• Monday, 27 May 2024 11:33 pm

  Florida, May 2024

  

  A whirlwind couple of days in Florida for my sister's engagement party: therefore a whirlwind blogpost to match.

  Wednesday: Terrific flight down on Virgin Atlantic, due in part to a mostly-empty plane and in part to VA's tendency to sweat the details (e.g.: an exhortation on the infotainment system to use the toilet before The Captain Illuminates the Fasten Seatbelt Sign Prior to Descent). Pick up a pickup from the rental place: the attendant in the multistory tells us to take whichever takes our fancy. A long drive up to Gainesville punctuated by (dubiously unpunctuated) Popeyes fried chicken.

  Thursday: breakfast at the International House of Pancakes (mostly sugar + HFCS) and a trip to Lowes followed by spectating my mom and sister planting new flowers in raised beds in the backyard. Sweaty work indeed! Hop in the pool for a swim and remain there for nearly 4 hours. Dusk descends on drinks with family, ending in sudden exhaustion: to bed.

  Friday: quiet morning listening to birds in hammocks (we're in the hammocks, not the birds). Off to Zaxby's: underwhelming, slightly nauseating. Start decorating for tomorrow's party; fill an arch of balloons with our breath. Feel woozy: back into the pool. Drop by REI for a cheeky browse and then get tacos with dad and his partner downtown. An old friend shows up in the evening and we catch up over: you guessed it more beers.

  

  

  Saturday: up early to run up and down the stadium steps at the University of Florida. I don't realise it at the time but this will be the most thorough calf workout I will have had in a long time. Back home, last-minute flower prep before our future brother-in-law's family arrives. It turns out that, as expected, they're wonderful folks, full of kindness and love and ingenuity. My sister fits right in with them, and I can't wait for them to be family. While away the afternoon in the pool, do some light packing, then zonk out at the end of a fruitful day.

  

  Sunday: back to Orlando, drop off the rental car, queue up for check-in. Delta does not live up to VA's standards. Short flight to Atlanta; watch Fargo. Faced with the prospect of a 7-hour connection, we take the MARTA into town and get an early dinner at Daddy D'z BBQ Joynt. It is heavenly: precisely the kind of food that I suspect British people lack the genes to make. Hobble on sore calves back to the airport for our flight back to Edinburgh.

  Monday: drive home. Flat tyre! Torrential rainstorms until the exact moment that we re-enter England, after which clear skies and sunshine. Don't read too much into it.

  Family Florida Travel

• ---

  Monday, 6 May 2024 12:02 pm

  Now

  Inspired by Rach Smith, who was in turn inspired by Derek Sivers, who has created the nownownow.com project to encourage others to join in.

  So a website with a link that says “now” goes to a page that tells you what this person is focused on at this point in their life. For short, we call it a “now page”.

  

  Anyway.

  Currently recovering from the Fellsman. I picked up some IT band pain that only occurs when I run. It's getting better, but slowly. On Friday I could only go about 2 km, but it's Monday now and I can do about 5.

  At the very beginning of June I'm running a leg of the Bob Graham Round with a friend of mine, so my main goal at the minute is just to relieve the knee pain enough to support him through it.

  I have a couple of other events after that: a sprint triathlon in Chantilly, France, and a half marathon here in East County Durham I'd also like to run a few fell races this summer, but I haven't signed up for any, just yet.

  We're traveling to the United States at the end of the month for my sister's engagement party. It's been about a year since we were last there and I'm looking forward to spending some quality time with family in the warm weather.

  Trying to make a final push on finishing the tiles downstairs, which project has turned into a saga spanning months and months. Next time I'm going to insist we just hire someone. We've got all of the grout down but we need to scrub and scrub and scrub to remove the residue that's stuck to the surface of the slates, which is a gruelling, manual job.

  

  

  Short week ahead.

  Running now Travel

• ---

  Tuesday, 3 Oct 2023 1:45 pm

  Stockholm: Tuesday

  This is the sixth & final post in a multi-part series about our trip to Stockholm in fall 2023. All entries here.

  Nothing left to do in Stockholm but pack our things and head back to the airport. A final hotel breakfast, a final wheat cracker with cream cheese and honey, a final bowl of yogurt poured from a carton. We briefly consider trying to rig up our luggage somehow for a final ride to the Centralstation, but abandon the idea when it becomes apparent that it just ain't gonna fly.

  At the station I dodge between rivers of communters and grab a kanelbulle from an empty café. It looks exactly like what you'd expect from a café in a train station. We sit in the minimalist Arlanda Express waiting area and I munch on my bulle. There are solid birch tables scattered throughout the room and a little mobile coffee stand parked up between two tall plants I couldn't name. The overhead lighting is dim and very warm-coloured. As far as final experiences in Stockholm go, this one's alright.

  

  We board the train and rocket back to the airport. We've given ourselves plenty of time, but we already have our boarding passes (on our phones, natch), have no luggage to check, and security is a big empty room. We pass through a customs checkpoint and post up for the long wait for the plane. I purchase a final kanelbulle. It's not very good.

  

  Sweden Stockholm '23 Travel

• ---

  Monday, 2 Oct 2023 11:00 pm

  Stockholm: Monday

  This is the fifth post in a multi-part series about our trip to Stockholm in fall 2023. All entries here.

  Up early for a final run in Stockholm: so far I'd explored north and west, so it was south-east for me on a morning I could only describe as brisk: chill, dry, a faint blue tinge to the air. Commuters on bicycles flying silently past, trailing chic scarves.

  Straight down to Hammarby sjö, a lake pretty much only in name, a series of marinas lining a shallow lagoon connected by canals north and west to the other watercourses of Stockholm. Lovely running through here: broad paved promenades fronted by modern barbecue joints and design agencies.

  

  

  Something Stockholm does that I've never seen anywhere else: put their open-plan offices on the ground floor behind massive plate-glass windows. You can just look in and see everyone going about their days: powerpoints and Figma and emails. If these agencies produce physical media, they'll usually have it on the back walls, or otherwise mounted on the little radiator pedestal in front of the window, almost as if to advertise their acumen. To the side of the bullpen, also before massive windows, will be a meeting room, where (I assume) agencies compete to see who has the most progressive lounge chairs.

  Around the corner from our hotel, between a single 12-foot pane of glass and a rear wall covered literally floor-to-ceiling in awards, four chairs supported exclusively by braided leather in tension. On the merit of these chairs alone would I hire these folks to design my house, had I but the money.

  I run past a pile of rusty old bicycles and grime-coated electric scooters. They have apparently dredged from the shallow mud of Hammarby sjö and left here for collection.

  

  We've checked nearly everything off of our list of tourist spots to see, so we decide to make our last full day in Stockholm, appropriately, a smörgåsbord. We head, against our better judgement, back to Östermalm to visit the Saluhall, which is by a broad margin the fanciest market, indoor or outdoor, that I have ever seen. There is fish, meat, cheese, fruit & veg in abundance. A trio in exquisitely-cut suits sip cortados in a cafe making extravagant use of gold leaf. Kanelbullar in bell jars leer at me. I cannot muster the courage to ask for one. A pair of Canadian men are chatting up a lobstermonger. The lobstermonger is explaining that some lobsters have barnacles on them. I sneak a peek: the lobsters are, indeed, covered in barnacles. We steal away.

  

  Hungry for bullar, we stroll over to a nearby Thelins on the advice of a listical detailing the best bullar on offer in Stockholm. Thelins feels like it's catering to Japanese people's idea of France. It's a bit fancy for a chain cafe, and the clientele are exactly the kind of people who'd be frequenting a fancy cafe at 11 am on a Monday—that is to say, old folks. The kanelbulle is alright, very light but with a decent chew. Top three, but nowhere near first place, which still goes to Skansen.

  Seeking once again the highs of that first bulle, we head immediately to Bröd & Salt, Stockholm's homegrown response to Starbucks. I'd seen their advertisements on the Stockholm Metro on our first night in town, and I've been lobbying for a visit ever since. The lady behind the counter greets me with a "Hej hej!" which strikes me as both friendly and charming. I am, unfortunately, compelled to answer in English.

  I don't ask for a "cinnamon roll", however—here, as elsewhere in Stockholm, I ask for a kanelbulle. I think it's polite, at least, to try using the local language when abroad, and besides, kanelbulle is only interchangeable with cinnamon roll in categorical terms.

  On the way back to Södermalm, we stop at an outdoors store, a sort of Swedish Shūgakusō. At least half of everything they sell is Fjällräven. We abscond before I'm tempted into making a foolish purchase.

  Lunchtime finds us back on Södermalm on the doorstep of Bruno's korvbar, Stockholm's premier korv-vendor. Bruno & his disciples elevate simple hotdogs into works of art: double-length sausages folded in half—hell, why not two of them!—and wedged into the carved-out butt of a baguette and stuffed with sauerkraut. We retire to a nearby bench to eat and recover.

  

  A final bulle for the day at Skeppsbro bageri in Gamla Stan: a bit flat, nice and dense. Free refills on coffee. Skeppsbro abuts a touristy area and caters to tired Europeans looking for an authentic fika experience. At the next table, someone says, "Isn't this nice? Or would you rather be sitting at home all day?" I take it that the question is rhetorical. On the other side of the window, a couple are feeding the remnants of some pastry to a flock of voracious-looking finches. I polish off the bulle and we skedaddle.

  Stop for a beer on the way back to the hotel. Drinks down the pub (or down the bar, I guess) are a lot more expensive in Sweden than in the UK, and you only get 80% of what you'd get in a festival pint, which makes it worse. We drop by the Coop grocery on the ground floor of our hotel and grab a couple of Maristads(es) to enjoy in front of more weird Swedish TV.

  

  In the evening, we make our way back to Meatballs for the People, where we'd seen a huge lunch queue the day before. They'll make a meatball out of just about any mammal you can find in Sweden, but I go for the relatively-tame reindeer and a local stout. The meatballs are good, but I'm not sure they're good enough to queue for, and probably not as good as the price on the menu indicates.

  Before bed we watch, inexplicably to either of us, all one hundred and twenty-three minutes of Soderbergh's Out of Sight, a tonally atypical heist movie starring George Clooney and Jennifer Lopez. Apparently the critics went wild for it when it came out, but only Don Cheadle's performance could hold my attention. Looking back, I suspect that we only leave it on as a respite from the enthusiastic Swiffer commercials that occupied, without pause, nearly every second of broadcast on every other channel.

  Sweden Travel Stockholm '23

• ---

  Sunday, 1 Oct 2023 11:30 pm

  Stockholm: Sunday

  This is the fourth post in a multi-part series about our trip to Stockholm in fall 2023. All entries here.

  Sleep in. It's been a busy couple of days and we deserve it. Besides, the hotel offers breakfast basically unto the afternoon, so we're in no hurry to wander downstairs for a bowl of yogurt and and one of those wheat thins with cream cheese and a little honey. There are a surprising number of late-morning breakfasters with us; I'd been under the impression that the hotel was mostly empty, but suddenly from the woodwork come young folks in their multitudes wearing Luke Combs t-shirts. We gather that there was some sort of show last night that drew the youths from the hinterlands.

  We set out eventually on our bikes for the Vasa museum. On the way to the bicycle parking, we pass a great big hole in the road where the utility company is apparently doing some work on pipes laid three or four metres underground. There are no men from the utility company around. The hole is cordoned off by plastic fencing, but it occurs to me that a distracted cyclist could wind up at the bottom of the big hole without too much trouble. As we walk past, Sam and I chant, "Big hole, big hole, big hole," at increasing volumes.

  The Vasa is a huge 17th-century Swedish warship, built at great expense to the Swedish crown and meant to signal Sweden's naval superiority in the Baltic, but which was blown over in a stiff wind about a mile into its maiden voyage, where it sank into the salish mud of Stockholm harbour. It was rediscovered in the 1960s and floated back to the surface, then transferred to a purpose-built museum where it's been preserved, almost totally intact, ever since.

  

  

  The museum itself is a big concrete thing kept at a precise temperature and humidity, and shrouded in wood-preserving darkness. The lobby is perhaps deliberately claustrophobic in contrast to the soaring space that houses the ship itself. Which, if it it isn't obvious to you (as it isn't obvious to me), 17th-century warships are big.

  They let you get surprisingly close to the boat. Not touching distance, mind, but close enough to smell the wood, to see the grain, to look through the cannon ports at the shadowy belowdecks. The whole ship has been stripped bare—no paint, no trimmings, no furniture—but it's been partially rigged, which lends a lot to its majesty. It's big in the same way cathedrals are big. It looms, literally and figuratively. The museum spans five or six mezzanines alongside the ship itself, but on all but the top two you're craning your head Copernicanly to the gunwales, the shrouds, the transom. A few hundred people all walking around this way makes for easy collisions between the multicultural crowds—what language do you use to say excuse me?—but we come out unscathed.

  

  

  Tucked into corners are full-size replicas of different parts of the ship—the middle deck, the crow's nest, the interior of the aftercastle. There's a little diorama of how they raised the ship from the bottom of the harbour. I'm coming to realise that Swedes (and I) love a diorama. There are artifacts that they pulled from the mud. There are wax reconstructions of sailors and real skeletons. There are the remains of rope and yarn. There are sea chests and canteens. It's easy to forget in the majesty of the old boat that its crew were regular folks. Most of the crew escaped when the ship sank, on or above deck—and those people have disappeared into history. Their abandoned belongings, left for hundreds of years in the mud and ogled now by tourists of every stripe, is all that's left of their time here.

  

  The dim atmosphere and the plentiful seating makes the museum a lovely place to spend time, but the humidity control starts to wreak havoc with my sinuses after a little while, and we've made it to the top floor anyway, so we head back down to ground level via a hidden set of stairways and browse the gift shop. Outside, the wind's picked back up and is blowing the leaves about. Our bikes are where we left them.

  Seeking novelty, we ride up to Östermalm, in the north east part of the city. We're advised by our guidebook that this is the most expensive part of the city and we want to see what that looks like.

  It turns out that it looks like midrise apartments punctuated by hip, expensive cafés and the kinds of stores that sell immaculate navy blue toques and t-shirts for 800 kronor. A couple sitting outside a café look like Patrick Bateman and his girlfriend Reese Witherspoon, except for they're taking turns shooting photos of each other on their new iPhones: with sunglasses on/off, with/without lipstick, legs crossed/uncrossed. Untouched lattes with technically complex foam art sit untouched between them. The café, Bageriet Kringlan, is stylish and historic. Their coffee is good and comes in nice big cups; the kanelbulle is a bit dry and is the traditional spiral shape, rather than the elaborate knot of a truly artisan bulle. It's still better than anything we can get back home, and the currency conversion math is difficult enough that I don't second-guess the cost anyway.

  Deciding that Östermalm isn't really for us, we ride back to Södermalm and pop in at the decidedly more accessible shops around our hotel. We duck into a couple of colourful vintage clothing shops, the kind of places that you have to sort of pack yourself down to fit between the aisles of rayon and leatherette and gabardine. Another shopper and I come to an impasse in a doorway and we engage in an elaborate exchange of waves and embarrassed smiles as we try and yield without assuming anything about what languages the other speaks. Later on, in another part of the shop, I overhear her in conversation with a friend: she's British. In the next store we visit, an English bookshop called The English Bookshop, we overhear the clerk recount the days of his youth spent in Minnesota to a couple of American tourists.

  

  We decide to retire to the hotel without purchasing anything, but stop off at the Coop grocery at the end of the street first, for a couple of beers and a spur-of-the-moment pick'n'mix. The beers, by law, are not a hair above 3.5% ABV—only the government-owned alcohol store, the Systembolaget, is allowed to sell stronger stuff—and the pick'n'mix, while at first glance far superior to the UK's home grown Candy King brand in variety and colour, winds up being mostly made up of different styles of hard liquorice covered in ammonium chloride.

  For those of you keeping track at home, now-erstwhile Wilko had the greatest pick-n-mix of them all: excellent variety, never stale, binnacles always full to the brim. RIP in peace Wilko.

  Back at the hotel w doze off the beer-and-candy comas while more Swiffer ads play on the television in the background. I'm reminded of why we don't have a television at home. There are only so many times you can watch someone shout a highly-European-accented "Wow!" at the tidy path left in the dust piled artificially high on a black coffee table.

  We venture back out into the cool dusk for dinner at Meat on a Stick, a celebrated local kebab place. The kebabs here tend to the fancy, loaded with exotic pickles, tahini, harissa, jalapeños. No paying extra for a tub of garlic sauce here. When we're seated, we're handed two Swedish-language menus. I wonder dimly if they only have Swedish menus.

  My answer comes before long: a waiter, seeking to rearrange some tables in order to accommodate a crowd of seven or eight university-looking guys 20 minutes before closing time, asks for the table in Swedish (I assume; I don't speak Swedish (yet)). I say, as smoothly as I can manage, "Ja, okej." This both means, and is phonetically indistinguishable from, "yeah, okay." He takes the table; the exchange has either gone so fluently that he didn't notice I'm not Swedish, or so poorly that he couldn't be bothered to correct me. When the waiter's out of earshot, I grin like a goofball at our fortune: either way, we have been mistaken for locals. The waiter returns to provide the university lads, now clustered tightly around two adjoining tables, with a single English menu. "I'm sorry, we only have one English menu." The lads ask for a recommendation from the beer list. The waiter says, "I don't drink, I'm underage."

  

  Satisfied at the end of our meal, we drop a "Tack så mycket!" on the way out the door, and walk back to the hotel. We pass the big hole at the end of the street; it's been filled with rubble while we were out during the day. We chant, "Big hole, big hole, big hole," anyway.

  

  Back at the hotel, the Swiffer ads end and Apollo 13 comes on. I've seen this movie enough times that I can recite large portions of it by heart, but we stay up late watching the whole thing anyway.

  Sweden Travel Stockholm '23

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