Social life

Recently I was invited for dinner to my second cousin. She visited me two years ago and now lives in Uppsala.

She is the only tourist Australia ever had, who photographed Japanese tourists, cows and letterboxes. This is a very brave woman who climbs mountains, gallops horses and looks quite hot on her motorbike (800 cc Intruder).
It was great to see her again and we had a lot to talk about. After I had entered her apartment it took an hour before I realised that the cat in the sofa actually was alive. This pitch black cat had a shiny coat like a stuffed velvet animal, and it blended in perfectly with some of the black fabric in the room and it never moved, so I was confused.
A week after she also invited me to meet her sister who I had not seen for 25 years.
She lives with her family in the woods by the lake Mälaren where they run an Internet based business (http://www.informus.se/). This is exactly the kind of lifestyle I would like to have. -An Internet based business which you can theoretically run from a laptop. Not that their business is easy to run but it allows for a great lifestyle.

We walked through the wood to a small jetty where we took their motor boat out to a cliff by the water. A fantastic barbecued dinner was served by the husband. Australians know how to BBQ when they are born but this guy had made it an art.

It was a lot of fun to talk about our family and the memories we had. The water was absolutely calm and the surface was flat like a mirror. It was beautiful and the only sound you could hear was me, gobbling strawberries like a maniac. We waited for a long time to see the sunset but the problem is that even a bit south of the arctic circle, the sun does not go down quite.

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One Saturday evening, my friends gave me a great gift. They took me to an outdoor musical in the garden of one of the castles outside Stockholm (Ulriksdals Slott). The show was a rock version of the music and life of a famous Swedish composer (Bellman) of the 18th century. Since the cast was all professional and the script was very good, it was all fantastic. The thing that also made it great was the hot sum

mer weather. Before the musical we had dinner at a restaurant on a jetty nearby, fantastic off course.

Every summer in Sweden, hundreds of bridges and jetty's are converted to outdoor restaurants and cafes. It is standard that each chair always has an extra blanket on it. If the weather is warm, nothing beats going by boat to an island in Stockholm and stepping straight up to a nice cafe and to sit and watch the other boats and the life around the islands.

The weight

And then it was this thing about my diet and the gym etc...
After joining the gym here in Sweden and mixing my organic supplements, I soon learned it was almost impossible to stick to the regime that I had back home.
None of the people I stay with could possible be able to provide the food that I need. It would be like trying to supply meals to a diabetic allergic vegetarian or something.
There is also absolutely no time for me to cook and no space in their fridges to store my own food. I simply have to settle for what I get, which still is great food and since I don' t put much fat and sugary stuff on the plate, I´m doing OK. That together with a lot of water will keep me alive for a while.
It has been hard to focus on the exercises at the gym as well as I do when my PT "Kommendant Helen" is with me. Still, it all went well until I pulled some shoes of some horses and got myself a serious "golf elbow". Four weeks later, I now feel a bit deflated and have finally been able to try some exercises that does not hurt my arm.
The thing is, that pushing weights regularly makes you feel, and move around a bit like "Arrnolt" and it is good for the ego (of a man, that is). So, I may always look like a dehydrated prisoner of war, but now I also feel like I look like one, and this is not good for the ego (of a man, that is). I may need to get some treatment for the elbow when I get back. In the mean time I just have to improve my sun tan and keep from breathing out.

The weather

We have had several weeks in Sweden with hot summer days almost no rain. All my friends are complaining and at +28 one day, the all stoped functioning. I remembered that I do belong to a whingeing tribe with Serotonin deficiency and night sight from 9 months of darkness each year. Part of my own complaining personality comes from this femonenon.
As my friends on the farm, where I ride Farao, work hard and suffer under the sun, I am quite enjoying the heat myself as I also try to do some work around the place. Still my job is nowhere near the effort of even apart time job, so my days here are almost like holiday. The beauty of it is that when I get back home, it won´t be long until springtime in Langwarin.
I also hear as much complaining about the lack of rain as back home in Australia. And this is in a country with more water than almost any other place in the world.

I keep quiet because all my friends got tired long ago of all my stories about Australia. The Scandinavians have absolutely no idea of the fear of drought and fire that is almost a part of the genetic code of the Australians.

Here, the grass and plants stay green almost through the entire summer so the landscape is extremely beautiful. The best views are to be found in the north and in the archipelago of Stockholm.