I am now home. Or maybe not home. I am at my parents place, waiting to leave for Stockholm, pick up my keys and then come “home”.
I have a few things left to write, about my last days in Lucerne, my visit to Vienna, but after that, the trip itself is over. Kind of.
On Sunday, the day before leaving for Vienna, the Dodds family, James and me took the chairlift up to the top of the Pilatus mountain, the highest in the region. There was already snow up there for the kids to play in and the view is undescribable, my pictures are only bad copies of reality (as always).
Friendship.
One word that explains a lot of the motivation for letting everything go and travel the world.
I have met many people during this trip, many I have never met before and many I will never meet again.
I have had the privilege the last three years to travel a lot, almost always it has been to friends around the globe.
In the end it doesn’t really matter how beautiful the buildings are, what history a country has. In the end, what matters, is the people we meet.
It is these people that give colour to the buildings, fill them with life, pride and a context. The people is the reason the buildings and the history is there at all, and the very same people is the reason they still stand.
It is easy to think of ourselves as separate beings, but we become human first when we take part in a larger context. Our culture and our environment. No matter what we do, we never leave this context.
When things start spinning a bit too fast it is easy to forget what is important in life. Then it can be good to slow down, stop for a while. Put ourselves and our well being first. Only then is it possible to meet our friends with presence, attention and the respect they deserve.
How can we otherwise demand others to show the same respect to us?
I feel immensely happy and grateful for the friendship others has shown me during this trip. Not only from people I have met, but also from everyone back home.
This journey would never have been the same without you.
Classical music has been a neglected type of music in my life, just like in most Swedes lives I would say. I still remember listening to Vivaldis four seasons and Edward Grieg, but that was more or less it.
By knowing Regi and Dan who are both violists I have had the privilege and oppurtunity to listen to more classical music than ever before. At the moment I can hear Dan practicing in his office.
The first real concert I went to was in Stockholm concert hall in 2008 when Dan came there to play with their orchestra Festival Strings Lucerne (Regi was at home with a newborn).
Later I saw him play in London the same year and this week I have seen three concerts. One with Dan in the Jesuitchurch, one with them both playing with clarinett player Sabine Meyer and this Saturday Regi played a tango concert together with her friend and collegue Anca Serban. Three very different types of concerts but the more I hear, the more I appreciate it.
It’s pretty impressive too that their daughter Yara, six years old, can sit still and listen to a two hour long concert. I don’t think many kids coudl do that.
In a few hours I will get on the plane from Zurich to Vienna in Austria and after a few days there I will return home to Stockholm.
This is the third time babysitting in my life, third time with the same kids. Maybe I get a bit spoiled, because these kids is really good to deal with!
Except for the time this summer when Yara got a dogs face and tooth right in her face (by mistake from the dog), with two hours crying and a pack of ice, things has been going quite well.
Yara started to cry tonight when her parents Regi and Dan left for rehearsal for their coming concert, so James took the oppurtunity to teach them rule number one in life. No money, no food. No toys. A reality you can’t escape, you just have to accept it. Maybe she stopped crying when she realized that she was lucky to have someone else work for her so she can play “pick stick” (mikado) and “go fish!”.
Later on while eating we got to teach the second principle in life, not to cry over spilled milk. If someone hits you, it hurts. But if you spill your milk, it’s not actually hurting, it’s all in your head. Nothing to cry or get upset about. That is how it often is, most of human suffering is in our heads and the real pain we feel we usually make worse by blaming someone else or screaming loudly about how unfair life is.
Luckily James and me will be long gone when the consequences of our crash course in Philosophy 101 thrown in the face of a three and five-year old pops up and unfortunately therapy is expensive in this coutnry, just like everything.
I have always been scared of kids. Always felt completely lost when they are around. Earlier in my life I was afraid of everything that you couldn’t calculate or control beforehand. And children is not very easy to control.
Coming here means to hang out with Yara and Liam, six and three years old (soon). At first they were a bit shy, but after a day or two, we are now best pals, just like last time I saw them in California in July.
If you are not used to it, you get tired pretty quickly. They don’t. It is probably easier somehow when you are in the middle of it, but I can’t help admiring parents to small kids.
I have learnt the hard way the first rule with dealing with kids. Prepare them for change. Do not just turn off the tv when you think they are finished, but explain earlier that they can only watch another episode. Most of the time you can avoid kicking and screaming.
This might be obvious for anyone with experience dealing with kids, but you got to start somewhere, right?
If you think about it, the difference between kids and adults are not that big. We don’t like change either most of the time.
We all know what we have. Even if we might be unhappy with it, we can usually deal with it anyway. But all change mean you take a risk. It might get better or worse, but we rather focus on the bad stuff. Therefore we avoid a multitude of possibilities only because there is a small chance that things might go horribly wrong. Success usually mean a willingness to fail completely, yet get up and try again.
That is why people in the west is more unhappy, suffer more from depression and anxiety than people in poor countries. The more you have the more you are risking when change comes.
Maybe the only difference between children and adults is that we are better at making up excuses and lie to ourselves about things. Instead of crying and screaming and then accepting we sometimes spend years and years avoiding the world as it is.
It is thursday today. I have now been six days here in Lucerne, Switzerland.
Lucerne is a small town in the central part of the country and a popular place for tourists. It is like a miniature town from another time, filled with people living minature lives in some kind of fantasy that we only get to look at from the outside.
It is the second time here. First time was in May 2007 when I went here together with my ex-girlfriend Marina for Regi and Dans wedding. Then already I got a small glimpse of this small miniature world, but we only had 48 hours here before returning home to work, so I never had the time to properly explore the city. I have had more of that this time around.
For it’s small size, this city is packed with culture, old buildings and a long history and despite finding the average store on the shopping streets I can still appreciate it. They have found some way of mixing all these new chain stores with it’s great historic atmosphere.
Our mutual friend James surprisingly arrived here yesterday. The plan was for him to arrive friday or saturday when he got in his 1998 Jaguar XJ 8 wednesday morning in Tooting in South London and started moving south, but when he was in Luxembourg later in the afternoon, he decided to keep on going all the way here.
With the car packed with tuna sandwiches to last three days and a 20 page Google driving direction he parked outside the house on Wesemlinstrasse at 9.50pm after driving 579 miles and after 14 hours and 20 minutes on the move.
We celebrated this pleasant surprise by drinking a lot of wine.
It is strange how things that we once took for granted, held on to as if our life depended on it, suddenly is nothing more than a memory.
Just like with everything.
Our opinions, thoughts, ideas, our friends and the things we have must never become so important that we desperately hold on to them, suffocating them.
Our lives must be like writing on water, one door close, another one opens up. The world we live in, the people we meet deserve to be taken seriously, but we must never take ourselves too seriously.
What I write here is important and completely meaningless, all at the same time. We must never think that the words we use has anything to do with what they describe. To hold on to what has been is asking for trouble.
We do what we do in the moment, then we let it go.
That is to be happy to me.
Today I will board another plane. Pack my bag yet another time, go through security, arrive at a new, yet old, destination. I have been there before, but every situation is unique.
I am grateful that someone has let me stay with them during my journey, and at the same time, willing to let it go, to become a memory in my past.
Next stop is Seattle again. The first day of the rest of my life.
As you might know, the reason I am now in Sydney is not because I am that interested in laying on the beach getting a tan (I haven’t gone for a swim yet), but that my sister Jennie lives here.
Jennie has been in Australia for around seven years, first four of them in Adelaide in the state of South Australia, where she finished her postgraduate studies in Bio Medicine. After that she got a job at an institute today called NeuroScience Research Australia here in Sydney, where she is doing research which to me is completely impossible to understand.
Not only that she lives on the other side of the planet, meaning you only get to see here once a year at best, she is also doing something that for most people is unexplainable. To read her doctoral theses or her articles is about as interesting as trying to read a chinese newspaper. The only thing you can comment on is the layout or the images.
Luckily there is something in this field that you can show that people can understand.
The Laboratory.
Sure, I don’t know what all the machines do, but it brings you back to the chemistry classes in school and you can nod and be a bit impressed when she tells you what these intricate tools cost. Not that it makes her work more understandable or that the price really matters, but at least you can get that important things are going on in here.
This is how fun it is to work in a lab!
One of the best things to do in Australia is to drive around in the wine regions and drink free wine.
When I started working for the Student Union’s restaurant in my hometown Västerås (where I went to Univeristy) a bunch of years ago, I didn’t really like beer or wine and I was also a vegetarian, so most of the food was off limit too. But instead of finding that stuff boring, rather it increased my interest in food and wines. I started trying everything, experimenting to find my taste and as time went by, I learnt to enjoy most everything. In the end I had spent almost five years working in the industry, in all kind of places doing all types of different stuff like bartending, cooking, managing and serving 400 Irish coffees in one night at the Stockholm Beer & Whiskey Festival, before moving on.
Wine I started appreciating during the many wine tastings we had, when I found out how different wine can taste and how tastes change when you mix it with food.
Together with four collegues and friends we took a five week distance course at the Restaurant University in “Grythyttan”, which mostly focused on viticulture (the craft of growing wine) and wines. The lectures we had was mainly wine and spirit tastings and was by far the most interesting lectures I had during my University days.
You realize fast that, like with most stuff in life, you can spend the rest of your life learning about wine and still not learn everything. So when you have the oppurtunity to drive around among vineyards and taste hundreds of wines, talk to interested employees at the different places and listen to their specialties, you just don’t want to miss that. Wine will never again be just something you drink, after an experience like that.
Hunter Valley outside of Sydney is mostly famous for their white Semillons and unfortunately they don’t get the really good red Shiraz wines that I prefer, like the full-bodied, spicy varieties you get in South Australia, but that is probably good since most bottles usually cost around $20-25. So it can get expensive fast. Despite using the same vines and grapes, the climate and soil makes the Shiraz more medium-bodied which completely changes the taste. Even the same type of wine can differ in the same valley because of the micro climate and variations in soil and rain. Wine growing is very much a matter of skill and intuition paired with some luck trying to wait for the perfect day to harvest the grapes to get the perfect wine. You want as many hours of sun possible but sudden rain can easily make the end product loose much of it’s complexity and taste or even completely ruin it.
Another sad thing is also that most of the varieties you taste is impossible to find in Sweden, since only vineyards that can guarantee a certain quantity each year are allowed to sell to Systembolaget, the government owned stores. And to carry it home is a bit of a pain and to send it by mail easily double the price.
Still it is a great way to spend a few days, taking the time to drive from vineyard to vineyard, learning about the craft and finding out what types of wine you really prefer.
Me and Joy got in the car yesterday morning and headed up north, three hours in the car to Crater Lake. A lake formed within a volcano that erupted 7700 years ago and created a huge crater. Now it’s the center of attention in a national park with high peaks surrounding the lake in an astonishing environment with trails, camping and a rich animal life.
A small chipmunk run around like crazy in front of us when we stop, posing to my camera, completely without fear. They are probably used to being fed, or they are eager to get famous.
You never know nowadays.
It seems to be a very popular place for tourists to come, it’s packed with people, cars moving along the narrow roads around the rim. Wherever you stop you meet other people breathing the cold, fresh air and enjoying this unique place.
Feeding chipmunks who wants to get famous.
