bironic | Ketchup

Hello! I’ve been here, keeping up with people’s posts; I just haven’t been posting myself. Let’s fix that.

Travels

I went on vacation last month for the first time in 5 years, to visit my friend A. and her husband V. and two kids for a few days in Finland, where they’re from, and another few days in Stockholm, where they live now, finished off with a few days on my own on the Swedish island of Gotland. I’d never been to either country, and it was so nice to see new landscapes and architecture and wildlife and try new foods. The weather offered welcome relief: around 21C/70F and breezy compared to this summer’s record-breaking number of humid 90F+ days at home. Two weeks after midsummer, it never got fully dark.

Helsinki: Restaurant-filled streets smelled of dill. We visited a sauna in a gentrifying harbor area that included a shipping container-style steam sauna with a picture window overlooking the sea, a smoke sauna featuring the hottest air I have ever attempted to breathe, and a ladder straight into the Baltic for cold plunges. The center of town offered a striking amalgam of Soviet, neoclassical, and modern architecture, both in building design and in street/square layouts. We rode street trolleys and caught a tall ships festival. We took the overnight ferry-slash-cruise-ship from there back to Stockholm since A. and V. travel with their car to see parents in various parts of Finland. Foods tried for the first time: real gravlax, blackcurrant herring, salmon soup, Karelian pasty, salty licorice, vegan shrimp.

View of Helsinki harbor from the Suomenlinna ferry, with church and ferris wheel

A modern complex on the harbor, with one sauna visible as a rectangle to the left side

Fountain in front of the Kiasma newspaper building includes female figures from many other sites, weeping

Art outside Amos Rex museum looks like swells of marble with round blue windows

Moomin Shop at Helsinki Airport with glowing Hattifatteners out front

Souvenir shop cans of elk meat and bear meat with photos of the animals on the can tops

All-gender restroom sign has a neat interconnected gender icon

Helsinki train station with Art Deco-inspired, Aalti-designed figures holding globes

View of the curves of Oodi Library's front facade

Stockholm: We visited the outdoor Skansen museum that has houses shipped in from all over the country and reenactments of traditional crafts and a zoo of regional animals, as well as the Nobel Prize Museum with laureates’ scientific and personal artifacts and Prize-inspired fashion; Jewish Museum, which taught about Sweden’s short and rocky history of prejudice and acceptance and notable local Jewish figures; and National Museum with its survey of centuries of Nordic art and design. Wandered through neighborhoods ranging from 17th century to parkland to contemporary hipster. Said hello to the Karolinska Institute. Saw a couple of GIANT urban hares; like, at first glimpse while my brain was trying to process what it was seeing, I thought it was a dog or a fawn. Foods tried: reindeer tenderloin, princess torte, cinnamon rolls & cardamom rolls, pear ice cream, shrimp sandwich (räkmacka).

View of part of Stockholm from the hotel roof shows a few buildings and a strip of sparkling waterway

Gamla Stan square with old facades in red orange and yellow. Nobel Prize Museum with classical columns is on the right.

Bright waters and green island in the Stockholm archipelago

A house in Skansen has a single-story brick front and wild greenery on the roof

Jewish synagogue in Stockholm with menorah sculpture in stone courtyard

View of part of Stockholm from the waterfront on a cloudy day

Angled view up the front of a building in goldenrod stucco

Dinner plate of reindeer medallions with potato, lingonberry jam, and carrots and peas

Close-up of a sandwich with small shrimps, mayo, lettuce, and a tower of cucumber

Close-up of a slice of princess cake, with layers of cream and sponge topped with green marzipan

A traffic barrier in Sodermalm is decorated to look like a cute monster face, next to some flowering bushes

Gotland: Perhaps my favorite part of the trip. I stayed in a B&B-style inn on the grounds of a ruined cathedral in the medieval city of Visby, a UNESCO World Heritage site, in the calmer part of the tourist season between Almedalen and Medieval Week. Much souvenir shopping. I learned about history, prehistory, and geology at the Gotland Museum. Storied buildings, quaint cottages, cobblestone streets, summer roses and hollyhocks, a rocky shoreline for dipping your feet in the Baltic chill. Then took a day trip north to the adjoining island of Fårö to see the fossil-strewn beaches, towering limestone formations called rauks, small museum dedicated to Ingmar Bergman since he spent the latter part of his life and career there, and sheep farms. Foods tried: sparkling tea, local fish soup, langoustines, local lamb and potatoes and vegetables.

Cathedral wall ruins with roses in foreground

A yellow cottage seen at the end of an alley

B&B courtyard includes a yellow guest house, picnic tables and chairs, and lawn and trees

Shoreline of Visby shows algae-covered rocks and some ducks

One of the pre-Viking era picture stones of Gotland shows people rowing a long thin boat

A section of the Visby city wall, with grasses and trees in foreground

My rented bike leans on a tree in a park along the Visby shoreline. Baltic sea visible in near distance

cobblestone-lined square in Visby with cathedral in background

Souvenir sheep figurines have cute faces and curly wool hair

An artfully composed plate (wood block) of three langoustines, four slices of bread, and lemon slices with dill

Next time maybe there will be a chance to visit

isagel and/or

naye. I’d also love to see Lapland in wintertime and the northern lights.

COVID

I’d put off traveling anywhere besides visiting family since 2020 because I knew as well as anyone that it raises risk of contracting COVID, and I’d avoided COVID so far. But fumbled policies have left us with COVID being basically endemic, and I wanted to go abroad, so I took extra precautions before and during, bought travel insurance, and crossed my fingers.

Friends, I came down with COVID less than 24 hours into the trip. Which, if the CDC’s statistics on incubation period remain reliable, means I 100% caught it before departing. Sigh. One of many no-longer-"novid" victims of the summer surge.

In any case, I was lucky. The symptoms were manageable, and I didn’t get the crushing fatigue that so many others have suffered. Not even malaise, actually, and I get malaise with every illness. Don’t get me wrong; it sucked; I coughed and sweated and ached and scoured the city for tissues and slept irregularly; but I was able to power through with ibuprofen and fluids and go out and do something each day. (Masked in a KN95 and Purell-ing everything, to be clear. Even if Sweden dealt with the pandemic by letting everyone do whatever, and even if my well-educated friends still insisted I come over for dinner every night because they’d had COVID like five times already and weren’t concerned, I didn’t want to get anyone sick.) My senses of smell and taste stayed intact, or mostly so, which was a huge relief since I wanted to enjoy local dishes. The biggest accommodation was that I couldn’t bike around Gotland because my lungs burned if I tried to do anything more than walk slowly on even ground. So I spent more money than planned and rented a car. But! The travel insurance company later agreed to reimburse it! So all’s well that ends well.

I got home and slept a lot for a couple of weeks. Would say it took one month from first to last symptoms. TBD on any lingering effects.

Health

Like, for example, how my current period has lasted three weeks and counting? More likely it’s perimenopause and/or the fibroids or endometrial hyperplasia an ultrasound found last week, after more than a year of increasingly disagreeable symptoms. The medical investigation is only just getting underway. "Hooray."

Family

My little sister is getting married this fall! Guess it’s time to accept that she’s 40 and not 12. Her boyf is a good guy. Our parents are over the moon that one of their offspring has at last found a life partner, even if there are no grandchildren on the horizon. Insert complicated feelings here about suspecting I am ace and aro + wanting parents to feel like the family line isn’t dying out + general mortality anxiety. The wedding will be fun and the right amount of quirky. It’s at the science museum on the grounds of the 1964 World’s Fair, where our families used to visit when we were kids and my dad took slides and reel-to-reel tape when he was young. I’m dress shopping. Some relatives I haven’t seen in a while will be there.

My grandfather turned 103 in June. He’s as cognitively sharp as you could hope. A lady with a therapy cat comes to visit him in the assisted living facility every other weekend. Amazing. I wish I could look forward to same, but since he’s my dad’s stepfather, the genes don’t belong to us. Best hope comes from my grandma (dad’s mom), who made it to a week short of 99. The rest died young or youngish, alas.

Pets

Pepper is still here, still cute, still feisty. She’s my condo companion and stress reliever and provider of amusement and affection. If rescue records are to be believed, she turns 5 this month. The average guinea pig lifespan is 6, but there’s a pretty big spread around that number. We’ll see. My sister’s guinea pig—adopted to be a friend for Pepper but whom Pepper categorically rejected—lived until almost 5. If memory serves, our childhood guinea pig made it to something like 8.

View from above of a gray and white guinea pig with making a puppy-dog-eyes expression

Guinea pig looks up from drinking while a hand pets her

Guinea pig lying on her side inside a white quilted pillowcase, leg out, with one poop visible

A guinea pig sits in the arched doorway of a small wooden house, paws in front, looking into the distance

Work

I accepted another promotion. Been having mixed feelings about it. Good: money, learning useful new skills, a change after 10 years in the same office. Ambivalent: little time for creative work. What does it mean to focus on management and strategy after 25 years of identifying as a writer and video editor? Am I drifting further away from the ideal artist life I dreamed of, or making a smart/pragmatic decision since various factors have made writing harder as the years pass? Am I gravitating toward something I’m actually better at? What’s the plan? What’s the meaning of life?

THE END

Hello to you all. Please don’t feel like you need to respond to everything if there is one part you’d like to engage with. <3

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

From:

jesse_the_k

Helsinki as portrayed in your delightful photos seems to be a 2050 city as envisioned in 1950. The fountain of weeping is super-creepy and the infinite gender accessible ?toilet is lovely. I'm eager to hear how one crafts vegan shrimp.

In Stockholm I'm surprised that the brown building with many bay windows appears to be stuccoed, an exterior treatment that quickly decays in Wisconsin winters. (Maybe it's full employment for plasterers, which I approve of in principle.)

The felted sheep souvenirs are adorable, and bear a strong family resemblance to Pepper.

I'm glad you were able to enjoy the journey, COVID notwithstanding

From:

Ketchup

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