The Revival!

June? Thats the last time I posted? JUNE??? Wow. I first and foremost apologize. So much has happened, a second trip to Copenhagen, a departure from beautiful Sweden, the 3 month return to Austin... and oh, yes, the new traveling job that has landed me back here in Washington D.C.! So one can only guess, the blog is getting fired up again and ready for a revival! I'm floating around my nation's capital at the moment, having dinner with the busy Obama family (not true), working at my new job, getting all political at bars, asking all random people about their lives in the underground metro and other great stuff to fill a nice few posts. So how about it? Do you forgive me yet if I start posting again about my experiences in Washington D.C. and then on to Chicago? Good. I knew you would come around, just as you know I can't stop traveling. (Especially when you are now getting paid to do it!) Enjoy the presence, no matter where you are. Teepee

From Prague to Budapest and back!

Pardon the gap, but as anyone who runs a meagerly read travel blog knows... it sometimes gets difficult to update on the road. For that, my return to Gothenburg today was made certain by rainy coldness, the snus packet I saw in urinal, and a new addition of bubbles in the fountain of Jörntorget (seen here).

While Gothenburg isn't that bad as I make it out to be (I was smiling while I biked around in the rain today), my 2 week jaunt to Stockholm, Prague and Budapest, Hungary was simply exquisite. Stockholm, sweden's other, more snobby epicenter treated me to great weather, a marathon, damn good chinese food and a host (who I met in Austin during SXSW) who showed me around and solidified a friendship - even though this was all for 24 hours. Oh and I forgot my camera charger... so you will have to rely on my iphone.

view of Prague near Cousin's apartment

Prague was wonderful like always, and there was the typical copious amounts of Czech beer consumed and beauty adored...

Prague by the river

view from terrace at cousin's apartment in Prague

evening BBQ on the terrace while listening to euro trance beats. good stuff. famous Lennon graffiti wall in Prague

But my visit to Budapest really knocked my socks off, where I visited my ex-boss (weird) in Hungary's incredibly beautiful capital. I expected cool communist architecture and a very eastern european vibe, but what I got was a slap in the face with awesome people, incredible Austro-Hungarian Empire architecture (awakening the history class cells of my brain that this area was once the seat of an enormous empire), and great weather to create a perfect time. There were haunted labrinths, schoolchildren filled underground caves, hungarian dive bars, ice cream, great mexican food (wha? ya!) and castles/churches on the Danube River that made this city one of my favorite in the world!

note my future top level apartment in mid frame, Danube River in Budapest

So yes, I am back now safe and sound in Gothenburg... and I leave you with a public service from the City Of Gothenburg, noting... "Get back into cycling!!!"

Upptäck cykeln igen - Göteborgs stad from ljudbilden on Vimeo.

-teepee

Sverige is svenska for Sweden in swedish.

Tjena, I have been doing a lot of Swedish stuff the last week since my side trip to Spain. Actually within an hour of stepping off the plane, I was whisked away in a Volvo (the national car of Sverige) to my first Swedish wedding. My personal Swedish designer fixed me up with hip suspenders and other nonsense that I complained about like a whiny 5 year old boy going to his first Swedish wedding. I endured introductions from two sides of a family that I didn't know and would probably never see again after 48 hours, a service in Swedish mixed with bad English songs on guitar by a great female pastor, and the toasts. Oh the toasts. I don't know Swedish, and the toasts lasted 3 hours, but was made far less than dreadful by copious amounts of buffet breaks and the occasional translation by my table neighbors. If you ever get a chance to go to a wedding where you don't know the language do it, as it will introduce you to a new level of facial feature and gesture observation and even understanding.

(entire Swedish wedding album)

The wedding went without a hitch and the night was danced away, rocking the peaceful surroundings of huge pine trees, a tranquil lake and fields of blooming flowers, short green grass and other assorted fairy tale setting features.

Moving on to the next middle class Swedish tradition ... The Summer House. The summer house is a house by a lake/fjord/coastline that Swedish families gather to celebrate long hours of light during the summer, due probably to the lack of sun during the winter/fall/spring/every month of the year rather than July-August. Here, the infamous Midsummer Celebration occurs with all its silly Swedish drinking songs, Schnapps in the amounts only Scandinavians can consume, and some kind of dancing around a pole. I hope to experience this in late June and I will report back with interesting stories... Oh yes, but the Summer House. Karolina's parents in particular have been blessed by the old Nordic gods to have probably the most beautiful piece of property in the northern latitudes. Just an hour outside of Göteborg, there is a little house next to two other even littler houses in a small neighborhood tucked in the trees facing an enormous flank opening to a massive fjord. Its granduer of nordic beauty is unrivaled; upon arriving at the signature little grass roofed houses, large steep mossy rocks give way to a blue-grey abyss, where one walks slowly to give awe-inspiring moments of catching your breath and to take it all in. As one with any experience of admiring nature beauty on a God scale, it is hard to take all in at once. Epic songs of deep sound echo through your head as you admire this place that awakens thoughts of "whoa". Your deep appreciation is only broke when you take off all your clothes and jump into a shivering shock of ice cold water and dive into laughter of being at this really cool place.

See all of Summer House album

After coming back from the cosmos, a feast was prepared, made possible by fresh garden greens, a old school grill and a late sunset that makes you stick to your dinner chair far longer than necessary. The cold sets in, you start the fireplace and read like an old retiree after tending to a farm.

Life snapped back at me once I was back in G'borg where the city life of movies, out to dinner and a birthday were celebrated. The week piles up again for me, with cool plans/tasks of fixing bicycles for free in the park, finding old bicycles to restore, and cooking for a Friday graduation party filling up each day until I leave for a few days in Prague to visit my cousin... toodles... from the abyss

teepee

Spain! Spanien! España!

(central Alicante, Spain)

("cartas" = mail/letters in old Albaicin neighboorhood in Granada, Spain)

(the Alhambra, Granada, Spain)

With Karolina's stress point reaching a dangerous and scary level due to her looming Medical Final Exam that solidifies her place in the DoctorWorld, I spent several hours coming up with a solution for both of us for me to get the heck out of the house. After deciding against touristy Turkish and Greek resorts, I settled on a flight to Alicante, Spain because it was cheap, sunny and Mediterranean. Besides, I was ready for speaking a foriegn language I could actually comprehend and speak, as well as a warm beach, obnoxiously strong coffee and the loss of my freakishly white skin. I arrived and navigated Alicante's superb public transporation without a hitch only to find it was rain day and the place was absolutely deserted. I retired to a local overpriced hotel, as my plans to camp would have to wait until tomorrow, napped, got out for coffee and then settled unto a bar stool at a local Cervecería to reaquiant myself with the local cañas (also known as tap beer). After a caña and some secos (nuts) later, a friendly smokey man with crutches struck up conversation with me and we soon were chatting about life, Morocco (where he was from), Spain, castles, ... his recent divorce ... his kids he can only see every other weekend ... and finally = awkwardness. He offered his car for me to drive around the next day, and kept buying cañas, so I went to a trendy little bar down the street with him and persuded him to talk about more pleasant things like where the best place to go hiking was or where the nude beaches are. The night ended, I was weirded out, but I still had my wallet and none of my free beers were spiked. All and all good. I woke up the next day to sunshine, singing spanish ladies outside my open windows and beaches peppered with people in little euro bathing suits. Juan gave me a ride to the camping place and I told him that I was feeling sick and that I would call him as soon as I took a siesta. He willingly believed this because in Spain you cannot doubt or impede a person´s siesta. Doing so is a major crime. So, the next few days were spent sleeping in a tent, laying on the beach, reading, running, relaxing and visiting the massive Castillo in Alicante. I made friends with my neighboors - the crispy Dutch couple who had been coming to Alicante for 15 years (you could tell) - but European senior citizens and their sleepy migrant town can only be so entertaining for so long. So I looked at a map, found Granada and said hello Andalucía, south of Spain, here I come! Seven hours on a bus, 2 dubbed Disney films, one near heart attack (not me some other guy - weird story, this has happened to me twice, once on a bus from a Honolulu hotel to the airport and then now on a bus in Spain, so please if you have to go into cardiac arrest do so without being with me on the bus) and 3 million smoking pit stops later I reached Granada, a beautiful old city tucked between the Sierra Nevadas and punctuated by a little river and long Moorish history. I did the hostel thing, which was funny because even I felt too young for it, and slept soundly in anticipation for my visit to the Alhambra in the morning. The Alhambra is a beautiful, beautiful Moorish place that is unlike any I have seen before (Note: I have not seen any Muslim sultan palaces before). Yeah, its toursty, yeah, its old, but YES its beautiful. The wood and stone work are unparalleled and its history transports you into a remote to my European-Christian oriented past and just makes you want to drink sweet exotic tea, smoke elegant fruit flavored tobacco and lay with your sultan buddies on fine Persian carpets. So without further muddled words to describe the pictures.. check it out yourself!

View all

Get your own

My return was relatively uneventful - a falafel that made me sick here, some sweet exotic tea there, a shorter more pleasant bus ride back to Alicante and a slumber party in the airport - but Sweden was nice to come home to and it brought me right back to my next adventure - The Swedish Wedding (see tomorrow's post!) Taylor