~
thoughts
in a backpack ~
a
pre-travelogue
still undecided. that is the weather forecast for Sweden in short form.
could be anything from partly cloudy to grey and rainy to times of sun
and shine. yahoo also tells me that the most popular weather today is
Las Vegas... the only place on earth where you can walk through Venetian
streets twentyfour hours every day in bright daylight airconditioned
and all. an information that doesn't exactly help me to figure out what
to pack either. so I guess it will be the blue rain jacket and the black
sun top, as well as the green jungle shirt and my favourite faded jeans.
the other things are easier: a book to read and one to write, my camera,
the bag with the bathroom stuff, no hairdryer, no second pair of shoes,
no dictionary. I close my eyes as I squeeze it all into my backpack,
hoping that an invisible miracle will zip the pile down to hand baggage
size. yeah, I do own a bigger backpack, but as I probably will be more
on the road then in one place while I am in Sweden, I don't really fancy
the idea of dragging along more than necessary.
a friend of
mine asks about the sights I will visit, and about the local cuisine.
what can I say? I have no idea, I have enough to-do-lists back home,
my plan is to go there and just let things happen, the way this whole
trip happened to me - not really planned, but brought to me by a 'you've-got-enough-miles-for-a-free-European-flight'
letter from Swissair that coincided with an invitation from Tuula, a
friend of mine who lives in Goeteborg. all I know is that my flight
leaves at eight twenty, that I will arrive in Stockholm at twelve fifteen
after a stop in Zurich, and that there is a room in a hostel near the
Rehnsgatan waiting for me on Thursday, and Tuula waiting for me on Friday.
that we will spend Saturday together, maybe on some islands, which would
obviously include a trip on a boat, which does sound perfect to me cause
it somehow reminds me of the way we first met... in Bangkok, after I
took a boat to Wat Po, a green island of silence in the middle of the
vibrating Asian streets.
and because I prefer edges to straight lines when I can choose, I will
do a triangle trip, and head to Malmö on Sunday, and then back
to Stockholm on a different road on Monday, to spend a last evening
and a last morning there. and yes, the headline rumours about terrorists
plotting plane crashes in Germany is a bit scary. but then I remember
a line a wise woman said to me last month: if I should die travelling,
then know that I died doing what I wanted to do. but somehow I'm quite
sure that I will arrive back home safe and sound, so no real worries
about that. which
leaves just one thing unsolved: which music to choose for Sweden. I
browse through my cd collection, and the answer comes easy: it has to
be REM, no doubt, their album covers every weather, from 'I'll take
the rain' to 'summer turns to high'. sounds nearly perfect. all I need
to add now are my favourite chillhouse sounds: 'transmit liberation'
and 'seven seas'...
~greetings
from the land of travel~
Do