Giddy Up!!!

Things here in Stockholm have been quite busy the past couple of weeks, so my apologies to all of the people who read my blog (hi mom!). A couple of weekends ago (the 14th), Blake and I were invited to a Cowboy-themed birthday party thrown by an American-Swedish couple that I met through a friend at work. As you probably remember, the 14th is Valentines Day, which yes, they do celebrate here. They call it "Alla Hjartans Dag", which literally translates to, "All Hearts Day", and most people here also see it as a commercialized holiday (minus hallmark though). Blake and I both agreed that a cowboy part sounded much more fun than a crowded restaurant that night. We brought our friend Bjorn along, who took the theme quite seriously:

He showed up to our apartment and asked if he could borrow some eye liner to create the awesome 'stache. And he got quite a few looks on the subway with his "big guns!"

When I first heard about the theme, I immediately thought to myself, "See! I should have packed my cowboy boots! I knew I would need them!" (This is potentially funny if you know me well enough to know that I am a terrible packer and will always think to myself that I will potentially use something on a trip. You would think after all this traveling that I would be a better packer now, but turns out, nope- not so much. Which makes me wonder what WAS my thought process when packing for Sweden that I ever thought that I would not need my cowboy boots?! How did I talk myself out of that one?) Anyways, after kicking myself for not packing the boots, I realized that I was going to a house party, and that you dont enter someone's home in Sweden without taking off your shoes, so I would have had to leave them at the door all night and just point to them from across the room, which would have been just sad. So I wore a country-ish shirt that Kathleen once dubbed as my, "Texas meets Seattle" shirt, and called it good. Here I am with Per from my work, who actually went to UW for 6 months and was in a room across the hall from me and we never talked. He introduced me to the couple, Elisabeth and Tobias, who were hosting the party (both their birthdays are on February 12th.):

Blake, coincidently has now been to 2 cowboy themed parties in Stockholm. (The first one was his company Christmas party... weird... I know.) He didnt feel like going all out at his company party, because he thought, when would I ever use cowboy accesories again here in Sweden? Boy was he wrong! He had bought a teeny tiny button to wear to the holiday party that said, "Go West" and so he wore that both times. He also stole for me the foam cowboy hat that I rocked during the party that has been sitting around his office for the past few months. Good work Blake!

You can check out all of the pics at my flickr page.

Skiing in the Swedish Mountains

Not really much to say, except that it was great to see northern Swedish (well, technically middle Sweden, but it seemed north-ish) in the winter. My work hosted a ski weekend at Åre, the largest mountain in Sweden, and Blake and I were excited to try skiing in Sweden. We went with 8 other people from my work and stayed at a really cool cabin. Blake and I went skiing on our own because this was only the 3rd time I had ever gone, and I think swedes actually come out of the womb on skis. Anywho, it was a fun weekend, made even more fun when we quit skiing on Sunday and went to Pool and Sauna world. Check out some pics!:

The Super Bowl... Swedish Style

Awhile back (1st week of the NFL football season to be exact), Blake and I stopped in at a bar called O'Leary's to watch a Seattle Seahawks game. Well low and behold, sitting behind us were 5 people decked out in Seahawks gear. Blake was pretty excited to meet other Seattlites, so he started up a conversation with them, only to find out that they were actually Swedish. And they love American Football. You have no idea how rare this is. Turns out, this guy Erik's older brother used to play football in the US, and he used to live in Seattle, so when Erik went to visit, he became an immediate fan of the Seahawks. He got a few of his friends back here in Stockholm into the team as well. Throughout the season, we got to know Erik better, and we decided to host a Superbowl party together.

The only problem, is that to watch the game live, it wouldnt have started until 1 am on Sunday, our time. Since Erik, Blake, and potentially myself would have been the only ones to stay up and watch it so late on a worknight, we decided to download the game and have a party the following night. Erik thankfully volunteered to host, which was great because we had about 15 people over (and that would not have been comfortable in our apartment!). Blake and I cooked some chicken wings, made salsa, guacamole, a spinach dip, and a veggie tray to make sure our favorites were covered, while other people brought classics such as pigs in a blanket, pizza, pasta salad, and all sorts of other goodies. It was awesome. Everyone really got into the spirit. Most of the Swedes there had never seen the game, and got a kick out of it. They couldnt believe the huge production it was between the anthem, the flyovers, the food, the everything. Erik lent out a few of his seahawks jerseys to get us even more into the spirit. The only thing we were missing was the commercials, but after the game we watched the top 10 from last year to try and give people a flavor. Erik had even downloaded the half-time show! It was seriously an amazing success. Especially the part where I rooted for the Steelers and they won (most of the crowd was going for the Cardinals because the Steelers beat Seattle a few years back in the SB)! And it was a shockingly good game! Here are a few pictures of the event:


Erik, our awesome host:

The jersey brings out the tough guy in Pär:

Ylva enjoys the chicken wings and american food:

Björn and Ulrika enjoying the game:

The real winners... Ulrika, Björn, Alina and myself were the only ones cheering for the Steelers the whole game:

Blake is proud to be an American:

Life in Sweden: The Update

So usually I write about my travels, but, well there are none to write about right now, so I decided to show you what a week in my life in Sweden is actually like. I usually wake up, eat pickles herring, work out with the Swedish chef, listen to some Abba, go to work at Ikea, eat some meatballs, etc, etc. But no, really, let's see.

Borat Night. I know I said I would never see that movie, but our friend Bjorn is a huge fan of the movie and quotes it all the time, and his friend Mike was visiting from Poland, so we finally caved in and hosted a Borat Movie watching night. Bjorn brought his own mankini.

Then things got weird... haha. No, it was a pretty funny movie, excecpt for the part where I was embarrassed to be an American.

Bandy. According to wiki, "Bandy is a winter sport, where a ball is hit with a stick." Why of course! It is basically hockey played on a soccer field. My co-worker, Micke, invited us to watch a Stockholm team play his hometown team, Lindköping. It was a little cold, and Lindköping ended up getting crushed, but it was all part of the swedish experience that we are here for.


The Light Cafe. So, yeah, the whole thing about it being really dark here all winter, turns out, they weren't lying. At the peak of winter, there is only about 4 hours of daylight. 4 hours! I thought I could handle it, but to be honest, I have started to feel the effects of it. After 3 minutes of research on the internet, I found the Igloo Ljus (light) cafe which wasnt too far from our apartment. You can pay to sit in room and bask in a 10,000-lux glow while eating an organic salad while sipping Fair Trade coffee. Oh, and you get to wear a white robe and they dont get upset when you spill coffee on it!


Markus Krunegard Concert. My friend Ida has been hooking me up with all sorts of awesome Swedish music lately, and one of the artists I like, Markus Krunegard, was coming to Uppsala where Ida lives. So I took a train up to Uppsala on Saturday night to check it out.


The show was pretty great, and afterwards we even got to meet him! I bought Blake a T-shirt that says, "Jag är en Vampyr" (I am a vampire) and he asked if I wanted him to sign it. Without even thinking about it, I quickly answered, "No- thats ok." I think he was a little sad. But then we got a picture with him, so hopefully his ego wasnt too crushed.


So there it is... a week in my life. Well, plus there is the whole french fry eating itself thing:

Paris... that pretty much says it all

One weekend in Venice, the next in Paris... I could get used to this! (Actually I couldn’t... I am soo tired from all this traveling!) Well again, I have a reasonable excuse- my Uncle Larry spends every January in France for wine tasting and when I saw him and my Aunt Ida last spring, I told them that if they were in Paris this winter that I would meet up with them, and so I did! Well, my aunt couldn’t make it unfortunately, but Blake and I found some good deals and were able to meet up with my Uncle Larry for the weekend.

My Uncle Larry is known for having extremely good taste in wines and food, so Blake and I were pretty excited to meet up with him for a few meals. Blake and I had both been to Paris before, so sightseeing wasn’t a huge priority, and the meals were definitely the highlights of the trip.

We arrived in time for dinner on Friday night and met up with my uncle for dinner at a cute Bistro. The restaurants in foreign countries tend to seat you closer to fellow dinners than in the states, and so we ended up getting in a conversation with our French neighbors about wine. They were quite impressed, and I decided that we need my uncle to go to all the countries that hate America, or that think we are unclassy and uneducated. He could just go out to eat and convert them one by one. They loved him, especially when he said that French wine is the best!

On Saturday morning, Blake and I went to the Musee d'Orsay, which has a great collection housed in the old train station.

After a couple of hours there (and after being lost for a little while), we met up for lunch with my Uncle to eat some calves head. Yep... you heard me. Blake was brave enough to order the “Tete de veau” which Uncle Larry suggested, although I was pretty adamant about it not being served in the head of the calf, which is how it is supposed to be served. The waiter made a joke about letting the wait staff eat the best part, the eyes. Wait, actually, I am not sure if he was kidding or not. Hmmmm… But regardless, I consider myself somewhat adventurous when it comes to eating (oh, I eat some mushrooms now, fyi), but I draw the line at looking at the head of a baby cow while eating it. Blake took a picture of what it looks like on a plate:

It was better than I thought it was going to be- we tried the tongue, cheek, and of course, the brains. I wasn’t crazy about the brains, the texture was a little weird, but the cheek was really good. The whole time this French couple next to us keeps glancing over at Blake, and finally they asked him what he thought. He admitted that it was quite good, and they were very impressed with him and told him it was a very special French dish. Then we ended up getting in another conversation about wine with this couple, who now probably think differently about Americans. 4 down, and (insert number of French citizens) to go.

That afternoon we walked around the city for a bit with my Uncle and just enjoyed a pretty nice afternoon for January (it had been raining that morning). Nothing really “blog-worthy” there, just a nice afternoon with my uncle who is a great tour-guide. Blake got a few cool pictures of the city:



But back to the “blog-worthy” stuff… I told you already, the highlight was the meals with my Uncle! And Saturday night topped it all. It was a place called La Tour D’Argent, which is the oldest restaurant in Paris, dating back to 1582. The view of Notre Dame and the Seine was gorgeous, and the food was amazing. The restaurant served as inspiration for scenes in the Pixar movie Ratatouille.

My Uncle was like a kid in a candy store with the gigantic wine list (it has a wine cellar with over a ½ million bottles of wine!):

As an appetizer, we had eggs with truffles and learned the proper way to eat them to fully enjoy the aroma (no really, this is how it is done):

Blake and I ordered the pressed duck, which is what the restaurant is famous for. You even get a postcard at the end of your meal that gives you the number of the duck that you just ate (Lucky #1,075,664). My uncle had described the process of how they make pressed duck to us, and I remember being slightly disturbed by it, but luckily I didn’t read this article about the process. (Note- this is not for the faint at heart!) At first it was a little hard to digest (ha- pun intended!), especially since I used to have a pet duck (Hamilton) and all:

But I have to say, I got over it, and it was amazing. Seriously… amazing.

After dinner I was supposed to meet up with a friend of mine, Lori, who is getting her post-doc in Paris, but our cell phone ran out of minutes and we weren’t able to figure out where she was! It was terrible! But we will be back- I love Paris!

The next morning, Blake and I hopped on a train and headed to Versailles, which is about a half hour train ride outside the city. Here we saw the Palace of Versailles, which was pretty amazing. We were a bit rushed, and it wasn’t the best time of year to see gardens, but I was still quite impressed. Here are a few pics from the palace and the gardens:



To see all my pics from the trip (and some of Blake's too) check out my flickr gallery.

After Versailles, we headed back to the city, bought nutella and banana crepes (one of my favorite things, um, ever), grabbed our stuff and headed out of town. It was a great quick weekend, although it ended on a sour note at Charles DeGual airport. I hate that place. It is terrible. I don’t even want to go into it. Just try to avoid it all costs.

A Hole in the Ice

So yesterday I was having lunch with my friend, Pär, who was telling me about a recent ice skating experience of his. (And when Swedes talk about ice skating, they dont mean in a rink, they go long distances across lakes and rivers.) He was saying that there werent many "vak", and then he was trying to figure out what that word was in English. So he starts describing how the word sort of means a hole in the ice, and asked me what we would call that. I thought about it, and I said, "I think we call it a hole in the ice." He was pretty confident that there was a specific term for this special type of hole in the ice (since they distinguish this special hole in swedish), so to prove me wrong, he texted Blake:

Pär: What do you call a whole in the ice?
C: A hole in the ice.
Pär: Come on. U have to have a word for it.
C: Yeah, 'a hole in the ice!'

And English is rich? :(

A few hours later, I got an email with this link: http://tyda.se/search?form=1&w=vak&w_lang=&x=0&y=0

Victory is mine!!!

Venice- The Stockholm of the South

Who goes to visit Venice in the middle of winter you ask? Well, Giselle (Blake’s older sister) is a ballet dancer in Dresden, Germany, and she doesn’t get a lot of time off, and so when she did recently, she wanted to meet up with her bro and to get out of Dresden. So we found the cheapest place to fly into for both of us (although in retrospect, even though it was cheap to get there, it wasn’t so cheap once we actually got there, but, oh well- I got to take a weekend in Venice! Hecks yeah!).

Blake and I didn’t get in until really late on Friday night, and by the time we figured our way to our hotel through the bus and water bus system, we were ready to crash. So that brings us to Saturday...

We had decided to not rush to see certain things, and just wanted to take in the city by walking around it. For most of the day there wasn’t any big “blog-worthy” story, we just had a really good time getting lost and exploring the city. The city is absolutely gorgeous, and the weather was a little on the chilly side, but compared to Sweden, it wasn’t bad, and the sun was shining, so we were happy.

If you haven’t been there before, Venice is a city that is mostly on water, and it is connected by a series of canals and bridges. There are no streets, which means no cars, which makes it a very quiet city. It is actually a little unsettling at times when it is really quiet. But it is absolutely beautiful. I had a lot of fun just trying to capture it on film. Here are a few of my favorite pics that I managed to take, but if you want to see all my pics (well all the decent ones), click here.

One of the funnier things was the random spotting of a he/she walking the streets in a bright blue outfit, complete with fuzzy blue jacket, hat, glasses, and matching shoes. We were trying to get a picture without drawing attention to what we were doing, so we could only get her (?) from the back:

Oh yeah, and there was the whole Gaza war protest thing. We wanted to check out the Jewish ghetto, but a) forgot it was Saturday, and b) there were a ton of police in riot gear in that area just hanging out. We couldn’t figure out why the police where there, until we saw a very large group walking across the bridge towards the Jewish Ghetto. Blake got this picture from a slight distance:

There were a few Jewish people standing at a distance just watching it, and we noticed a few people on the bridge making gestures in their direction. The whole thing was a little unsettling, especially for such a complicated situation.

On Saturday night we met up with one of Blake’s friends from Lund, Carlo at a bar not too far from San Marco (I think... I didn’t look at the map the whole weekend, which was awesome- thanks Blake and Giselle for being my navigator!).

Most of the evening was spent drinking outdoors, which was a little weird since it was only slightly above freezing outside, but it was a lot of fun. I even met some Italian guy who wants to study at the campus that I work on in Stockholm, so that was random. I may have told him I could help him, which doesn’t make sense, since I have absolutely no connections to the University itself... hmmm.. oh well!

The next day we were a little sluggish, but rallied to go to the Academia, which is a museum filled with Venetian art. It was ok... nothing spectacular. Most of the museum was closed off, so maybe the other half that we couldn’t see is better.

The rest of the day was spent enjoying the city again, and then we got on a water bus, and then a bus, and then headed home!