So I’m back in the lovely realm of London. I’ve got my cats and work should start being more normal. So, to get myself back in the blogging saddle, I’ll give some more fun with Frankfurt. This was a quick 2 day business trip, but I tried to have a little bit of the German experience.

Frankfurt is an odd city. It was pretty much levelled in World War II, so a lot of the old German charm was destroyed. As its become the financial centre of Germany, it’s got a lot of modernity to it. But there are definitely rebuilt buildings that retain an old-world charm to it. My company’s Frankfurt office is currently on the 27th floor of the Maintower, which is a nice building with a shitload of cool views.

Anyway, here’s a little of Frankfurt in pictures:

My office (the taller one) and my hotel (the shorter one). Easy commute and nice views!

The view from my hotel room. Alas, it was mostly rainy while I was there, but here’s a moment of clear sky.

Here would be a “typical” Germany meal. A whole lot of yummy pork. Mmmmm. In Frankfurt, this would be accompanied by Apfelwein, a fermented apple cider type drink. It’s dryer than a English cider.

I mentioned that not all of Frankfurt is new, corporate architecture. Here is the rebuilt opera house.

So I’m writing this from our office in Germany. I had to buy a plane ticket on Monday for a flight on Tuesday to come to Frankfurt for a quick jaunt of a work related nature. The office is on the 27th floor (cool!) and the hotel is it’s ‘twin’ accross the way, but my room is only on the 26th floor. hee hee. I’ll post more about it later, but here’s my spiffy hotel room:

So I have a post about my previous day on my Chicago trip, but I checked the news this morning and saw some baseball related info that seemed relevant to another activity I partook of whilst in Chicago.

The previous evening, I went out with a whole lot of people and braved the rain and lightning to see the Decemberists play in the Frank Gehry designed bandshell. Our friend Sof was there and, as we were leaving, he mentioned that he had a free ticket to see the Cubs the following afternoon and hinted that they were pretty freaking good seats. With everyone else having to work and stuff, I gladly took him up on the offer.

The day started out beautiful, but kept looking ominous and cloudy. They called for rain, but all that happened in the end was a little sprinkling of rain and some nice cloud cover from the sun.

Welcome to Wrigley!

After a little bit of missing each other in the crowds, we met up with two of Sof’s friends. Their dad had managed to pick up some box seats from work for free and couldn’t go, so he passed them on to his daughters and, eventually, I ended up with one! Well, these seats were about 20 rows back and slightly to the left of home plate. Very very nice. See for yourself:

Very nice view of the game. Which just meant that I actually had to watch it. So, while I did imbibe some alcohol at the game, I can actually recall what happened. It was a high scoring affair, with the Cubs jumping out to a big lead and squandering it. The big highlight (or lowlight, depending on your perspective) was Barry Bonds hitting homeruns 752 and 753.

Which brings me to why I’m writing about this today instead of the Decemberists concert. I’m not going to try to go into the obvious fact that Barry Bonds has been cheating for many years in order to reach a milestone that is one of those records that has and should be hard to break. I just think it’s a shame that major league baseball has appeared to wash their hands of it. He’s going to break the record very very soon (now that he’s tied it), and it doesn’t look like, short of them catching him taking steroids or HGH, there’s not much anyone can do about it. Which is kind of sad. Hitting that many homeruns is an impressive feat, but it appears as though he repeatedly tried any means he could to take things to enhance his game while not getting caught in the act.

I’ll leave it to someone who knows better than I to say a little more about it. Bob Costas, while he can get on my nerves, has a great interview here where he lays out the (circumstantial) reasons why it’s pretty obvious that Bonds has been using steroids (or other shit to make himself a gigantic man). Ok, no more rant. I think, in the end, that Major League Baseball deserves a whole lot of the blame for basically approving of these kinds of actions.
Anyway, I was really happy to have a chance to enjoy a day at a baseball game. I am not the biggest sports enthusiast, but I always like to catch a game or two every summer. It’s always a fun time.

Now, aside from wanting to propose to Carolyn, another reason for my visiting Chicago when I did was to celebrate her 30th birthday. It turned into more of a weekend long celebration, so I’ll write about each day separately. There might be a little overlap from other posts, but bear with me 🙂
The day started with a jet-lagged Matt, since he had just arrived the day before, waking up pretty much constantly from about 4am onward. Once I was up and about, it was time to begin a nice Chicago day. We first went off to Metropolis, which is home to the finest coffee in Chicago. I know it’s still an Intelligentsia town, but I much prefer Metropolis. They roast all their own beans in small batches and understand that making a coffee drink is an art. Once I was caffeined up, Carolyn and I did a little volunteer work. She has recently been spending her Saturday mornings at the Ginkgo Organic Garden near her apartment, so we went up there to help harvest vegetables (100lbs of it) and do some general weeding and maintenance of the garden. All the food grown there goes to local food banks.

After a little rest and cleaning, we began the first day of celebrations. We started by going to the Hopleaf. It’s an upscale bar with a wide selection of beers (on tap and in bottles). Their focus is on Belgian beer, but they have beer from all over the world. They also have food, but that wasn’t on the schedule this night. We met Dave and Melissa for a little pre-dinner drinks:

(That’s Carolyn and Melissa)

Eventually, we made our way a little further north to our dinner destination, Ethiopian Diamond where we also met up with Virginia and Carolyn W. We’d been there for Dan’s birthday the previous year and it was a fun group dinner. For those of you unaware, ethiopian food is typically eaten on a big platter with a sponge-like bread instead of utensils. This place is particularly tasty. We got a wide variety of food (chicken, lamb, beef, chickpea and okra dishes) and sampled the range of African beers they offer. Here would be the food:

And here is the birthday girl and her birthday ‘cake’:

After filling up on some good food, it was time to move down the street to Moody’s. It’s one of the more interesting bars in the city. The interior, unlike much of the city, is not air-conditioned, so in the summer, it’s very warm inside. On top of that, it’s got a very dark vibe and a fireplace which makes the inside a little scary. However, they have a gigantic beer garden (about twice the size of the inside bar) and is a great place for some beer and conversation. Their beer choices are limited but good (Anchor and Berghoffs on tap) and the price is ridiculously cheap ($9 for a pitcher of Anchor). On top of that, they have huge, cheap plates of fries and good burgers (people argue they’re the best in the city — I’m not convinced, but they are tasty). Anyway, we headed here for beer and conversation, as well as to meet up with some fine folks who couldn’t meet for dinner (Anne, Dan and Ryan). Here is an attempt at capturing the beer garden at night:

I personally started to crash after a few beers and fries and, thankfully, the night wound down. But, we all departed around midnight well fed and happy. For Carolyn, she still had more birthday fun to come the next day.

Just a quick hello from Chicago. I’m not too horribly jet-lagged. Since I got here, I’ve had dinner at the Heartland Cafe and Carolyn and I went and did some volunteer gardening and the Ginkgo Organic Garden. I also got some nice coffee at my favorite coffee shop in Chicago. And my apartment is unsold but still looks good. Everything feels very much normal, which is nice, but a little odd since I’ve been gone for 4 months now. I didn’t have my camera handy, so I’ll need to start taking pictures later! 🙂

Best of all, I’ve been able to see Carolyn! It’s very nice to see her again after all these months.

Hello all you lovely Chicago readers. Just a quick announcement before regular posting continues, but I wanted to make it be known that, barring an emergency at work, I’ve got a ticket to head to beautiful Chicago in less than two weeks. I’ll be in Chicago or visiting the family in Michigan from the 13th of July until the 23rd at which point I’ll be heading back to finish my marathon project at work.

Hopefully, you’ll all be around and I can see you and break bread and drink beer and enjoy a little bit of summer in Chicago with you. Exciting!!

I’ve been bad and haven’t done a whole lot of bloggy updating. It’s been busy and I’m fighting a cold. So let’s take a step back to last weekend when I took a little trip into the countryside and visited Leeds Castle.

It’s about an hour train ride to the nearest station and then a quick bus to the castle. I went with some coworkers, their roommates, nieces and wives. Here would be that group (forgive the uneven picture):

The castle has been around for about 700 years and it’s passed through many hands. Obviously most of these people were wealthy, or kings. It’s situated in the middle of some beautiful grounds, which is full of various birds. Among them are many peacocks. One of them (a white one!) was kind enough to do a little posing for some of the passer-bys:

Anyway, after a really nice stroll, you come upon the castle. It’s situated in a really cool spot in the middle of a lake/moat:

Now, it’s been a few years since anyone in England had a whole lot of use for a functioning castle, so the last occupants (who, when they died, set it up as a trust for people to visit and also for conferences of some sort) were not sitting around holed up from invaders. This was their home and they were clearly filthy rich. They’ve taken parts of the interior and tried to recreate what it might have looked like when various royalty lived there, but the interior parts that were most interesting were what the last occupants did with the place. There’s a gigantic library, 25 bedrooms and this very nice banquet hall:

Around the grounds, there are some other older buildings and, more recently, someone designed and set up a hedge maze. It was deceptively difficult. From the entrance to it, it seemed small and we figured we’ll pull it off in no time at all. Well, 15 minutes of wandering later and we eventually made it to the center where we could see that it might not look big but you can make a pretty complex path to get to the center with that much space:

Once you get to the center, you can take steps to an underground grotto which shoots you back under the maze to the beginning. A nice touch.

After a number of hours wandering around and taking in all the natural beauty, we headed back to the train station. Now, I’d been in the city for a while and I was curious what a smaller town (this one being a town called Bearstead) was like. In particular, I wanted to check out a smaller, non-London pub. The town had 2 or 3 pubs, but the town itself seemed to be more of an upscale commuter town for London, so the pubs were not as thrilling as I expected. We got a good cheap deal in one of them which had a funky modern vibe to it, so I wasn’t totally disappointed 🙂

After a couple of pints, we made our way on the train back to lovely London. Here’s a final shot of the front of the castle for you to enjoy:

It’s been a long week of things not worth writing about. So I’d like to take a step back. Almost 2 months back to a time when I still lived in the US and it was winter. I had one week before my departure and was getting things together for storage and moving. My parents, about to enter the blissful world of retirement (or rather semi-retirement), were in the process of putting the finishing touches on what is now their home in Michigan (which they share with my Aunt Judy and Uncles Mark and Marvin — a jolly little sitcom could be made). As of St Patrick’s Day, the place was very near completion. The guy doing the work was a machine and had managed to go from complete demolition to a livable house in less than 6 months. Here I was moving to England just as my parents were about to finally be geographically close to me for the first time in 12 years. Well, I’d grown up visiting the old house that stood where the new house was and I really wanted check it out before I left. That, and I needed to store some things there 🙂

So Carolyn and I prepared for a road trip. I rented a mini-van and did a massive push to get all my computer crap and a bunch of boxes together and off we went! But not before a little side trip. While I had lived in Chicago for 5 years, I had yet to experience the wonders of the green Chicago River on St Patrick’s day. And the day of our road trip was in fact that very Irish of holidays. Here is what the Chicago River looks like in a bright shade of green:

This is in comparison to when it’s usually a murkier shade of green.

Anyway, the drive up to Michigan was nice and smooth. I believe it was the last time I’ve driven. My aunt and uncle were already there which meant I had a chance to wish them farewell before my trip. We got to the house and were thoroughly impressed. My family had managed to capture the essence of the old house, but enlarged it to house a lot more people and taken a crumbling place and made it suitable for many people to live in. There are some great colors on the walls and I love the big ass porch. This is what it looks like from the exterior (keep in mind they had literally just finished a lot of the big stuff so it was still a work in progress):

We spent a little time unpacking the mini-van as well as taking in all the nice rooms (ranging from the gi-normous downstairs rec room to the cute little office). However, since the plumbing wasn’t quite ready, we made our way to a hotel, the Bay Point Inn, a nice new-ish hotel on nearby Gun Lake which was the inspiration for many of the cool color schemes in the new house. After a dinner of Guiness and fish and chips, we retired for the night. We went back to the house to explore it some more and take some nice photos:

I miss Carolyn 🙁

Yep the Schroeder genes make us tall!

Although it was a short trip, I was happy to have made it. Hopefully, I’ll have a chance to see the finished, completely furnished product in July. We said our goodbyes and Carolyn and I hopped back in the car for the return trip. But, before returning to Chicago, we decided to make a little detour. A fine gentleman by the name of Tony used to be in a running group with us in Chicago. He had finished his PhD and had moved to the far far outskirts of Kalamazoo for his Post-Doc. We decided to drop by and check out his life in Michigan. He surprised us with a very short hair cut (the previous week we’d seen him and he had long hair) and gave us a tour of his life in the rural Midwest. One of the Kelloggs had bequeathed a lot of land to MSU and it was now a great place to study ecology, which Tony studies. It was a very cool layout and he was living in an old farmhouse near campus. After a little tour and walk, we went into Kalamazoo to check out the Bell’s brew-pub. It had a cool hippie-vibe, which I hadn’t expected. Anyway, here’s Tony having I believe a Bell’s Porter:

After a quick beer, we hit the road. Since then, I’ve moved far away, the house is now completely furnished, Carolyn ran a marathon, my cats have moved from CT to Michigan and now get along with my parents cat and my parents are living a nice life in the cozy confines of their new house. A whole lot of change in 8 short weeks!

Hope you enjoyed a little trip in my time machine. I’d meant to add this a long ways back, but it’s been a little hectic. This weekend will be quiet and it looks like the London rain has arrived, so it might be a little uneventful. So chew on these pictures and this story for a bit.

Brighton, while also known as the home of Dina and Adrian, also had a thriving arts community. As a result, every year they put on a month-long festival called the Brighton Festival (how original!). It has evolved into a world-class place for plays, musicals, dance and all sorts of art to be shown. While this festival consists of a lot of high-brow type of art, a crazy cousin has shown up, calling itself the Brighton Fringe Festival. It consist of more of the alternative and experimental art and theater that England and the world have to offer. They co-exist at this point and just serve different audiences and tastes, thus expanding all that the month of May has to offer in Brighton.

Dina and Adrian are big fans of this festival. I believe Adrian has tickets to see 15 shows during the month of May (he’s got his own page of easy-to-digest reviews). Since I had a place to crash and some people with a lot of knowledge about the fun goings on down there, I’m trying to make a trip or two down there in May to see some shows. This weekend is a bank holiday (no work tomorrow!!), so I headed down on Saturday to see two shows. In this case, they were both Fringe Festival shows.

Now, the Fringe Festival has a mainstage in the middle of a square in Brighton. It’s called the UdderBelly:

It’s a lovely shade of purple and is actually in the form of a cow lying on its back, complete with udders (hence the pun). Here would be the head of the cow (you can enter through head or the ass — insert infantile jokes here):

Now, the UdderBelly, being the center of the Fringe Festival, has a sort of lively little center around it. There’s a pavilion that serves milkshakes, beer and a variety of food. As a result, it’s not just a big cow in the middle of a square. They’ve taken some pains to follow a theme. See if you can guess what it is:

(I totally nailed Dina about to attack the cow!)

Just in case you think it’s all about purple cows, note the beautiful fountain behind those two beautiful people:

They’ve got hippos and penguins and various other animals too. Never fear, they’ve only got a mild cow fetish.

OK, enough of the random remarks about the festival. Allow me to talk a little bit about the first show I saw: Bill Hicks: Slight Return. For those of you unaware of Bill Hicks, he was a comedian who died just as he was rising from cult status. His work had a anti-establishment slant and also had themes that focused on what might be considered vulgar to some people (ok, a lot of people). Anyway, he died in 1994 of cancer (as a heavy smoker, he managed not to die of lung cancer, but of pancreatic cancer). I first heard of him through a band I very much enjoy (Tool) and, more recently, found that Adrian loves him. As a result, I’ve also heard some of his old routines. Now, even in death, he’s achieved a heavy cult following. And a few years ago, a couple of people decided to write a play in which Bill Hicks came back from the dead to comment on all the fun things that have transpired since his death. The format is basically someone channeling Bill Hicks and giving one last stand-up performance. The actor playing him had his voice and mannerisms down very well. His material was quite good and alternatively funny and cringe-worthy, which was apt for Bill Hicks’ style. It was a little weird that someone had basically put together a show pretending to do someone else’s material but, if you got past that, it was quite enjoyable. One person in the audience, I believe with the help of quite a bit of beer, was not able to get past the premise, started heckling “Bill” and was escorted out. It actually made for a very funny ad-libbed moment (unless, of course, it was staged which would be a little odd). There were also a few other people in the audience who were not-quite-sober and that just added to the mood.

After the show, I experienced something that seems to be common in England. In the US, most bars serve some sort of food on top of their array of alcoholic beverages. In the UK, it seems as though tradition dictated that you ate food before going out binge drinking (so I’ve been told), so the need to serve food was not there. On the weekends, this tradition continues. On a Friday or Saturday, you pretty much expect to not find any food in any pub you enter. So we had to scour the area we were at for food before we hit the pubs. We hit one of two pubs, not really enjoying the vibe (mostly just too crowded with a few unpleasant folk) and stumbled into a pub that was also a time-warp. While all the other pubs consisted of 20 or 30 somethings, this pub, only block off the main strip we were on, had no one under 40 (well, maybe one or two). We opened the door and people sort of turned and stared. Meanwhile, a man with a guitar (which he played in only one song) was performing some version of karaoke and the decor was frozen in some long-forgotten time. We pondered leaving for a moment and then decided to at least have a pint. It was a good move. The people were a little odd, but pretty nice and it had the feel that everyone there had been coming to this pub every Saturday for years. Basically, it was a country pub in the middle of Brighton. Out of place, but fun to soak in. Oh yeah, Bass poured from a cask is much better than the US crap in a bottle.

Anyway, back to the culture. The next day (today actually!) dawned cold and overcast. But, we walked the sleep away by taking a stroll to a lovely little market that happens once a month around the corner from Dina and Adrian’s flat. It had a great variety of local produce, breads, juices, coffee, nuts, cheeses, beer and so on. I picked up some eggs and bread for the week (Carolyn got me a pasta maker for my birthday. Hopefully one of those eggs will go into my first batch!). After that it was on to our next show.

While the Bill Hicks show took place in the mainstage, there were venues all over the city hosting performances. Our next show was in a much more intimate setting, the Theatre Cella. It was basically a basement performance space that could hold 40-50 people under a nice cafe:

This performance was called Bite-Size: Short & Sweet. It’s basically a collection of 10 minute plays on a random array of themes and subjects. I believed it originates in Australia where the select/write/develop the plays and send it around to many arts festivals. It ranged from a romantic comedy to a sci-fi thriller with a whole lot of other ones in between. I found all 8 of the mini-shows to be excellent. They asked us to vote for our three favorite and I had trouble picking just three. It was also nice to see that, while I picked three, Dina and Adrian had their own three with almost no overlap. The writing was solid and the actors were very good (we were all impressed by the lead in the romantic comedy — it could have gone the way of a sappy Hollywood film, but he gave it a sense of believability that could be tough in a small venue). And, while it was a very minimal set, they did a lot with the space and lighting.

After my second helping of theatre, I headed back on a train to London. I have tomorrow off, which is very nice and I’m hoping to keep chipping away at the whole “I own nothing in London right now” problem. 🙂

Soooo, my lack of free time and internet connectivity means that I got a little behind on some posting here. So let’s take a step back to the time that man forgot — April. A time when I was born and, on some years, a time when some guy might have been nailed to a cross, thus proving something or other. Anyhoo, in England, it means a 4 day weekend. And, in my case, it meant moving day. For those of you who have been keeping up, I was supposed to move in a few days before Easter weekend, but forces beyond my control meant I moved in that Saturday. Thankfully, what I moved into was a small, but lovely flat that I’ve been enjoying ever since. So let me begin with some flat related photos:

This would be the kitchen on moving day. It is also the 4th wall of the living room. All the appliances are in good shape and behind one of those doors is even a washing machine (everyone owns a washing machine, few own dryers. I’ve learned the joys of a drying rack).

This is the view out my bedroom window. A nice British-like scene.

I spent a day getting adjusted to my new surroundings and woke up that easter to take a trip down to Brighton. This would be the home of Dina and Adrian and they’d been kind enough to invite me to join Adrian’s family for Easter celebrations. After arriving in Brighton and realizing that Adrian didn’t quite know where his aunt and uncle lived (despite going there on a regular basis for 35 years), we arrived at his aunt and uncles nice house in the suburbs of Brighton. I got to meet the entire Spottiswoode clan and drink beer and eat good food with them, as is their custom. I also used this time to prep myself for an event planned for the next day. Somehow, I’d been finding myself exposed to people who knew about the quaint English game known as cricket. And, the day after Easter was a friendly match between Sussex (the county where Brighton is) and Surrey (closer to London) and Dina and Adrian wanted to expose me to this sport. Since it was the Cricket World Cup (since then Australia has won, yet again), people were very into following the ups and downs and murders of the sport. England was playing Australia on Easter. Now, since I was about to go to a match, I decided to plop myself down and ask the people watching as many questions as possible since I had absolutely no idea what was going on. Thankfully, Adrian’s family seemed more than entertained to teach a silly Yank a thing or two about the game (all the while cursing at how the English National team sucked as usual). I was able to pick enough up so that, the next day, I wouldn’t be clueless. Again, thank you to the Spottiswoodes for being so kind and putting up with a stranger in their midst on a lovely Easter Sunday.
The following day dawned nice and sunny (in fact, it’s been a little bit too nice and sunny for rainy England — they’re in the middle of a drought). We made our way to the cricket grounds. I could try to explain the game, but it would take a while. It’s got a lot of interesting similarities to baseball (here I go again doing compare and contrasts), but plenty of strange differences. i want to say that the rules have an almost loose feel to it (you have a playing field but the area where the batter and bowlers stand shifts depending on the condition of the playing field, the positions apparently change name every few years and there are three or four different versions of an actual match — some last one day, others last 4 days). Now, while some might think 3-4 hours of baseball is a lot of sport for a day, cricket beats that by a long shot. A ‘short’ game will last a full day (8 hours, plus a break in between the teams batting). One team gets up and bats until it’s out of turn, they take a break and then the other team gets up and has a go at it. Whoever scores the mosts runs in the end of their turn wins. Technically, a turn could consist of only two of the players batting the whole time. Like I said, I could go into detail, but it’s complicated. The watching of the sport has a nice relaxing feel to it. At least for this exhibition match, you could roam the stands, taking in different viewpoints of the game and, at the halfway point, hit the nearby pub for a pint and some food. And, since you’re sitting in the midst of a large green space, it has the feel of a day at the park with something to watch. Here is my attempt at a sports action shot:

This is a more an attempt to get the whole field into the camera.

Anyway, all long weekends must come to an end and mine came to a close loaded down with lots of nice household needs that Dina kindly snuck off and bought me a housewarming/birthday gift and have proven to be most useful. I’ll be seeing them again this weekend for the annual Brighton festival. I’ll take lots of pictures and post about it much quicker than I did about Easter!

For some reason, I got this idea walking back to my hotel after my biking tour of Stockholm (pics here). There are lots of bike and foot paths in Stockholm. They are nicely marked and decently laid out. On one of them, I found a special path, but they seemed a little confused as to who it was for:

This path is for a man with no leg and his daughter. But then, a short while later, it changed purposes:

Now the path is only for men with no heads, one hand and his legless daughter. But never fear, things go ok for the daughter in the end:

Now the child has all her limbs. Alas, the man has no head (he did get his hand back).

Needless so say, I was alone and had all my body parts intact. So I got off that path. Best not to temp faith 🙂

Hope that was amusing!

Just to make people jealous, here are a selection of pictures that hopefully illustrate my trip here. If you want more words, check out a previous writeup.

Here is Östermalm looking along some of the waterfront (there’s a lot of waterfront in Stockholm since part way between the North Sea and Baltic Sea)

Here is my rented bike in front of a museum on Djurgården

A Hot Chocolate and Cake break in a pretty square in Gamla Stan

The front of one of the many churches in Stockholm. This one is known for a sculpture of St George fighting the dragon he supposedly slayed.

A slice of modern Stockholm. Personally, I kind of like this sculpture.

For those patient enough to still be reading my blog, I’ll give you a treat. Three posts in one day. Hopefully, you like at least one of them.

So I had to go to Stockholm for a short weekend trip. We have our data center here and, my being new and all and us having some work to be done at odd hours, my coworker Ben and I scheduled a trip to Stockholm. Our plan was to get up very early on Saturday, rebuild a server and do some general maintenance and check out our little world in Sweden. I won’t bore you with the details, but we had one day scheduled for work and another day just in case things got ugly.

Fortunately, things did not get ugly and the work portion of the trip ended smoothly. Which left me a day to set out and explore a new city. While I’m pretty sure I’ll be back here at least once or twice, I wasn’t running around going “holy shit! What am I going to do with one day!” but I wanted to take in a sizeable chunk of the city. I decided that renting a bike would be the best option as it’s not a huge city and a bike allowed me to get a good sample of a very nice city.

Stockholm is divided into a number of sections (as a tourist, I’ll focus on the city centre). Gamla Stan is the original part of the city. With some hindsight, the government was able to preserve it with all it’s lovely buildings, churches and winding medieval streets. The same can’t be said for Norrmalm. In the 1950s-1970s, the city thought it was a good idea to tear down huge sections of the old buildings in this section (just north of Gamla Stan). As a result, there is a decent amount of not-so-pretty modernist buildings. But there is also some interesting modern stuff as well. Södermalm is south of Gamla Stan. It’s the bohemian edgy part of town (but bohemian and edgy in Sweden is pretty darn clean and well thought out. None of that converted warehouse kind of vibe. Just coffee shops and people with alternative looks). Östermalm is the ritzy part of town (West of Gamla Stan — some of you might catching a pattern in the naming of things in this part of Stockholm). It has some wide boulevards and expensive housing. Finally, there is DjurgÃ¥rden, an island west of Gamla Stan that has remained quite un-developed and has a lot of nice parks and trails.

In order to see all of this, I found a bike rental place on DjurgÃ¥rden. I took a four hour ride through all sorts of areas. It’s a very pretty city. It has a German/North European feel to it, with lots of dark roofs and pointed decorations on places like the churches. Each of the areas had it’s own feel (very old in Gamla Stan, newer and modern in Normmalm and so on). If you want to see 100 photos of the place, I have a slideshow here. My next post will have a selection of pictures for those who have no interest in a bunch of vacation photos :).
Some random thoughts. Even in April, it stays VERY light here for a long time. The sun was spreading light by 4:30am and it didn’t get dark until 9:00pm. I feel like an ass because I know absolutely no Swedish (I know a little more now) and people here know English soooo well. I know it’s been said that in this country people don’t mind that no one knows their language, but it’s still embarrassing to not even try to me. It’s also interesting how much my intense efforts to think like someone living in the UK have paid off. It took me most of yesterday to remember which side of the road cars were coming from (same side as the US) and I was converting Swedish Kroner into Pounds, not dollars. And I kept saying cheers instead of thanks (or Tack — thanks in Swedish).

Sweden really does live up to a lot of its reputation. It’s very well laid out, clean and the drivers are the most sane I’ve seen anywhere in Europe. It’s a bit of a shock coming from the chaos of London. Even the train from the airport was efficient. The airport is about 25 miles from the city and it took 20 minutes to get there (the train was going 200+ km/hr most of the ride!).

Food so far has actually been Belgian. For some reason, both places Ben and I decided to eat served a huge variety of Belgian beer and food. But it’s pretty heavy stuff, so I think dinner will be lighter. 🙂
Anyway, I enjoyed my first European maintenance day and it was nice to have a day to explore a very nice city. I’m not leaving until the morning, but this would be most of my trip in a nutshell.
Pictures are next!

Hello all.

I’ve made it to London. I now officially live here, even if I’m stuck doing the hotel/couch surfing thing for about 9 days. I’m very very tired, but it was a smooth trip, even when lugging around 50 pounds of crap. And with a good night’s sleep, i’ll be raring to hit the ground running tomorrow.

Anyways, just a quick hello from London! Those of you I’ve left behind in the US, I miss you all.