Enjoy! We sure did…

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By some calculations there are almost 25,000 islands out there to explore. Some are pretty suburbs of Stockholm proper, townships that can be reached by local transport. Others are veritable nature paradises where it feels like you are the sole survivor on planet earth. In between, there are a multitude of interesting places, guesthouses, shapely harbors and picturesque fishing villages to take in.

The obvious catches are of course the weather and the season. During winters, the ferry lines decrease the number of boats and routes, and ice conditions sometimes puts large swathes of archipelago out of reach. It is better to wait for summer, when days are long and warm.

Stockholm ferry at the dock

The Waxholmsbolaget, a ferry line, sells a boat pass that allows unlimited travel across the whole island chain. Accommodation? Either bring a tent (you’re allowed to pitch it anywhere you like, as long as it is not visible from someone’s house) or hit up one of the many hostels and Bed&Breakfast places that have sprung up in recent years.

Should you ever find yourself in Stockholm with two weeks to spare, a decent sense of adventure, a love of nature and a small-ish budget, the archipelago is the perfect destination.

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The Valborgsmassoafton festival takes place every 30^th of April. It’s big Swedish hello to Spring (aka a day-long party followed by bonfires at night).

Today’s SOOPic was shot in Uppsala at, oh, around 3pm. I’m willing to bet they didn’t get to this year’s bonfires.

Welcome to the Spring, Sweden!

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“I’m really fat right now!” Martin declared, out of the blue.

This honest expletive was made last night during our evening sauna. Grabbing a little (microscopic, really) bulge on his stomach, he looked up at me in a slight state of shock. Having been a life-long skinny guy, this new addition was a bit of a wonder to him. I had to laugh. He obviously isn’t fat – but fatter, yes. Just a little.

The most likely cause? Swedish food. Northern Swedish food, to be more exact. These people eat as if they’re still out tilling the farm. Top on their menu is butter, followed closely by beef, potatoes, and bread, all of which is smothered in more butter. I’m not knocking it – it’s heavenly – but it’s just so different from what we’ve been eating and therein lies the issue.

Swedish sausage (aka the irresistible devil in plastic)

While in Sweden we’ve been catching up on our meat eating, feeling we deserved it. We flew here from India – the land of rice, lentils and chickpeas – where we had a mostly vegetarian diet. Sure, we ate meat from time to time, but only when Martin declared that he would most likely perish if he didn’t eat animal protein that instant (which resulted in some seriously yucky eating at times). Eating vegetarian is what you do in India, just as eating meat is what you do in northern Sweden. So, we went from vegetarianism to meat-eatering in the course of a flight. Did that make us sick? No. Did our bodies send us a little “woah, lets just store a little bit of that meat in your fat cells” bulge. Yes, yes they did.

Bangkok street food vendor

This isn’t the first time we’ve made a major dietary change on this trip, either. We jumped from five months of delicious SE Asian food (does it get any better than the street food in Bangkok?), to four months of veggie-filled Indian/Nepali food. Then it was onto a month of meat-eating in Myanmar and then back for a month of Indian vegetarianism. All this change, packed into a year.

I’m not sure how I feel about it, now that Martin’s comment got me thinking. Where do you draw the line while on the road? Traveling is about experience, right? Food is huge part of that experience for us – but to what extent do we let it go? A little bulge or a little loss from time to time is one thing, but what about the long-term effects of our radically changing diet? Have we thought about that? No, not really. Just as with most things about this trip of ours, we’ve been living in the moment. Is that a bad decision? I guess we’ll have to wait and see. In the meantime, it’s time to start planning how to get rid of the 10 lbs (or what I call the Swedish curse) that we always gain here.

What do you think? Is living the food experience worth more than the (possible) long term effects of a dietary roller coaster?

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We’re on a little detour from our trip – a month spent at Martin’s parent’s home in Northern Sweden – which means two things: home cooked food and free, limitless internet.

So, I’m eating all the stodgy food I can fit in while finally getting around to back-end work on the website. First up: updating our Links Page. A close second on the to-do list is admitting that it’s taken way too much time to realize how important linking is. The early version of our site didn’t even have a links page – that’s how little importance I placed on it. You know how many people came to our site then? One – my mom.

After months of diligent writing work (and hard travel, I might add) with no real traffic to speak of, I finally sat down to figure out what the issue was. Well, if it wasn’t the much ignored detail: the links! Those darn little things were part of the problem. I realized that search engines, such as our beloved behemoth Google, ranks pages based in part by how many other sites link to it. The more links – the more legitimate (and therefore higher that website will be on their list) a site will be in a search. Ah ha! So those links are important.

Yes, most of you who haven’t had their head stuck in the mud like yours truly knew this already. Well, I didn’t – but I do now. The result: traffic! So, I sit down every month or so and plug away at other travel blogs – reading, learning and linking away.

My next move is creating a presence on Twitter. Yes, I know I’m late in the game on this one, too. Sadly, I’ve known that tweeting was important all along but have completely ignored it. I read a Wired article before we left arguing that blogging was a dying art; that Twitter was the new rage. Did I pay attention to this advice? Nope. I didn’t even finish the article. Here is what I know now: We should have been tweeting all along. To date we’ve written nearly 750 entries during our year on the road. That’s a whole lot of information we could have been sharing but there’s no time like the present, right!

I’ve logged into our Twitter account over the past few days and am, well, I’m feeling a bit overwhelmed. So, in an attempt to dive in head first, I’m posting this entry to our Twitter account to see if anyone has advice for me. Everyone started from where I’m sitting right now, right? Ignorant, but with the desire to learn (and learn fast – since that seems to be the MO in Twitterland).

If you hook me up with a tip I’ll write something awful nice about you. Hey, I may even figure out how to tweet it

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Here’s the recepie for Palt – a renowned northern specialty. It is especially claimed by the people in Pitea, where they fill their palt with raw pork and boil it for an hour. This is how we make it here in the Kalix area. Every town has its local variety, and of course ours is the best!

Palt a la Sangis, Serves 4.

Ingredients:

8 medium/large raw, peeled potatoes.

~6 deciliters of wheat flour

1.5 tsp salt

2.5 hectograms of salted pork, diced and fried separately in a skillet.

Crush or finely shred potatoes. Stir in salt and flour and mix into a batter. You should add enough flour that the spoon can stand up by itself without falling over. No more, or the Palt will become too compact. Less, and it will break apart when you cook it.

Bring a spacious pot of salted water to a boil, like you would for pasta.

Shape the batter into a half ball, about the size of a small-ish fist. Add a spoonful of fried pork and close the ball into a neat package. Gently add the balls to the boiling water. Lightly boil for 30 minutes.

Serve HOT with a dollop of real butter and Lingonsylt (substitute with cranberries if you can’t find Lingon).

The Usual End Result from Palt Overeating, the Dreaded Palt Coma

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Over the years, attendance to the regular ceremonies has dwindled more and more. At the same time, the finances of the Church of Sweden has hit upon hard times. The latest word is that the Sangis church is up for sale. It can be had for basically any price at all; and whomever that wants to take it off the Church’s hands is welcome to it.

This weekend we stopped by for Sunday mass. It’s normally not something I do when I’m up here, but I wanted to have a look at the old church before someone converts it into a woodshed or a potato storage unit. The priest for the day happened to be my old confirmation minister, who told me that everything must have an end, and that this goes for the church building too.

So, who here thinks we should bid on the old barn? Wifey thinks it would make one cool-looking studio…

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Thank you, Mom. Thank you for making the long trip to northern Sweden. I knew I’d missed you when we were on the road but it took seeing you to realize just how much.

I love you.

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Well, it took marrying a Swede to realize that I knew exactly nada-nothing-zilch about saunas. They really know how to do it here – wood fired heat, billows of back-stinging heat and a number of cool-down sessions (often with a little chilled adult beverage of choice) – make the experience something both painful and amazing at the same time.

I shared this experience with my Mom, who flew into Sweden for two weeks, and I’ve gotta say – I’m quite proud of her. She’s a total convert. Way to go, Mom! You handled the burn like the best of ‘em.

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Once upon a time a man named Klas, Martin’s great-great-grandfather, and his brother inherited a house . Neither man could agree on how to handle this inheritance, so they did what was most logical – they split the thing, literally. The house was torn down, plank by plank and split evenly into two piles of wood.

Claus’ pile was reassembled into a structure that makes up a portion (it’s since been expanded) of the workshop that still exists today. The building was eventually passed down to Sixten, Martin’s grandfather, who turned it into his carpentry shop – and thus it stands today – a very old, very cool building filled with wood working machinery, a long family history and a mountain of sawdust.

If I were ten years younger I’d be tempted to beg for an apprenticeship. Those beautiful machines really do need someone to carry on the wood working tradition.

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