Some pixly, but great

These are those wonderful moments that are so hard to catch: they show a personality, fragments of seconds of great joy and a working camera...and the hard work it sometimes requires to convince people that yes indeed, the photo of you is that good.

Museum Mission: Haga parkmuseum

1787 was the birth year for this tent that is supposed to look like it is made of copper. Inside, there is the Haga park museum (and a separate café) that depicts the story of the Haga, the park it is in. It is for free and I recommend to combine the visit with a stroll around and a visit to Gustav III:s paviljong.

The park theater in 1925.

Picnic in the park in 1867.

Schemes, plans, history and previous interiors of local buildings shortly mentioned.

The park's buildings in more detail. Good to know if one is too tired to walk around.

Sugar heartbeats

 Jamaican music, sugar and art sums up this evening. Cotton candy is quite interesting as a shaping material, especially when in touch with water - I managed to make a face!

Gamla Orangeriet

This is a very nice café that I can recommend! It is an old greenhouse, inside a botanical garden where there is also a new greenhouse. And this tea! I added a piece of unrefined sugar, too, which perhaps made it even more perfect.

At the right time of the day, it is a calm place to have a late lunch or a coffee.

Bye, Annika and other love gestures

All that love one develops for people one has shared one's life with in the student corridor is shown here in glimpses. Annika will have a delightful surprise tomorrow when she will step out through the entrance door on her way to catch her flight.

S. said that the flower placement was my idea. Ok, let us say that.

Hearts left from a gratitude moment. Neither Ian or S. could figure out when I had had the time to do this without them noticing it.

Tessinska palatset by Nicodemus Tessin the younger

This pearl is a house across the Royal palace and is the home of the county governor, as long as the county governor stays the county governor. 

The interior is nice, but not shown to the public that often.

Some of the rooms have any "hidden" meanings demonstrated with its paintings, one of them being the attempt to create a depth with landscapes to make the interior look bigger. Then, entering an adjacent room with almost white wallpaper, all those efforts seem lost: the whiteness gives a bigger feeling of space in a room than a dark, painted lake or sea ever will.

There are in general many tricks seen here and there. The grand valve in the middle, on the third floor (I call the ground floor "first floor"), is only 7 meters deep and is fake - there is nothing inside. Right behind it, there are ordinary apartments with inhabitants that find the arrangement quite amusing.

Changed plans

The ultimate picnic weather continues!

Since we were locked out from a friend's apartment anyway, we simulated the experience indoors.

I only then found out I had lovely red cherry tomatoes and plastic cups to drink from in my bag (not seen here, though).

And just a few minutes later, grace to the serious phone call, we got to watch the football cup almost fully.

*imagine thunder*

Defying the summer being rained away, we took a chance while clouds were apart and rushed to the grill. Drop by drop, another rain forced five of us indoors, while me and a friend stood tight together under an umbrella and made the best out of the fire that partly got it heat from Sebastian's exam results (he got an A). Then it stopped raining again, and to prove that it was "hot" outdoors when Joakim opened the window to ask, one of us stripped...and had to stay bare for quite some time to make it look credible :) 

A question to you, dear readers

It takes on average seven-eight years before a blog becomes "popular", the veterans say. Sweden has a rather special blog climate, as I have seen: it is common to at least for a short time have had some kind of blog, and we have young girls (and others) making a fortune out of it.

I have blogged every single day since July last year, and slowly gained a relatively steady audience from Poland, France, Brazil, United Kingdom, Russia, Sweden, Turkey, USA, Ukraine and now and then there are also readers from China, Germany, Saudi Arabia, South Korea, India, Switzerland and Australia and I am so happy you found me, among all the other zillions of blogs out there.

So my question to you is: how did you find me, and what attracts you the most on this blog? Simply - what makes it worthwhile to continue reading?

Happy midsummer!

It is like new year's eve in Sweden today: almost everybody is on holiday and celebrates the longest day of the year eaither dancing around a maypole or eating good food with friends and family, or both. I am just heading home from a party that kind of combines that!

Moving out activities

:)

Spoiled

Once, when internet would take forever to load, like nine years ago when I was in such a small Swedish city where there are only 150 permanent inhabitants and to use the internet at the hostel one would have to book a tiny room where a hugely fat screen was chained to a table and took exactly the half hour to turn it on that I had at my disposal before it was time to let it to some other hostel user, yes at that time, I could be entertained by the hope itself: will the screen show any new signs of life? But not now. I have, at a pretty near distance of where I am right now, direct or indirect access to (counting a computer room as "one" computer) about 11 computers, one of them being my smartphone - and this leaves me with no patience when stuff will not load properly. So, dear readers, photos might take time to load the coming...kalpa, or perhaps just a vedha?

Good films do not grow on trees. (Well, these do.)

If somebody asks me what my favourite Swedish film is, my most accurate answer would be "among those I have seen, it would be the first 10 minutes and 50 seconds of the movie "Känn ingen sorg"" - the one to the left. The Oscar-nominated "No" is loosely based on political events, but is still for me to see -  maybe it will end up being one of my favourites in general?

Summer days

While calm hysteria goes on in my student corridor due to the football finals, I am preparing to move. I also have started doing the splits every day. I managed to follow this schedule once, so this far it is more or less perfect success, but let us see how far (low) I can get by just stretching once daily.

"Dead swan under a parasol" or Museum Mission: Svindersviks gård

Nordiska museet also possesses a p(a)lace called Svindersviks gård. Technically, it is too small to be a palace but was owned by an Italian noble family, Grill, a name that is supposed to come from the moment when one of the ancestors had to jump over a large wall to escape from someone and did so like a cricket (grillo in Italian).

The main building looks like a summer house somebody invested a lot of time and crafts in. We were given the advice to look carefully at the pattern on the tiled stove, which had the very common motif of a dead swan under a parasol, and even with the swan absent, it is still common with a swan-shaped arrangement of items under a parasol - good to know when visiting auctions.

Wallpaper paintings in the, then popular, Chinese style.

In one of the adjacent buildings, there were magic herbs and fish and eggs and nails. The dragon blood came from a dragon, was the answer when I asked; the leaves in the dish and the inner peel of the egg could both be used as a patch.

Inside this building, there was a concert held by a researcher - also dressed as in the 1700's - who knew a lot about Carl Michael Bellman.

Bellman was a Swedish composer that wrote the first Swedish national anthem, psalms and less appropriate songs, the latter making his work survive till these days. Back then, applications for jobs were written as poems, and the probably most known song by Bellman - "Fjäriln vingad syns på Haga" - was originally a job application he had written for his wife! Times really change.

A nice place indeed - but seldom open. For a visit, check Svindersviks gårds webpage out (available only in Swedish, as I can see).

Dragon blood and a noble cricket

More is to be told about Svindersvik once I wake up!

Bernadottebiblioteket

Books owned - purchased ones as well as gifts - by royalties, starting from 1796, reside in this library, Bernadottebiblioteket: the kings' at the bottom and the queens' on the balcony. It was assumed that there would be enough space for a very long time ahead for books, but very soon what was supposed to have been the national library required a new location, and so The National Library of Sweden was built elsewhere - today considered to be in the center of the city, but back then very far away from the castle.

Sex bomb, sex bomb

Concert summer ahead that I have no time for, but will try to take the time for! And invest in new ear plugs. So far, I have seen Tom Jones live, who - as a friend put it - has been married since the year her father was born. Jones turns 74 this year, I believe. Yet he did not attract as many people as Tenacious D last summer, when people even tried to swim their way in to Gröna Lund.

A dry joke

Dry ice is hard to both make and buy on your own (I do not find the method of letting a fire extinguisher blow through a pillow case easy), so I was happy to have found an AGA shop in Älvsjö and went in to order pellet of ice. The staff could not find my membership number at first though, and suddenly I realised that the TV behind me was playing suspension music (with a black screen), as if me making the order was a thriller movie - and the music stopped when the number was found.

Orangeriet at Norr Mälarstrand kajplats 464

Evidently, one goes here for the view and the setting, not for the prices - and the meny is rather short. But again, the place is nice!

Museum Mission: Tullmuseum

Drugs in picture frames,

leather bags

and so-called raw diamonds are forbidden to import without special permission (well, had you had special permission, you would not put the drugs in a frame in the first place).

All of this is to be found at Tullmuseum / The Museum of Taxes and Custom Service (my own translation - first, I wanted to call it "The Museum of Duty and Customs", which got a religious and philosophical tone). It is for free and is actually in the same building as the agency Swedish Custom Services itself.