:00.005+02:00

Hej! This one is just a shortie. I feel short of time to blog right now because I'm doing two courses in Stockholm, which requires me to commute a lot each week. I've also enrolled myself in boxing classes, apart from doing swimming and spinning, and they keep me busy (and tired) when I'm not cracking books.

Just wanted to say that my favorite cookie brand of all time, Ballerina, came up with this new seasonal flavor, pepparkaka (gingerbread) in time for the Yuletide season (Yes... even here, there's a bit of Christmas air as soon as months begin to end with -ber).

Anyone who met me in my first year as an MA student here knows I'm absolutely addicted to Ballerinas. I literally had to stop myself from looking at them so as not to buy them. They're so good and so inviting to eat. Thankfully (or unfortunately), they phased out my favorite flavor, banana that year. They replaced it with mint, which I don't like as much. Nougat, I thought, was delicious but a bit too plain, and that put an end to my Ballerina devouring.

Today I saw that they had the pepparkaka flavor in the store, and as I just finished spinning then, I thought I'd reward myself by trying it out. Heheh. There. I just needed an excuse. It's really delicious and the gingerbread taste is very distinct. Talk about combining two things I like! Thank goodness the flavor is seasonal, or I might just have found my new favorite flavor.

See Tags: Food

Food journal number 57: Skaldjursfrossa, with a recipe for Västerbottenpaj

2009-09-27T18:43:00.007+02:00

Skaldjursfrossa – a happy Swedish word. The mouth, which opens for the first syllable, puckers as if for a kiss for the second, and the two last vowels jump out of the mouth with a joyful intonation. True enough, the mouth also puckers and lets out sighs during a skaldjursfrossa. The word means a seafood feast –literally "seafood reveling".

The eating of seafood, especially crustaceans, are quite special events here as the price of fresh seafood is quite high. The last Friday of September, with its start-of-autumn weather, was our backdrop to the seafood feast. Margareta had the idea of buying crustaceans home instead of eating them out, and invited us to our own little seafood party in their home.

We had havskräftor, or Norway lobster, boiled plain (in Sweden, they are called "ocean crayfish" but this is a misnomer; they are related to lobster more than they are to crayfish). These were normal-sized and thus much, much larger than the frozen Norway lobster which we baked during the crayfish season. Even for being a lobster though, don't expect its tail to be bigger than a thumb. It's thumb-sized pure seafood goodness! (I'm humming to the tune of "Les Poissons").

Another yummy creature in the buffet are these crabs from the west coast of Sweden. They translate to Wikipedia as "edible crab" (sometimes also "Cromer crab") and live in the Atlantic. Their shells are darker and thicker than the crabs I'm used to from the Pacific. The Atlantic crabs' arms are hairier, and their bodies are almost pure fat, except for the areas around the arms and the arms and claws themselves. Lovers of crab fat – a delicacy that can be bought in bottles from the Philippines – will love this.

We also had shrimp. Though medium-sized, they really are shrimps, figuratively, in comparison to the size of other crustaceans out there.

Some differences between how Filipinos and Swedes prefer to eat their seafood are the sauces and the side dishes. In the Philippines, cloudy vinegar is the preferred dip to boiled crustaceans, and they are eaten with rice, the steamier the better (crab fat with rice is a major yum, by the way). In Sweden, there is a dill- and mustard-based seafood sauce, and it is not uncommon to eat seafood with some kind of vegetable or cheese quiche ("paj"). Mats whipped up that seafood sauce in the small footed bowl in the above pictures. The quiche, which you see in the background, is a cheese quiche out of a special Swedish cheese called Västerbottensost, baked by Margareta.

Västerbottensost is a cheese has traditions from the second half of the 19th century. It is cooked and stirred in its vat for a longer time and ripens for 18 months, resulting in a strong taste. Västerbottenpaj is also a classic autumn quiche and can be made with chanterelles (another autumn delicacy). And because I can't make seafood from scratch, here's a recipe of the Västerbottenpaj to round up this post:

Västerbottenpaj

10-12 slices

2.5 dl flour
1 dl grahams flour
150 g butter
2 T cold water
whisked egg for brushing

4 dl milk
2 dl cream
350 g grated vAsterbottensost
6 eggs
salt
black pepper

1. Heat the oven to 200 C.
2. Combine the two kinds of flour, salt, and cut the cold butter into the mixture until it resembles crumbs, preferably with a food processor. Add the water and knead quickly into a dough.
3. Press the dough into a pie form, ca. 28 cm in diameter. Make high edges. Set aside in the refrigerator to cool for 30 minutes.
4. When the 30 minutes are done, whisk up the egg and brush the unbaked crust with it. Pop in the oven for 10 minutes. After the 10 minutes, take the crust out and take the temperature down to 150 C.
4. Heat milk and cream in a large pot, and take away from heat. Add the grated cheese and stir until it melts. Stir in the 6 other whisked eggs – they will not coagulate, surprisingly enough. Add salt and pepper to taste, and pour the filling into the pre-baked crust.
5. Bake again for 45 minutes.

Serve with seafood! :-)

Thanks again, Margareta and Mats, for all that seafood yuminess!

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See Tags: Food

Fashion advice, please?

2009-09-20T10:38:00.006+02:00

I haven't touched this blog for more than a week. Not that there isn't much to say; it's been really activity-filled for the last two weeks, but I think I'll save telling about them for another time since they kind of all have to do with exercise and I'm all for varied content here ;-) Besides, I'm still waiting for more pictures before I can blog about the other topics I've been meaning to share.

Until then, let's talk about me. ...Err, I mean, hair!

Yes. It's about me and my hair. I've been in a pony-tail for most of my life, and since about two years ago, I thought I'd get bangs and wear my hair down (picture here). I think bangs are great! Problem is, I can't seem to keep them on my forehead like bangs should be. They want to go to the side, or worse, to both sides (which looks strange when I tie my hair). Another problem is the whole 'do gets kind of awful when the bangs get longer (read: bad hair day for a week or two. Just look at some of my Facebook pictures, ugh!), so every three weeks or so, I have a dilemma between letting the bangs grow or cutting them short myself. I usually do the latter.

Here's my question. I want to keep my bangs, but I want to update my look to save me from bad hair days. I want something that will change my look and has a feminine touch. Whenever I go to a salon though, they tell me that I should know what's best, but actually, I'm clueless. Lately, however, I've been thinking about either one of the two things. Should I:

(1) Have it cut short like picture number 1?
(2) Let my bangs grow, and color my hair, like in picture number 2?

Please look away from the fact that these hair models have the silliest poses on earth to display their hair with. And my hair doesn't have to look exactly like the ones in the pictures; that's just to give you some idea. My hair is wavy; I'm willing to use products to tame it if need be, but lately I actually don't have any problems about it puffing out into a mane, which is why I'm daring to change my look.

Related hair-questions: if you know anything about hair and styling, can you guys also tell me how I can keep my bangs down? With a round brush? With spray?

And what are your opinions on color highlights? Cheap? Flashy? Labor-intensive? Do you have any suggestions on color?

Advice appreciated!

Thanks,
Bangsy Joy