Välkommen till Europa

Pony Pin Ups by Julian Wolkenstein
Part of: Like a Horse, Fotografiska exhibit
Für Jacqueline

Greetings from Copenhagen. Just arrived after spending the weekend in Sweden. Prior to the flight to Stockholm out of JFK, I made a stop in Galloway, where I grew up before 7th grade, to see my dad and grab some desserts out of Korchan's kitchen.

Amazing éclair, but it's no banana cream pie.

Formatting may get sloppy now that I'm writing these posts on an iPad. Can't even figure out how to add photo captions.

Here's Sweden's story: shapes, (lack of) stop signs, ABBA, blondes, and a double long cheeseburger.

The ACTUAL big story in Sweden was that we were there for a holiday weekend (National Day of Sweden) which meant they were running the country's big marathon on Saturday and that hostels were packed. By one hostel manager's admission, we got very lucky finding two beds Friday night, right after a cancellation. Saturday night, we had no such luck and basically slept in a Max (Swedish fast food), snacking all night. Fortunately, our train to Denmark was first thing in the morning.

My first meal was räraka, which means hash brown. I took a guess reading the Swedish menu and thought it would be fish-related. Most expensive hash brown I've ever had, but that's because it was kinda fish related. It was covered in roe! However, it was also covered in sour cream, so naturally I thought the orange whitefish roe was applesauce, as when you eat latkes. Wasn't til I nearly finished the meal that I realized the applesauce was actually roe. Then I wasn't so demoralized over the 220 SEK hash brown.

Also noteworthy was the Fotografiska museum of contemporary photography. It hosted what may be my favorite art exhibit of all time, and honestly I don't think this is recently bias nor general excitement over Europe. I can't remember ever getting so giddy over art as I did in "Like a Horse".

Went to the Nobel Museum as well. Didn't realize til now that I didn't get any pictures inside. Whoops. Was given a good tour by a Swede with excellent English. Found some Swedish meatballs later on. Really good! Took so long to find though that we began to wonder if Swedish meatballs were actually a thing, or just an American conception of Swedes.

Don't eat these. They are salty like nothing you've had before. We sampled a lot of Nordic candies, including these. They love salt.

City hall

Gamla Stan

Horse collage

Some Swedish YouTube celebrity gala, wish I knew whom we were looking at.

Warning: my travel buddy Phil has blog writing permissions now, so beware of his posts. Our writing styles are easily differentiable. Dunno how often he will actually post. He also has his own blog, mostly for science ruminations.

Bookending the post with horses. Take a good look. We did.