I met some great people in Stockholm, including a bunch of Americans teaching English in France. Still one of my favourite places in Europe.

Two months in, woo!

Strange to think that I’ve been living like this for, um, one sixth of a year. Actually, no, that’s not weird at all, but time has been doing some funny things since I left. Belgium seems more recent than Berlin, for some reason, and Copenhagen seems like a decade ago. One thing that is in perspective, however, is London, which receedes a little more with each passing day

So, I’m now in Oslo, a city whose defining characteristic is drizzle. It is a good museum city, actually – partly because it has taken London’s lead and instituted the very sensible policy of making things free, and partly because they offer protection from drizzle, which becomes a very important factor after any length of time here. Today alone I visited no less than three museæ (+10 point correct pluralisation bonus SCORE) – the Modern Art museum, the Edvard Munch museum and the Nobel Peace Centre. Of the three, the first was probably (and surprisingly) the weakest – a couple of interesting bits and bobs, mainly installation and photography, but apart from tat just the usual morass of breasts and freshly culled deer’s blood. Edvard Munch, on the other hand, has long been one of my favorite artists. Not so much for “The Scream” or “The Kiss”, both of which suffer, inevitably, for over-exposure, but for paintings like “The Sun” :

and etchings like “The Sick Child” :

So that was also good to see.

The Nobel museum was also great. It was supermodern, which itself bamboozled the senses, but there was a ton of information there, so I spent a happy hour re-educating myself about the Middle East conflict, the collapse of Apartheid, the work of the Red Cross, the goings-on in Myanmar and Guatamala, and all those happy kinds of thing.

The Nobel Award has, naturally, been something of a theme for the past week or so, as Stockholm inevitably had its fair share of Nobel floorspace. I spent a good week in Stockholm. As mentioned in the last email, my ex gf, Katie, joined me for much of that week. What I was too polite to say last time was that I anticipated disaster, and while it wasn’t quite as bad as that it certainly wasn’t quite fun. The problem with Katie is that she’s both a sociopath and someone who is used to the finer things in life, so what she expected to get out of a youth hostelling trip (where people are plentiful and conditions are squalid) is beyond me. Her stay culminated in her dragging me to Ikea (who the fuck goes all the way to Stockholm to go to Ikea? It’s flat pack furniture for heaven’s sake) then ditching me in the foyer for two hours. I say two hours – I don’t know how long she left me there for because she actually disappeared without telling me, and got onto her flight back to England without so much as a goodbye and thanks-for-having-me.

So, I tolerated her BS, mainly because she was only there for a few days and I could always stay later and do my own thing, but it kinda put a crimp on the week. Couldn’t ruin it, hough, because Stockholm is possibly the nicest city I’ve been to so far – only Copenhagen can compete, really. Firstly, it’s undeniably stunningly gorgeous. Built on an archipelago, it has a certain Venician quality to it – all rivers and waterways, wending through neo-classical architecture and busy cobbled streets. But it also has modernity and energy; parts of the city felt almost Blade-Runner-esque, with streets running over and under each other beneath neon signs and vast, glowing monuments to god knows what. The people were uniformly freindly, if disappointingly unattractive. A rather amusing group of American people I met claimed that this was because winter in Sweden was a six-month hibernation period for sexy time, so only the ugly Swedes still walked the streets. I don’t kinow whether this is true or not, but I have also been informed that all Swedish men have shaved scrotæ (+10 more points, go me!), so it seems that the Swedes are gathering their own sexy mythology. And more speed to them!

Of intrest in Stockholm was the Vasamuseum, a vast museum dediated the the warship Vasa, which sunk mysteriously in the 16th Century and was only excavated 300 years later; the Nobel Museum, which I expected to be ruthlessly narcisistic but, fortunately, gave far more floorspace to the winners than the selectors, the Swedish Parliament, which is intresting but amusing (most of Swedens politicians are part-time, and seem more obsessed with making sure that the deomographics of the parliament match the demographics of the country exactly than, y’know, selecting he right person for the job – but then the population of Sweden is smaller than the populaton of London alone, so I suppose it doesn’t really matter); and, ohhh, a whole host of other things besides. Seriously, just stop reading this and go to Stockholm yourselves, You won’t regret it because it’s ace. Just don’t go in winter because winter is sexy time.

There.

Also, I took a night train from Stockholm to Oslo. It was actually quite good fun!

Right. Tomorrow morning I’m going to Bergen, which appartently has rain for 275 days of the year, and I’ll be there for three days. Following that, I will EITHER head north to Trondheim, Bødø and Tromsø, OR I shall head straight for Stockholm and take the ferry to Helsinki. There are two factors to this: 1, I am spending money at an unsustainable rate, and long to get to Estonia and Poland where I can live on 30p a day; and 2, I’ll be back in Sweden in December, as several of my more awesome family members have clubbed together to get me a night in the Ice Hotel ( http://www.icehotel.com/).

So. By now you must have had enough of my blather, so I shall leave you for another short while. I hope all is well in your collective lives and hope to hear from you all soon.

Much love.