Last night in Lille, feeling weepy and generous

I just said goodbye to Theo and Ivan!  FOREVER!  

Or maybe just until Christmas.  Or maybe FOREVER!  Up there, in the picture, Theo and I are looking out over Lille from another friend's 20th-floor apartment.  That was Saturday, after we had spent all afternoon baking at the seaside.  If you look closely, you can just make out Theo's farmer's tan.

In France you don't say "at the beach."  It sounds too close to "at the bitch," especially when French people say it.  Instead you use the highly refined, 19thC-toddler-in-a-sailor-suit term "at the seaside."

OMG WHAT WILL I DO WITHOUT FRANCE? 

I leave in the morning.  I don't think it's an exaggeration to say that part of my heart is breaking a little.  Luckily another part of my heart is cracking the champagne and blowing noisemakers to celebrate the pending homecoming.  Balance!  I learned that from Gandhi!  

At the seaside, we fly kites.

And accept licks from cute random dogs.   And boys!

Just kidding!  Boys have to reverentially recreate my image in a flattering sand sculpture first.  So far, no boy has succeeded.  

OH NO

I should never have read this.    

Come & Dance With Me

So I'm going to start this one off with a little story which doesn't involve pirates or cowboys, like most good stories should.  But it does have an epiphany at the end, even if that epiphany is about as large and as consequential as a grain of rice.  BUT: it's a true story, and it explains these dance pictures, in a very roundabout way.  That's my hook.  

One of the first times that I can remember spending a whole night away from home (not counting summer holidays with my grandparents, and that time I went camping with my aunt and almost hyperventilated from crying so hard because of homesickness ... to the point where the guy in the next tent yelled at us to keep it down) was a night I spent at my friend H's house.  It turned out to be a big night for me, though I didn't realize until much later.  

H lived out in the country, like me, and we went to the same little public school, and we must have started sharing our morning snacks or whatever it is 8-year-olds do to bond, because one day towards the end of June I was invited to take the school bus home with H and spend the WHOLE NIGHT at his house.  Our parents encouraged it.  They called each other and wrote our names together on their fridge calendars.  Oh!  The anticipation!

Riding on a school bus other than my own was a rare and savory experience.  I remember studying my classmates with pity that day, because all of THEM had to take their OWN bus home.   And then, as if the school bus ride wasn't excitement enough, when we got to H's stop I spotted an incredible multi-story turreted tree-fort in the field across from his house.  I wondered if Rural Route 20 had led us straight to Heaven.

We got off the bus and went right to the tree-fort where we played a complicated action game that somehow incorporated both Darkwing Duck and Treasure Island (hey, there are pirates in this story after all!).  But before I had even perfected my ARGHH! he shouted from the ground that it was time to go to his house.  I was lured away only after promises that we'd come back after dinner.  How naive we are in youth!

We went inside and he took me to his room so I could put my overnight bag down (guess we were still too young for gender segregation).  First unpleasant shock of the visit: in his room hung the unmistakable yellowy smell of pee.  The mattress made a pfffffft noise when I set my bag on it.  With all the polite subtleness of childhood, I flung back his blanket and saw the proof: plastic sheets.  I hope I didn't make things worse for him by actually asking out loud if he wet the bed.  He saw that I saw, and we were both embarrassed.  He left the room.  I paused a moment to consider what the night might be like, breathing in the pee-air.  Then I carefully picked up my bag again and put it on the floor.

Second unpleasant shock: dinner was preceded by pre-dinner chores, which I understood only after a lot of explaining and gesturing.  In the Findlay family, chores were done on Saturday mornings.  Saturday was a day for chores.  Not before dinner on a weeknight!  I watched dubiously as H began to clean the bathroom.  Was he SURE this was what his mom wanted?  Did he have to clean the bathroom EVERY weeknight?  What's more, I never had to clean the bathroom at home.  It belonged in a category of chores that I was thankfully considered too young to do properly, like folding underwear.  

But clean the bathroom he did.  And then we were allowed to eat dinner, which apparently wasn't as momentous as cleaning the bathroom, because I don't remember it at all.  

Then things got a little hairy.

After dinner, I waited eagerly by the door to go back to the tree-fort.  But H didn't want to go to the tree-fort.  He wanted to play Battletoads on his Nintendo ES.  Which I remember because I thought it was the most repulsive-sounding Nintendo game in the history of everything, which I told him.  And then he told me that Darkwing Duck was the dumbest cartoon in the history of everything PLUS INFINITY.  Which was cutting pretty deep.  I felt my last hope playing in the tree-fort slip away from me, but I couldn't let the Darkwing comment go unchallenged.  Before we knew it, the tension had escalated so steeply that we were banished from each other's company for a cool-down period.  

My holding cell was the kitchen.  I sat on the floor beside an open cupboard that held a box of Froot Loops, which gave me hope for breakfast.  After a while H's mom came in and gave me a drink of Coke in a plastic Canada's Wonderland cup.  Normally I was only allowed Coke on Saturdays (a big day in our family, apparently), so this gesture put me in a generous, forgiving mood.  H's mom sat down on the floor across from me.  A fat beagle with miasmic farts wandered over and licked her legs from ankle to shorts' hem.  I remember the spoosh sound of that dog's long tongue as she told me that H couldn't go play outside again because he had something called asthma, which gets bad in the evenings, especially when it's hot outside like it was then. Asthma was a foreign concept to me and for a long time afterwards, years even, I thought it had something to do with bedwetting.

Plied by Coke and the threat of a phone call to my parents, I finally conceded to playing Battletoads.  Which wasn't as repulsive as I thought, and about five hundred years later, when my parents FINALLY gave me a Nintendo (which they bought used from my friend Amy, because like every other kid in the universe she had upgraded to Super Nintendo by then), I had that game.  

Here's the epiphany: that night at H's house was the night when I really started to understand certain irrefutable facts about the universe, such as:

1.  Some kids' parents let them drink Coke in the middle of the week and eat Froot Loops even when it's nobody's birthday...

2. ...on the other hand, some kids' parents ALSO made them do chores in the middle of the week.

3. Some kids' parents had already taken them to that far-off magical place called Canada's Wonderland.

And, most importantly:

4. Some people have invisible problems, like bed-wedding/asthma.  Problems that the other kids at school would never know about, unless they were invited for a sleep-over.  And even then only maybe.  

I looked at H after that day and wondered what other invisible problems he might have.  And then I started to look at all the other kids in our class and wondered about their invisible problems.  And then I began wondering about all of the adults I knew, like my bus driver, or the town librarian, or the guy selling candy in Stedman's.  Did they all have invisible problems that nobody knew about, except the people who slept at their houses?  My wondering went on and on and on into forever.  Forever PLUS INFINITY.

That little moment of awakening on the floor of my friend's kitchen happened about 17 years ago.  And I still feel just as baffled by the concept of invisible problems going on in other people's lives. The million private little battles being waged by everyone every day, from perpetually wetting the bed to worrying about an illness to rethinking a romance.  It could be anything, at any time, taking place where no one else can see it.  

It was probably a big deal for H to invite me over, since that would mean showing me his invisible problem.  Since then, I've been invited into the private worlds of many other people, and it's a fantastic kind of intimacy with a very brave message attached: I trust you with this.  

Okay.  

I am now going to stretch this epiphany wayyyyy out to unreasonable limits by turning it into a metaphor, thus justifying these photos taken during a brief but wholehearted dance party with my friends Ivan and Theo yesterday.  Negotiating your own invisible problems, and then taking into account those of the people you love and want to protect, is a dance so complex that even "So You Think You Can Dance" champions must often fumble their moves, despite the best of intentions.  

I am going to take swing lessons.  I've wanted to take them forever but there's always been something more important to pay for, you know?  But I will take them.  If I learn to swing dance, I will be even happier than I am now.  I will be able to handle stress with grace and proaction.  I will be a better cook, gardener, pet owner, writer, friend, and, eventually, girlfriend.  All I need are swing lessons!

I'm thinking about all of this because in two weeks I'll be back in Canada, which makes me nervous, because it means facing all kinds of challenges.  And whenever I think about it all, I find myself applying a very unreasonable kind of logic.  For example: the first thing I need to do is find an apartment in Ottawa.  Which has ballooned to the point where I believe that if I can just find the perfect apartment, I will be fantastic in my new job, I will be mature and farsighted in love, I will be successful in writing, etc.  All I need to do is find the right apartment!  Easy!

But I know that's not how it works.  One final, tiny story: down the road from our farm was a family with a beautiful old collie named Lady, who clearly suffered from the heat of her thick coat every summer.  So to solve that problem, the family shaved her coat right off.  Refreshed, happy dog, right?  Except that Lady got so sunburned that she nearly died.  It's easy to find one solution to a problem and believe that it will fix everything.  BUT, that makes it easy to be shortsighted and naive, which leads to even more challenges.

Finding an apartment in Ottawa will only solve the problem of not having an apartment in Ottawa.  Which is sort of disappointing.  

On the other hand, coming home will mean seeing people that I am really, REALLY excited to see. (People... and cats.)  Which makes all of the invisible problems so totally worthwhile. 

Last words: even if taking swing lessons leads to nothing more than knowing how to swing dance - well, that will be COOL PLUS INFINITY.  

  

It's not easy becoming your future.

So my good friend Jen used to participate in a regular research expedition that involved strapping herself into an experimental airplane and launching herself into outer space.  Or almost, at least.  She even blogged about it once.  There was a lot of throwing up involved. Throwing up, and swearing on several graves never to do anything so irrational and uncomfortable again, all equalized (I think she'd agree) by a rush of euphoria.  The kind of euphoria that only comes from tottering around on unsteady legs, gloriously in tact despite having volunteered, completely unnecessarily, to sacrifice solid ground for the sake of experimentation.

This is roughly what my year in France has felt like.  

Somewhere in Holland, trying to watch the road and not the tulips 

(occasionally failing)

I've got a map and a yellow hi-lighter and when I trace out all the adventures I've had since I arrived last September it looks like a glow-worm had quadruplets and then the quadruplets each had quadruplets.   

I just got back from spending a week in the Alps near Italy with "family" who first gave me a home in France ten years ago.  I need to write about in on paper before I can blog about it on a screen, but to sum it up in six words or less:  Thibault grew up, but not too much.  

I fly back to Canada in less than a month.  It's hard to get a grip on that statement.  Back!  To Canada!  In less than a month!  You know how sometimes when you repeat a word over and over and over it starts to sound like nonsense?  Same goes for whole sentences.

Back.  To Canada.

Less than a month.

Thinking Man, you never looked so handsome.

On a blogging and email hiatus for a bit while I show my ma around the best cities in the whole world.  And YES, I am allowed to make such definitive statements despite having seen only about O.O1% of the world's cities.  Why?  Because this is a blogtatorship!  

And also, how could these cities NOT be some of the best?  Consider the evidence:

Cats in Paris!  And some nice buildings and sights and food.  And cats!!!  Handsome French ones with a vague resemblance to a certain phenomenal cat I know in Canada.

Climbed up Sacré Coeur in Montmartre with mom, which I've done a few times before with various combinations of important people, though never with someone quite so important as my mom, nor quite so willing to climb that brutal winding staircase for a thousand breathless minutes to get up there (after jumping the turnstile at the bottom - God will smote us!).  The view is fantastic, and the graffiti is almost as rewarding.  Thousands of declarations of love painted on with white-out, and several hundred prayers scrawled over the stone, mostly begging the Lord to spare innocent souls from the brutality of the French finishing exams at the end of high school.  

Another point of evidence: endless liquid dinners in Lille with two of my most favouritest men in the world.  Okay, maybe Lille wouldn't make an objective list of the World's Best Cities, but to me, personally?  It's a tie for Montreal.  

Baby ducklings in Bruges!  (Yes, it's Belgium, but my love for France is so huge that it dribbled a little over the borders...)

The photo below is taken from inside the Close at Bruges, where we were shushed several times by earnest-looking nuns.  Just as we were leaving, we noticed a joyful and well-hydrated wedding party push their way in.  The things nuns have to deal with these days!

 

All of this is just a TINY taste.  So far we've done Paris, Bruges, Bologne-sur-Mer (northern beaches, with England like a hazy rope of licorice on the horizon), and Lille.  Tomorrow I'm taking her to ground zero of this whole love affair: ROUEN.  Tingly fingers just thinking of it.

Not easy!

Tearjerker alert: Lara left yesterday morning to go back to the U.S.

After Annabelle and I dropped her off at the train station, I allowed myself the whole morning for moping and taking everything far too seriously.  And then I got out of bed, went "running", took care of basic personal grooming needs, and got down to the business of planning for my last few classes.  If I sound self-congratulatory it's because initiating all of that activity took super-human strength, given the weight of knowing that Lille is now without its Lara. 

What we'd look like as a pair of Dutch farmers:

Over the weekend Lara, Annabelle and I drove to the Netherlands to see some tulips, which were so numerous and colourful that I doubt my overwhelmed retinas will ever recover.  I'm having trouble uploading photos so I will have to post all about that in a few days.  For now, here is one shot taken from inside Keukenhof, the fantastically enormous flower gardens in South Holland:

You know how sometimes when you spend a LOT of time with the same couple of people, even the best among us can't help feeling a little tense?  Well, with L & A, I never felt like that.  The more time we spent together, the goofier we got, and the more roving and unintelligible became our jokes.  It was heaven to meet these two goof-balls and go roaming across the continent with them, and it's annoying how we all have to split up now.  Thank goodness for Skype and for the fifty thousand emails we've already sent each other, even though it's only been two days!  

See you in September, BG!    

It's been evening all day long

I slept like a bear through much of the day, and then got up and went to a comedy show tonight so hilarious & insane that the actors themselves could hardly keep straight faces, and in the midst off all that tearful laughter I looked at my friends and realized that I have to say goodbye to France exactly two months from today.

An impossible (and somewhat inconvenient) truth.

This trailer has a hold on me.

Just when I thought Lille couldn't handle any more awesomeness...

... my aunt & uncle & three tiny cousins came to visit!  Which made me remember what I always forget: BABIES DON'T STAY BABIES.  In the same way that slim orange kittens become fat, glorious orange cats, tiny dudes become BIGGER tiny dudes! 

Milan & Rishi a few years ago, capable only of sitting around looking fatally adorable:

Milan & Rishi now, capable of creating mass chaos while STILL looking fatally adorable:

Not to mention their baby sister, conveniently known as Baby, exhausted after hours of holding her own in the midst of her big brothers' Tasmanian Devil-like energy:

Oh man.  Doesn't it kind of HURT a little bit to look at them?

Speaking of hurting a little:

I hope that they will always be able to laugh that hard.

There we were, a chaotic little flock of Ontarian ex-farmers (and my Aunt Padma, who is from India, but is also Ontarian and ex-farmer by association), parading through the streets of this big France town, among demon babies and boulangeries and beer parlors.

Demon babies, you say?!

For very mysterious reasons they just sort of appeared one night, and haven't left.  Lille people act like this is completely normal so I'm trying to do the same... but they give me the creeps nonetheless.  

So.  Other news.

I reached the point last week where I could no longer ignore the fact that I really needed a haircut.  And I got one, and it's a good cut, but it's SHORT.  Shorter than I'm used to.  I think it still classifies as "long hair" because it's not like you can see my ears or anything, but it's definitely something new.  I'm hoping that it's short & sexy, short & sophisticated, even short & cute, but it might be just short & short.  Too short to tie up when I go jogging, so it just kind of flies around everywhere, Medusa-like, which at least clears the sidewalk of people as I approach.

(that was my coy way of bragging that I am a jogger now!  No longer the black sheep of my marathoning family!  Except that I can barely wheeze through five consecutive songs on my playlist... but you have to start somewhere.  Also they are long songs.)

The jogging, while somewhat motivated by the memory of all that chocolate and wine that fuelled my first, let's say, five or so months of living in France, is mostly a clever avoidance technique.  As long as I'm concentrating on not hyperventilating or throwing up, my brain doesn't have time to dwell on the various uncomfortable questions it has recently been volleying around, like what it will feel like to leave France and come home, and what I should do when I get there, and where I should do it.  

Answering the first question is easy: it will feel fantastic, because I will finally see people I've gone far too long without seeing, and because I'm flying straight to Montreal where an extremely fun itinerary with the girls and guys I've missed so much has already been suggested.  

And it will also feel wrenching, because I will have to say goodbye to a life I've lived for the last eight months, and the people I've come to love, and all of that delicious, inexpensive wine & chocolate.  And I will have to answer the next two questions.

And I KNOW that this is irrational and silly, but since this is my blog I can air out whatever irrational and silly worries occur to me: what if I am peaking right now?  What if going to France to teach is the coolest thing I'll ever do, and after this I will get an acceptable job and start saving acceptable amounts of money and eating acceptable amounts of acceptable food, and accepting an adventureless life?  

I can't imagine that ever happening, because I can't seem to keep drama and adventure out of my life for longer than five seconds even when I try, but that's still a bleak question that creeps into my mind now and then.  

The answer, I think, will come to some extent from writing.  While I write I usually have this flickering movie reel in my head showing all of my friends in suits and cocktail dresses, helping me celebrate my first book launch.  Someday soon.  Someday in my twenties.  I am confident enough in this that I even know which dress I will wear (it is pink and if you've ever gone anywhere formal with me then chances are you know the one I mean!).  

This dress, which Pauline leant me for a party in Stockholm, might not make it to the future book-launch party... but that apple crisp definitely will, in some kind of delicious reincarnation

In the meantime, there's the mangled mess of everything else in my brain to be sorted through, and it looks something like this:

Two nights ago I had a dream where I found a job in a cavernous warehouse containing millions of Oprah-like self-help books, which would be a bleak prospect except that THIS warehouse offered free back rubs to its employees before and after every shift.  There was a whole room full of massage tables, with tabletop stone waterfalls artfully arranged around the perimeter and an Enya CD on endless repeat, and professional masseurs who would gently press you back onto the table if you tried to get up too early to start working.  MOST RELAXING WORKPLACE EVER. I'm afraid the whole experience of that dream has set a new & impossible standard in my job search, as if the whole thing wasn't impossible enough already.

For reasons big and small, it looks like I may live in Waterloo, at least for the summer and start of fall.  For a long time, right up until two weeks ago actually, I thought vaguely that I would go back to Montreal, find a French-speaking job to keep myself polished, and live among that famously loveable crowd, but the advantages of living in Waterloo, at least at first, are growing & growing.  A big one is the prospect of living close to family again, after three years of being at least eight hours away from them, first by train and then by plane.

And, of course, there's always the ten-dollar Coach Canada bus between Toronto & Montreal!

 

But... wow.  Sometimes I wish I could pay someone to quickly and expertly figure this all out for me.  Barring that possibility, I just keep telling myself that it doesn't have to be all figured out TODAY.  

Soon.

I am still here.  Or rather... I am here, for the first time in a while.  I'm back from Stockholm, Paris, and Amsterdam, and also from successfully herding 25 teenagers around London for two days, and it's been exhausting.  And I don't just mean the traveling and the extreme-UV-ray exposure to unchecked adolescence.  The last few weeks have been a scrambled mess of tough choices, baffling conversations, and an extreme, knock-you-down-and-steal-your-lunch-money kind of exhilaration, and not for the reasons that might first leap to mind.   That kind of frantic living takes the stuffing out of a girl, after a while.

But please don't give up!  I'm here and I have pictures and stories to share!  I just need to catch up on three weeks worth of skipping sleep and them I'm all yours.  And I promise to stop being so cryptic for no apparent reason.

An ice experience impossible to forget!

I don't know what I was thinking when I packed for Sweden, but it was somewhere along the lines of, "hmmm, this is Scandinavia we're talking about, and it is February after all.... oh whatever, I'll just take this light jacket and hope for the best." Of the many Stockholm/Canada similarities, snow is the coldest, and the easiest to underestimate. But it has its good sides! Living in a French city perpetually overhung by Eyeore-like rainclouds made me forget the pleasures of walking through a snowy city, full of tiny snowmen and kids on toboggans....


After the first few enchanting hours, though, the reality of snow begain to creep in the seams of my Pumas: SNOW IS COLD. And despite popular belief, being Canadian doesn't make me impervious to freezing temperatures! Result = several dozen hot chocolates, creative scarf arrangements, and all of us huddling in the bathroom when we got home, thawing out on the only heated floor in the apartment.

Rough translation: BEWARE! OUTRAGEOUSLY CUTE PUPPIES AT LARGE!!

Unexpected food fact about Swedes: they like their nutrients packaged in toothpaste tubes, be it bacon, cheese, or.... fish eggs.


I tried to be brave. I did! I ate stuff I have never eaten before! But despite the sexy Tilda Swinton scene in Benjamin Button, I couldn't bring myself to indulge in the fish-eggs-from-a-tube (unlike Mattias, my enthuasiastic host and friend, who generously offered to eat my share).


I did, though, eat raw herring, which is served everywhere in Sweden (along with potatoes - oh my goodness, the Swedes LOVE their potatoes). And not only did I eat the raw herring, but I actually kinda sorta didn't mind it, which is a big step for me, a girl who has resisted the sushi trend and every other seafood movement her whole life.

Very typical Swedish lunch, with herring, potatoes, a creamy fish sauce, and green onion:


I hadn't seen anything, though, until I went to Sweden's national culture museum, and saw examples of Swedish meals from past centuries. Amidst the million variations of herring, there was a roasted swan! With head and wings still in tact!!! And a diamond danginling from its beak, as though in some kind of grotesque gesture of forgiveness for all the butchery and roasting...


I guess I don't have to tell you that this isn't MY plate:

Traveling to another country can be as much of a gastronomical adventure as a sightseeing one, and sometimes, after several such "adventures," there's nothing better in the entire world than to eat something familiar and comforting and full of delicious calories that have nothing to do with seafood. Which is why the blueberry pancakes I had on Sunday morning were the best pancakes I have ever had in my life!


Let's just pause here for a minute in memory of the perfectness of those pancakes.....




Sigh.





Back to the sightseeing part of this adventure: since Stockholm is a city built on several islands, there is water everywhere, and wherever there is water there are boats, waiting for tourists to come and take their pictures.

In the distance of this picture is Nordiska, the Swedish cultural museum, mentioned above:

Another view of Stockholm:

Two things that I need to handle better when preparing for winter conditions: (1) find out some way of taming my hair, which buckles and frizzes like an old wool mitten the second snow is near and makes me all self-conscious, and (2) stop wearing jeans that are so long they drag in the snow and soak water up to knee height and freeze my legs, which is, you know, mildly unpleasant.

But I hope none of that sounds like complaining, because I LOVE being in this city and indulging in my very favourite part of travel: getting entirely lost in an unfamiliar city (but always only a phone call away from being found again). This is Stockholm's City Hall, where the annual banquet for Nobel Prize winners is held every year (mysteriously named "the Blue Room") (Also where my friend Mattias formally received his MA degree):

A view of City Hall from the other side of the river:

Of the bazilion other touristy/museumy things worth seeing in Stockholm, my second favourite was the Vasa Museum. That place is a dream come true for those who, like me, once went through a very intense obsession with Lego pirate ships and their tiny canons.

The story, as far as I could gather, is that halfway through the 17th century the King of Sweden ordered that the biggest possible ship be built to intimidate Poland. It turned into one of those "bigger, faster, stronger" stories, where what mattered most was a country's ego, at the expense of everything else.

In the end the ship was so enormous and wobbly that it immediately sank five seconds after it was launched, before it had even cleared the harbour. Imagine how embarrassing that would be!! The kicker is that the shipbuilders suspected that their ship wasn't seaworthy, so once they got it floating they had several dozen sailors sprint from one side of the deck to the other to test it out. They had to cancel the test after only a few sprints, because the ship was keeling so steeply that it might have turned right over. But of course the king ignored the results of this experiment and told them to hurry the heck up and launch the thing.

(Listen to me! "Keeling"! Like I know anything about ships!!!)

333 years later, in 1961, the ship was finally hauled up from the bottom of the Stockholm harbour, and evenutally the Swedes built a musuem around it.

Isn't that cool?? A 300-year old ship! And you can go and see it!! And touch it! And they even fished up the skeletons of all the people who didn't make it off the ship before it sank, and you can visit those too, which inspires a delicious mixture of creepiness and insatiable curiosity.

It was impossible for me to take a decent picture of the ship, which was truly massive, so instead I just stole this one from Wikipedia:

On the right you can see part of the ship, and on the left, a little model of it with its original colours, which I did manage to snap:

I wish I could be ten years old again, with this model to play with. I could feel that part of myself, the ten-years-old part, leaping with excitement.

ABRUPT CHANGE OF SUJECT:

On an entirely different outing, I joined some friends for the most unusual cocktail I've ever had. Actually, the cocktail itself was pretty standard Megan fare (raspberry vodka), but the location was entirely unusual!!

Actually, that could be the slogan for my entire holiday in Stockholm, not just the part where I got tipsy in a giant igloo...

Cocktail glasses made out of ice! Bar made out of ice! Walls made out of ice!

I sort of wanted to leave with one of those furry coats, but the staff had obviously anticipated that possibility and were super-diligent about making sure you de-robed before checking out. Regardless, the twenty minutes spent there represent the most fun I've ever had while sitting on an ice cube.

My totally favourite place to visit in Stockholm, though, turned out to be one of the last things I did, with our entire gang: we went to Skansen, which is a big "outdoor musuem" on one of the islands, meant to recreate old Scandinavian farms and stores and lifestyle. It had kind of a pioneer village-y feel, with guides dressed in period clothing, old toys and sports equipment to try out, and dozens of tiny, beautiful roads to wander....

And it also had animals! Like this very fat, very self-satisfied hog.

A pack of wolves and their noon meal:


Tycho's distant cousin:

Santa's reindeer in the off-season:

(side note: Swedish people have no idea who Rudolph is! And Sweden in the reindeer capital of the world!! Shocking.)

Mooses:

Pauline tries an old pair of skiis:

Hippie sheep:

The entire week was pretty amazing, and to give it a movie finish we left Skansen and walked bravely out onto the frozen Baltic Sea and wrote our names in the snow (and some of us did strange turtle dances):





That's it from Stockholm. In the morning I'm flying to Paris for a second, and entirely different, chapter of this holiday adventure, which will involve a VIP visitor from Canada, some shenanigans in Amsterdam, and probably a lot of champagne. I will splash it all across this blog (the pictures, not the champagne) once I get back to Lille and life goes back to some kind of normal rhythm, somewhere in the very distant future (ie. in two weeks).

Au revoir for now!