Tagged: americanabroad

19
Jun
2026

GLAD MIDSOMMAR!

It’s midsummer eve and a public holiday here in Sweden. Midsummer is celebrated across Northern Europe and the Baltic countries, but I think Sweden is the only one that celebrates the eve of it, per typical Swedish custom of celebrating holidays the day before. The actual solstice isn’t until Sunday. After weeks of pretty cold temperatures and lots of rain last week, today arrived HOT and sunny, nearly 30C, which is too hot for me, given that there isn’t much of a breeze either. I slept in, while Anders went early to a fish store in Landskrona where he got...

17
Jun
2026

CRUISING TO THE NETHERLANDS

We left Arromanches in the morning of June 6 (the 82nd anniversary of the D-Day landings) and headed north. Our plan was to swing over to Étretat on the coast. I had read about a place with lovely gardens on the cliffside above the town. However, due to the tiny country roads that led up the coast, it was nearly a 2.5 hour side trip that we couldn’t really afford as we needed to be in Bladel, The Netherlands latest by 9 pm. When we got to Étretat, it was sunny and beautiful, and while parking the car near the...

16
Jun
2026

GOLD BEACH, MULBERRY HARBORS, AND LESSONS IN HISTORY

I was a military brat, and as such, most of what I learned about WW2 in high school was from an American perspective. I knew the name of Omaha Beach, but very little else about the D-Day landings or the military operations of the war. I read a lot of books about the resistance, the holocaust, and the lives of ordinary people living through the war, and as an adult have educated myself much further with movies, books, documentaries, and other sources of historical information. I’ve been to Berlin when it was still behind the wall, and I’ve been to...

14
Jun
2026

ROADTRIPPING TO BRITTANY

Brittany and Normandy, or more specifically, Saint-Malo and Mont-Saint-Michel, have been on my travel wishlist for a very long time. I first heard and fell in love with wartime Saint-Malo in the book All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr. If you haven’t read it, you’re missing out, it’s amazing. Mont-Saint-Michel has been on my list even longer. Having had not so great experiences traveling in France when I was young, however, meant that the Normandy coast was always pushed aside in favor of other destinations. I also wasn’t super interested in visiting the D-Day beaches and all...

01
May
2026

DOUBLE RABBIT RABBIT RABBITS!

Two days in a row where I’ve had occasion to say “Rabbit rabbit rabbit” …that only happens once a year, if at all. Today is May 1st, a holiday here in Europe (it’s Labor Day) and yesterday was Valborgsmässoafton, or Walpurgis Eve in English, which isn’t a day off, but is cause for a traditional celebration here in Sweden regardless. That makes today a double holiday as it is also the feast day for Saint Walpurgia, who would probably be astonished and gratified to learn that her name is still a part of the calendar and that many parts of...

26
Apr
2026

A BIRD IN THE HAND

I don’t consider myself a birdwatcher, though I very much enjoy feeding the birds that come to our yard through the winter, and watching them. I’m always thrilled when we get one of the woodpeckers, and it’s exciting to see a chaffinch, a new bird that we hadn’t seen before. Normally we get blue tits, chiffchaffs, European robins, blackbirds, and tree sparrows. We get wood pigeons and mourning doves, and the aforementioned woodpeckers (Great Spotted). We get pheasants. And we get the big “blacks” including crows, jackdaws, ravens, rooks, and magpies. I scare the jackdaws and crows away when I...

14
Apr
2026

A LITTLE CATCH UP, A LITTLE CATCH DOWN

A near-whole month has zoomed by, with me out of place for 3 weeks of it. I left for the US on March 19, knowing that I most likely wouldn’t post anything here while I was gone, and I was right. We were BUSY the entire time. Sarah and I lugged out everything from the storage unit that is holding all the stuff from my mom’s that we deemed to valuable to just give away, including quite a bit of furniture, and about 30 boxes. We had help from Bryce and 2 of his friends to get everything out and...

18
Oct
2025

KRIMSKRAMS!

The little girl across the street, who must be 5-6 years old by now (they moved in when her mom was pregnant with her), is sitting behind a little white play table that her dad carried out for her, at the end of the walkway in front of their house. She has a little cloth on the table and various things displayed both on the table and on another cloth next to her on the street. She’s been out there for at least an hour, on a sunny, chilly, beautiful fall Saturday morning. She’s bundled up in a winter coat...

09
Aug
2025

THE GOOD THINGS IN LIFE

I’ve been so busy all this past week out and about, and right now, Saturday afternoon, I’m only busy with my own home-chore-based to-do list, and one of the items on it is write a blog post! I wanted to write about some of the things I did this week so I have them down for remembering and posterity, as my brain can’t be trusted to come up with details about things in the past once we get to the future. Not because I’m experiencing any sort of memory loss, just that in general, I find it’s better to write...

17
Jul
2025

IMPRESSIONS, EXHIBITIONS, AND EXPEDITIONS

I spent most of the day yesterday in Copenhagen with my friend Camilla. We met up at 9 am at the train station in Malmö and took the train over and then walked 2 blocks to the Glyptoteket. I have been there before, but it was ages ago, and all I remembered was admiring Rodin’s The Thinker and after realizing that a great deal of the museum is devoted to permanent galleries of Egyptian and Middle East, and Greek and Roman artifacts, lost interest. Not really my thing when it comes to museums. But Camilla was excited about 2 visiting...

July 2026
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