Cooking and Salvation

"If you use good ingredients, and you don't take any shortcuts, then you can usually cook something very good. Sometimes it is the only worthwhile product you can salvage from a day: what you make to eat. With writing, I find, you can have all the right ingredients, give plenty of time and care, and still get nothing. Also true of love. Cooking, therefore, can keep a person who tries hard sane." -John Irving, The World According to Garp

I get a kick out of this statement. So so so many nights have I come home, sick of school, only wanting to make dinner. Irving (Garp) just articulates it so much better than I could.

I'm being over-ambitious...checking out 4 books and expecting to read them all in a month. We'll see how this goes.

Edinburgh

So this is a few days late, but I'm keeping up, I think....

Edinburgh was gorgeous. Absolutely so. I'm not sure exactly what my experience was influenced by, but my guess is my privation from warmth for 3 months had something to do with my ecstatic and immediate love of the city. I spent 3 days in a tank top, admiring leaves, flowers, and blue skies. Not that copenhagen isn't beginning to bloom, but the temperature is prohibiting me from my annual shedding of layers. I should be in shorts by now...I didn't realize just how much latitude effects my mood. The days are getting longer and longer and longer here...noticeably so. After biking home at about 4:00 from a buzzed friday night, the birds began singing and the sky lightening. I've heard that by mid-summer, people go out "at night" with sunglasses on.

....right, back to Scotland.

It was lovely. Of all the places I've visited while in Europe, I would go back to Scotland. Hiking the highlands seems like it would be an amazing trip. Taking a month or two to go Monroeing sounds fantastic. Scotland is small enough to comprehend (unlike the US), but big enough to be scary with a full pack on.

I spent 4 days there, three in Edinburgh, and one in Glasgow. The short list of things includes: Edinburgh Castle (yes, I payed for that), Arthur's seat, Hill walking for a day in the Pentlands, Ferrying out to the Island of Inchcolm in the Firth of Forth, the Scottish Parliament, Calton Hill, Prince's Street Gardens, Leith (I stayed in the area), Quite a few old cemeteries, The Glasgow School of Art, The Willow tea rooms (i had coffee in one, and the irony hasn't stopped making me giggle a bit.), St. Mungo's Cathedral, The Glasgow Necropolis, The Glasgow Green, Sauchiehall St, and quite a few other things that were probably passed by way too quickly. To get home, I took an overnight bus to Manchester (stupid, stupid, stupid idea) for a cheaper flight and came home drained, but barely tanned with an afterglow from reuniting with my chacos for 3 days.

I booked my plane tickets to Scotland on an impulse that occurred in a circadian low, while watching the snow fall on a frigid March evening in Copenhagen. I was craving topography, and I got it, along with a much needed dose of spring and temperatures above 55 degrees. Good weekend, I must say!

So Stockholm...

It's amazing how a place can be impacted by the experience, the people, the weather, the smells, and the sounds. What is a place, but for the sensuality of it? One person may hate a city while another loves it.

Well, I loved Stockholm. The weather was perfect, the people were brilliant, and I ate like a madwoman. I spent my easter on a high foggy rock at midnight, drinking wine, and looking over the city with people from all over the world.

The topography makes the city. It's a collection of rocks, emerging from the Baltic, and topped with high trees and old buildings. Actually, it's one of the few cities that is built on an Archipelago, and once outside the city, there are hundreds of small islands dotted with vacation homes. I could imagine a life here, swimming in the ocean during the summer, sunning on a

granite rock, on an island only accessible by

boat. Apparently, one in 6 people who live in Stockholm (or Sweden) own a boat. I could see why. If only the city had eternal summer, and not the 8 month winter. There was still snow on the ground when we were there in April. Maybe I'll have to find another archipelago.

We took a ferry out to an island...got our nature on and such...it's quite beautiful out there. If anyone actually reads this, and chooses to visit, the archipelago is a must. Also, the little brass man near the Finnish church will give you good luck if you leave him something and rub his head.

Good trip...Edinburgh in 2 days. I'm very excited.

Solo Sailing

http://theadventureblog.blogspot.com/2010/03/solo-sailing-update-jessica-nears-horn.html

So the link above is about two 16 year old girls who are now circumnavigating the globe. How do you, at 16, leave home to brave the elements on a ship when you haven't even been alive two decades? What kind of person does this produce? I'd love to meet these girls...are they more mature? Quieter? Louder? The subject sparks my curiosity.

What kind of person do you become after a trip like that?

The Sky

The sky here is a strange color. It's not the bright blue that I'm used to. It's a milky kind of cornflower, like the ice has moved to the sky. The water is a deep royal that seems to steal the magic from the cloudless expanse above it. The ferries plough through, startling in their contrast, like the dangerous yellow of a hornet's ass. The tourist boats are needlefish: thin, flat, and translucent.

In the great green room
there was a telephone
And a red balloon
And a picture of--

The cow jumping over the moon

and there were three little bears, sitting on chairs

and two little kittens and a pair of mittens

and a little toy house and a young mouse

and a comb and a brush and bowl full of mush

and a quiet old lady who was whispering "hush"

Goodnight room

goodnight moon

goodnight cow jumping over the moon

goodnight light and the red balloon

goodnight bears goodnight chairs

goodnight kittens goodnight mittens

goodnight clocks and goodnight socks

goodnight little house and goodnight mouse

goodnight comb and goodnight brush

goodnight nobody goodnight mush

and goodnight to the old lady whispering "hush"

goodnight stars, goodnight air

goodnight noises everywhere.

Things to fall in love with today:

Bon Iver. How can you be so sad and so happy, and so...wonderful? I want to lean out of the passenger's side window of a certain car and watch the landscape go by. It's like looking out the rearview window at a place you'll never forget. It's like nostalgia and picnics in the park. It's the falsetto longing in a hipster beanie that I just might like to listen to tonight.

Pizza. It was: peppers, mushrooms, cheese, chorizo, salad, tuna (sure?), handmade dough, baking while talking with new friends, trying to eat it like an American and realizing everyone else is using a fork. (fail.) Plus, the giant cup of really strong instant coffee that made for a difficult first mile while running.

Long runs. Of all the mood enhancers that I've tried since being here, I think that running is probably the most effective. There is something fantastic about the immediacy of hitting the pavement. You can't be happy, you can't be sad, you can't be expectant, or mad when running for an hour and a half. After a while, you can only be running. It's rhythm, pain, landscape, trees, cars, people, sidelong glances, half hidden smiles, ducks, swans, panting, sweating, smelling, swinging hair, smiling at puppies, water, wind, air, cold, hot...simple.

The picture on my computer right now. That addictive smile that can get him in trouble and get him out of it. That smile that could probably get me to follow him anywhere. That smile that I get when he hasn't seen me in a while. I miss it.

Maybe, possibly, this city. We'll see. It's growing on me. Like most other things in my life, I have to learn to love it the hard way...