I made it

... to London, but without my big suitcase that I had paid extra for.  I was supposed to go with a virtually empty suitcase and fill it up here in London and bring stuff back to store for elder daughter since she is leaving London for a while. When I tried to check in the bag the young RyanAir girl said "No, sorry, you have not paid for that so that will be 1050 Swedish Kr more." That was about double of what my ticket had cost. It turned out that since I had had to change my ticket to another date the price I had originally paid which included a bag was no longer valid with a bag. It was just the date that had changed and the bag cost had been lost. I know this sounds petty but they (RyanAir) seem to get you for everything. I even read somewhere that a passenger was refused a glass of water to take his medication. He was supposed to buy their bottled water! As you probably can tell I am not very fond of RyanAir. I ended up taking my big case back to the car in long-term parking and just travelling with a shopping bag.  Very classy!!

Anyway, enough about me.  Gina's show went very well and she sold some pieces, and hopefully she will sell more in weeks to come, since it is on for a month.

Yesterday we went to Oxford Street for a spot of shopping, and then to The British Museum to meet a friend of Gina's and her mum. After that we were all invited to another friend's for dinner and then it was off to a club in Brixton to listen to a Senegalese group. As always in London the weather is beautiful and today is even very warm.

Tomorrow it is up early and off to Stansted and back to Sweden. It has been fun but very hectic and soo muuuch walking!!!

Not the Olympics

Tomorrow I am off to London again, I think. I say I think because I am at the library right now and can't print my boarding pass and check in on-line, so who knows what will happen when I get to the airport tomorrow morning. It just comes up with an error all the time. Oh, for the good old days when people were employed to do these sort of things for you.

The other little worry is where do I sleep? I was supposed to stay with elder daughter but after having seen her photos on Fb I think my bed is occupied.

Anyway the purpose of this London trip is to go to the opening night of elder daughter's show at the cuebgallery, and the rest of the weekend has been planned around oyster eating and swing dancing and seeing friends. The swing-dancing thing got me a bit worried, so I asked my daughter, who assured me that you are allowed to be a wallflower and observer. Let's see how we go. I might feel inspired. Apparently it can get quite physical. One time our daughter's dance partner had to be taken to hospital!

All decked out!

When we returned from Iceland, the new front veranda was finished, and we just love it. To paraphrase Mark Twain: 'A veranda with a house attached'. Oh, for an Icelandic Sky, though!

It is the rainiest summer since the summer we bought this cottage. That was also the year when hubby's Swedish vocabulary was extended. He had not realized that the address to our new little place was Kärra and that in Swedish it literally means swamp. And a swamp was what we had that year, with the back half of the property completely awash thanks to the rain and overflow from the far-from-bubbling brook at the back. Hubby's Swedish is actually quite good, but sometimes we come across these little difficulties!

For some strange reason this reminds me of another incident. It must be the photos I was looking at from today's outing. There was this beautiful stone wall, of which we have so many in the Swedish countryside.

Well, anyhow, when we lived in France hubby had a workmate who over the years had collected rocks on his mountain walks. He was intending to build a stone wall, but he was not in a hurry, far from it; he was a scientist for goodness sake!  He was actually enjoying the collecting and planning more than eventually building it. This had been going for years.  But he had a neighbour!  It was an Italian neighbour and we have noticed that very often Italians seem to like building things in cement or at least that was the case with this man.  He was a stonemason by trade and had made his own Olympic-size swimming pool and other constructions.

One day when hubby's mate went away for a long week end, he came back and his "stone wall" i.e. where he had placed the stones carefully, one by one,  every time he came home with a new one, was covered in cement. Voila, the wall was done! By a happy and friendly neighbour who was thinking he was doing a good deed!  Probably because he couldn't stand this excruciating slow way of building a stone wall when it really was so simple! He probably wanted to give the poor chap a hand, since he had the know-how of construction.

Oops, I did it again

Every summer I go a little crazy when the local library in Henån sells some of their books in a type of book fair. It is usually at the beginning of July, and this time I had decided NOT to buy ANYTHING. We can't house any more books in the cottage!

But then they had a Lonely Planet about Brazil (to where younger daughter is about to move), and another one about New Zealand (which we intend to visit), and another one about Old Orust and secrets and stories that I think we need to have. Then there were a couple of good detective stories ........ so here I am with two big bags of books again!

I am writing this at the library so I can't put in photos today, sorry.

Any, any, any old iron!

One striking thing (at least to some people) about Reykjavik is the dominant number of buildings clad in corrugated metal.   Hubby babbled on about this during the whole visit, despite a ban on the topic after the first day.  And even when he obeyed the ban, I knew he was still thinking about the reasons why, when he mumbled the odd delayed epiphany like 'very few trees', 'not much clay in volcanic soil', 'surplus material from Quonset huts?'...

In Australia, corrugated iron is a common roofing material, especially in the outback where tiles would be considerably more expensive to transport in, but for walls it is generally confined to sheds and outhouses which rarely see a coat of paint.  In Iceland though, corrugated metal appears to be the material of choice, from simple bungalows and shops, through stately and ornate embassies, to imposing churches, with nary a hint of rust.

Our opinions of the attractiveness of corrugated metal clearly differed, but we did agree that the Harpa, the spanking new concert hall in Reykjavik, is stunning, especially inside.

Blue Lagoon

I think everyone  who goes to Iceland visits the Blue Lagoon and of course we planned to do the same. But fate wanted it differently. Actually it wasn't even fate, it was my stupidity.  I had been in charge of booking hotels etc., and we had planned to go to the Blue Lagoon on our last day and spend a nice afternoon/evening there. We had an early flight the next day so I booked somewhere near the airport and the Lagoon. When we arrived after a pretty full day it turned out that I had booked for the previous day and they were full up  and could not put us up. So we had to spend a couple of wasted hours trying to find something but to no avail, everything was booked. Finally we came to one place where the guy was so nice and made at least 7 calls to other guesthouses and he found one that was not open yet but the owners agreed to come from Reykjavik and open up for us. So here is the view we had about eleven o'clock at night when we were  having our left-over food stuff instead of bathing in the lagoon.

And this is the next morning around six when we left for the airport. No wonder I couldn't sleep the whole time we were in Iceland. The day after we got back we both decided to have a little nap around two in the afternoon and we woke up at eight o'clock at night so I guess we were a little sleep deprived.

I know, I promised to get back about the puffins. They are just so cute and they are Iceland's national emblem. However, less pleasant perhaps is that they are also eaten (not by us). They can be served fried or boiled or smoked and is apparently a great favorite with Icelandic gourmets.