June 11 (Monday)

I spent the weekend in Copenhagen after leaving Carola's in the south of Sweden, then flew up to Stockholm yesterday.

Now I'm glad to be back in Sweden where I understand the language again - Copenhagen was a good place for me to practice being the tourist who doesn't understand the language. Frustrating, but also good to get beyond that barrier.

This is my first full day in Stockholm - the sun is shining and I've been wandering around St. Erik's street. It's fun seeing signs that spell my name the right way. In Copenhagen I found a cafe called Erik's Cafe, which was unfortunately closed, but at least I got a picture of the sign.

Today I visited the Jewish Museum. They had an exhibition of Isaac Grünewald, who was a Swedish scenographer and illustrator active during the first half of the 20th century. I loved his set illustrations (plus there were a few of his paintings which were also good) - he spent a lot of time outside of Sweden, and trained in Paris, so he was quite influenced by Matisse and other artists. I watched a video there about Grünewald - it wasn't just about his artwork, but included footage of him dancing tango with his wife, as well as street scenes from Paris during the early part of the century. He wanted to teach other Swedes this dance form, and so that's where the footage had come from. You really got a feeling for what he had been like as a person from the video, which made seeing his artwork a much richer experience.

I'm looking forward to getting more time this evening and tomorrow to catch up with my friend Beverly here in Stockholm. She was the English teacher at the folk high school that I attended back in 84-85. Tomorrow afternoon we're planning on renting a canoe for a couple hours to do our own little tour around the royal palace on Lake Mälaren. So hope that the weather continues to be good.

Those are my quick, unplanned thoughts for today. I continue to be a very happy and grateful traveler.

June 16 (Saturday)

I keep thinking about the difference between my year spent studying in Sweden when I was 20 years old and this trip. Then I didn't know what I was going to do with my life, and I was homesick a lot during the school year. Getting to the point where I was actually fluent in Swedish was difficult - I had studied one year before I came here, but that just gave me the basics. And getting to know the other students and make friends was hard; Swedes are generally not as quick to open up to other people as Americans are. However, once you do become friends with someone, there's usually a great deal of depth and warmth to the relationship.

Since this was before the time of easy Internet access and email, I remember how difficult it was to feel connected with my friends and family back in Seattle. I wrote lots of letters and eagerly awaited the distribution of mail every morning, but the frustrating thing about letters was the long delay in sending and receiving them. And phone calling was an expensive and logistically difficult task to do, what with the time difference (9 hours) and trying to work out a pre-arranged time that my parents could call me (and attempt to keep all the housemates from using the phone then) or else getting as many coins together as I could and feeding the pay phone if I initiated the call.

Now I feel much more confident and at ease in my life. I'm thrilled to be speaking as much Swedish as I can, but if I don't remember a word or phrase I don't worry about using English instead. And as I said above, I'm a happy and grateful traveler. Grateful that I have the means and opportunity to travel for a couple months, grateful that so many people are opening up their homes to me and offering me a place to stay. Grateful to be able to return to places which are important in my life and also to go places I've never been before. And grateful for the little things, like easy Internet access and email, so I can keep in touch with friends and family back home while I'm traveling.

This has been a busy but satisfying week in Stockholm:

• Canoeing with Beverly on Lake Mälaren
• Having dinner with three guys whom I know from another mail list
• Spending the afternoon with Kristina (one of my roommates from the folk high school)
• Seeing Carl Milles' sculptures at his beautifully preserved estate on Lidingö Island
• Visiting the folk high school and running in to the woman who takes care of the boarding students and who even remembered me from 16 years ago
• Visiting Skogskyrkogården (Woodland Cemetary) for Stockholm which was designed and built during the early part of the 20th century.

We've also found some wonderful places to stop for coffee - the Swedes may not have the whole espresso/Starbucks culture that you find in Seattle, but they definitely love to stop at little coffee shops (konditori) that serve tea and coffee and fresh baked pastry items. After we went to the folk high school, we stopped for tea at one of these shops in Västerhaninge. It was in the shopping center, with lots of people coming and going, doing their errands. A man was playing classical guitar (and some more modern, popular music) which sounded lovely, so we listened to this free concert and sat and enjoyed the sunshine.

Tomorrow we'll be flying to Helsinki to begin our Finnish part of the trip. So one last full day in Stockholm today.