December 15th: Skate Sunday

Sunday the 15th. Per's parents had originally planned to come to Gothenburg this weekend. We would have been going over to Per's brother's for lunch. Sadly our niece, Kajsa, got strep throat so all that got cancelled. We're trying to reschedule. 

So instead we puttered around the apartment, went for a walk by Red Stone, and then went skating at Bunkeberget. I headed out an hour before Per to catch the last hour of Women's Skate. It was LOVELY! It was pretty empty by the time I showed up, and I got to putter around the big bowl/vert ramp by myself for a while. I also met some ladies: a beginner, a roller blader, and a woman I met last summer at Actionpark. Good conversations and fun skating! I had a really good time.

The outside of Bunkeberget

It's crazy that you go through this door and beneath the mountain lies a gigantic skate park!!!

The times for Tjejskate (women's skate) are off, but the time they have for it now is still a four hour slot. Four hours just for women! The session was about half adults and half young girls. Parents were aloud in so there was a scattering of dads, but also some moms helping their daughters. Such a cool scene.

"We Do It Together"
This little publication is put out by the Swedish Skateboard organization. I only saw it right as we were leaving, so I didn't get a chance to read it yet, but it looks really cool.


I worked on breaking out of my comfort zone in the big bowl. I dropped in from the second highest part. There's a pool coping side and a steel coping side. I decided to start with pool coping, and almost crashed the first two times. But I didn't let myself get so scared I stopped. I kept at it. It was just a matter of leaning forward more aggressively, so I just did that. And at the end of the session I accidentally did a little frontside slide! So I worked on those a bit more. Maybe when I come home I'll be able to frontside slide in the full pipe!

December 14: A soft Saturday

December 14th. Saturday. We'd meant to go to go see The Refused last night, but stuff got in the way, and we were tired. So we stayed home and had a slow start out the door in the morning. We met Robert and Anna, Love and Klara, at this art and culture place for a children's Christmas performance. The place was gorgeous. A bunch of stone buildings clustered against a hillside, where artists can get studios or performances can happen. The show was great. My Swedish is good enough to follow along with children performers, mostly!

Klara and Per after the show

Klara and I at the show

Robert and I went shopping at one of the big stores, in the car so I bought a ton of stuff. It was Saturday, which means Saturday Candy, which means a battleground of abandoned candy beneath the loose candy cases

Happiness for sale

We went into the store at 3:30. The sky was still light-ish. When we came out at 4:15, it was pitch black. So so dark.

Softing on the sofa with Love and Klara and their Saturday Candy

December 13: Lucia Day

We started the day by getting up WAY before the sun came up (6am) and taking the tram to Robert and Anna's kid's preschool to watch her Lucia performance. She dressed as a tiny santa. The video starts dark but gets better.
After that was over, we took the tram home and the sun still hadn't come up. We went back to sleep and conked out for a few hours. It was lovely. 

I bought a Christmas tree!

The good christmas tree seller is a 15 minute ride away on the street car, so me and the tree rode the 3 home together.

A friendly Swede held the door for me as I got on. He commented that the tree was almost, but not quite, too tall. It was lagom. This was one of my first all-Swedish conversations. It was incredibly simple, but I'm getting better. 

Tree on the tram

Just a one block to go from the tram station.

December 12: Finally plugging in

I've been laying foundations to get involved in social justice-y stuff while I'm here. On the 12th I went to my first English conversation group refugees. Swedes refer to them as new arrivals, which I guess is maybe less re-traumatizing. I don't understand the whole situation yet, and I'll write more about that when I do get it. So what I went to was this conversation group in a church run by an organization that helps new arrivals. There was another American and a Swede running the group. Six young men, ages 17 to 19 I think, participated. Four were from Afghanistan and two were from Somalia. They'd all been here for a few years, and spoke fairly good Swedish. Now they need to learn English, so that's what the group is for. I've never participated in an ELL group, so there's lots to learn. I mostly just chatted gently with them in English and commiserated over the complexity of the language. It was great, and I'm excited to do more work with that organization. When we finished, we hustled up to the church to watch some high school students do a Lucia performance. Kind of like a Christmas choir. They were really talented.

We've been walking in the mornings. This morning we went through a garden that has this lovely espalied apple tree. 

Lucia singers

After the conversation group, the American invited me to his book binding club. SO NOW I'M BINDING A BOOK! It's just once a week, and we aren't getting back together till January, but I made some solid progress on turning giant sheets of paper into pages for a book. "Always say yes" usually works out pretty well.

A drum group was performing at the square on my way home. It was kind of a magical evening.

December 11: Jul Bord

This day I felt better. Not perfect, but better. We did stuff during the day, but I don't remember what it was. In the evening, though, we went to Blackbird, a vegan restaurant and bar, for the traditional Swedish Christmas smorgasbord. Smorgasbord translates to "sandwich table." At Christmas, it's a Jul bord, a Christmas table. Restaurants will book out seats, and everyone shows up roughly at the same time and stays through the evening. Sus had to book this date out for us last month because everyone wants in on the tasty jul food at Blackbird.

This is the road out front of our apartment. It's so pretty with the train lines and the trees.

I'm learning to play the guitar!

Per and Johan with their first plates of food.

New friend Anna showed up late, which meant that I could photograph her food spread, because I'd been too food focused to take a picture of my own. 

Johan, Sus, and Carolina 

Jansons temptation on the left, gluten free pepperkakor (ginger snaps) upper left, and a plate of tastiness that I couldn't quite finish

Blackbird cook, Christina, who also happens to be friends with some Portland friends. So we selfied to send them proof of our meeting.
Also I bought this epic sequined sweater at the thrift shop. I realized while sitting in a crowd of black-clad Gothenburg punks that I feel more empowered to wear glitzy clothes while I'm here because I already feel like I stick out like a sore American thumb, so why the fuck not deck myself in sequins. I always have glitter and sequins on the inside, I just rarely feel comfortable wearing glitz on the outside too. You know what they say, "when in rome, wear sparkles."

We sat at this table for SO LONG

Blackbird is small, but they've done a lot with the space

tiny little ice chocolates. They were each thumb-sized

That's us!

Evidently "slang" means hose, but I just think it's a direction of what type of thing to say when you trip over a triangle. We walked home from Sus's place after going back to her's to pick up a spare blanket. The walk was really good for my crohn's stomach, as it is unused to me stuffing it with two plates of dinner, two bowls of rice and whipped cream dessert, and a giant bottle of Jul Must (a specific Christmas soda)..

December 10: Lucia-ing

Sus found this lucia roll outfit at a corner store. Her kid wanted one, but so did Per.

We dangerously discovered that the lucia rolls at our corner grocery store are vegan. So some lucies were eaten.

10 minutes after I ate that lucia roll.  TO BE FAIR I haven't been sleeping well, and that outfit is super cozy.  It wasn't ALL the sugar crash. Lucia rolls aren't even that sugary. But still. Out like a light.

December 9: Magpies and Streetcars

I got official word from Phil that Mr Brady passed away during the night. It's nice, I guess, to move from not-knowing into accepting. I guess. I don't know. This day was pretty rough, too.

We went for a walk in the morning, and passed the grave yard. Some trees had been cut down but the workers removed this magpie nest and left it on the wall.

Snow technically came out of the sky. I do like our view. The tram runs by. I've had a lot of insomnia lately, so I watch it run late into the night, or early in the morning, empty at 3am. It feels distinctly different than Portland, so even though it's a little loud, it's a quaint reminder that  I'm not at home.

December 8: sad days.

I woke up this morning to a message from Phil Brady letting me know that his dad, my Mr Brady, my 6th grade teacher an friend and mentor, was on his way out of this world. I'd known he was sick, and that his health was declining, but I procrastinated visiting him and had promised myself I'd go visit in the spring. I loved visiting him when I did it, it just took the tiniest amount of energy to actually make it happen, and I'd kept finding reasons not to extend that energy. And now it's too late. I will still enjoy spending time with his wife, but I'm so sad that I'll never get to see him again.

Before we left on this trip, I'd started to feel really anxious. Then I realized that one of the things making me feel so bad is that the last (and only) time I'd left the US with a plan to be gone for months, my friend Damina's little brother went into a coma and died. So I was really worried that someone was going to die while we were here! And it only took five days for that to happen. It's not that I lost someone from my daily life; I hadn't seen Mr Brady in a year. And it isn't someone close enough to even think about going home early for. But it is losing someone important, and being unable to go to the service.

It was the middle of the night in the US when I woke up so I couldn't just call my parents to talk about it, like I would have if we'd been in the same time zone. It  drove home how far from home I really am.

Also when I got the message, he was still around so there was a tiny chance of getting to video chat once before he left us. So I was a little on the edge of my seat for that possibility. It didn't come together, understandably, but Phil read a message I'd sent him, and I'm grateful for that.

Mourning can be so selfish. I mean, that's kind of its essence. The person you're mourning isn't there anymore, and death makes us face the finality of life that we so often overlook. So the above text IS pretty self focused. I've lost so many people that are, like, second tier people. Not people out of my daily life, and I'm not in their first tier group of people either, but still people who are super important. So I'm not trying to overblow how big my experience of this loss is, because he wasn't family, and we weren't super super close, and he has a ton of other people he taught and mentored who love him, but losing him is also not nothing, either. I loved him, and now he's not here, and I didn't visit him as much as I wanted to and could have when he was here, and now that opportunity is over forever. 

Mr Brady

After I got my tears dried up and pulled myself off the couch, we went out for a skate. We stopped by a bookstore on the way.

I was pleased to see that Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's book, We Should All Be Feminists, has been translated into Swedish

Bunkeberget, a gigantic skatepark inside of an airraid shelter

There's a vert ramp here, so I'll have to actually build some vert skills instead of just being thrilled that I can drop in and kick turn around. It doesn't have as much vert as Pier. It's smoother, so I slide on my kneepads better. But it's cement, so it isn't soft like it would be if they'd made it out of wood. Or rather, half of it is cement and the ends are wood. I ate shit on the seam the first time I went over it at too shallow of an angle. Lots to learn. Maybe by the end I'll carve over that hole in the pocket.

This is the walk down to the skate park from street level.

This is the entry door. I remember trying to look happy in this photo, but clearly none of that came out. A whole morning of sobbing definitely didn't do much for my selfie-game. I wonder what I'd have looked like if I didn't even try to look happy.

We stopped for bibambop on the way home. I love this restaurant, and the past few summers we've visited while they are summer closed. Being summer closed is a thing that happens in August. Swedes get so much vacation, and lots of them choose to take it in August, so lots of places are literally just closed for a month. It's great for the workers, but it sucks to go visit and have lots of your favorite places be summer closed.

December 7th: Sunshine and Friends, and a cat

This is what my face looks like when the sun is actually hitting it, with no clouds in between me and it! 

I took this photo at 1pm. This is how long my shadow is at 1pm.

This is how low on the horizon the sun is at 1pm. SO LOW!

Eating lunch with Sus, Bo, Robert, Klara and Per at some vegan punk bar with tasty food

Robert and Klara got a pizza to share. It was larger than expected.
THEY PUT ARUGULA ON PIZZA HERE

We took the bus out to Fiskeback to visit Robert and Anna. It was 3:15 when we got off, and the sun went down over the ocean.

Getting some need cat time with Tofslan

Klara is pretty casual at the table these days. This is her Lucia outfit.

Just chillin'