Today I booked my flight home. Not many days left now.
It is still too early to summarize this trip. I think it will be quite some time before I do that, before I can see what has happened. I don’t know what it will feel like to set feet on Swedish ground, feel the cold, to wonder where the sun went. It’s for me to find out. There really is no end to a trip.
When I decided to go on this trip, two of the things I wanted to do was to get time to write and do photography. Not necessarily to use it for anything special, but because I like to do those two things and it can be hard to get time to do it when you are in the middle of old routines.
Maybe there will be a book about this trip, who knows, but I can say with certainty that I will continue to write. Hopefully, you still want to read.
I have gotten quite a few comments during this trip on what I write, that gives me courage to continue, to be more honest, try new things.
Sometimes it’s good, sometimes it is bad. Just like with everything we do in life. Hopefully we get better the more we do it. At the same time, my goal is not to write something “good”, because who decides what that is anyway? If I can say to have a goal, then it is to continue doing something I enjoy, in the way I like it.
Maybe it is not for everyone, but that is good.
It is dangerous to try to fit everyone, then you might end up not fitting anyone.
Some people thought I should send in my “we like different” article to some newspapers, so I did. I sent it to the debate news site Newsmill.se that published the article today. You can read it here, unfortunately only in Swedish. (But you can still read the English version here on the blog).?
Newsmill is owned by one of the big media houses Bonniers, so they are not entirely neutral, but at the same time it is one of the few really alive and good debate sites available today when most newspapers are to politically correct to discuss the real issues going on.
Except for this, today has been a windy and warm day here in Sydney. My sister Jennie and me wen to Parc, about ten minutes away from here, for brunch. After brunch, we came back home and realized we were running out of Internet. Sounds pretty strange, and it is. Something I have realized after living in Sweden and spending the last months on the west coast in the United States is that I have started to take free internet everywhere as a given.
In Australia, or at least in Sydney, internet is not a given. The places that offers internet either charge for it or you have to ask the staff for a personal username and password that can be used for one hour only. My sister pays $130 dollars a month for Internet and a landline at home och then they can only use a maximum of 30gb. Those 30gb ran out today, with one week until they get a new quota. That is of course mostly my fault, but still it feels a bit backwards to have a limit for something you pay that amount of money for.
Of course you can’t live without Internet for a week, everyone knows that, so I told Jennie to call customer service and see if they could do something. After being on the phone to Optus in more than one hour, with four different Indians (do they have their office in Bangalore in those buildings I wrote about in march?), she managed to get the limit temporary taken off and also get a new plan with 120gb/month paying $50 less per month. Well invested time although she was forced to listen to too loud crap lounge music while being transferred between different departments with the comment that “we are not qualified to solve this problem”.
Since my job back home in Sweden partly is in customer service/support and outsourcing it really makes you think about this stuff. And just this day, when all this happened, one of my favourite comics xkcd.com was just about this. If it is too good to be true, it probably is.
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.
I haven’t written for a while. The week before leaving the United States was a bit full and I rather spent my time hanging out with my friends than writing here. Now, I’m in Sydney with my sister, with a lot of more time on my hand, but I’ve been pretty lazy since coming here.
Yesterday I met up with a bunch of Couchsurfers and watched my first Rugby game. The Grand Finale in the Australian Rugby league, played between two Sydney teams, the Dragons and the Roosters.
An interesting event, and if you are unsure about your masculinity we are lucky to have Rugby to show us what a real Man is. If you are still hesitant after seeing fit, brutal men throwing themselves into a wall, head first, holding a ball, you get a bit more information in the break in the form of commercials.
The one who has to prove his manliness must be the one who is most unsure of it.
But, it is natural to doubt your masculinity, after all, it is just a mental construct. An illussion, a social contract on how to behave so that no one mistakes us for something we are not.
And it is very important that no one misunderstands us.
The paradox is that the only real man, is the one who is neither a man nor a woman.
Only himself.
When the world is experienced as more and more threatening and insecure we vote old nazis like the Swedish Democrats into parliament and polish our male image.
A black and white world is easier to handle than one full with nuances.
One of the reasons for this trip, was the fact that I started to plan for all the people I wanted to see and spend time with this year and soon realized that six weeks of vacation is a lot, but far from enough for all the people I wanted to meet and all the things I wanted to do.
Since a lot of my closer friends live in different parts of the world to where there are no real reason to go for just a few days, those days of vacation disappear pretty soon. Luckily I usually meet these friends at least once a year somewhere in the world. A group of people, in different ages, on the surface having very little in common, meeting for at least one week, enjoying eachothers company, doing what we do best, thinking and talking too much. The last four years we have met here in Northern California, the same place as this year. Below are some of the pictures from the time we had together before everyone went pack to their part of the world.
