This year my sister AC turned 40. Like always we planned something special. And this is the story…
Due to scheduling conflicts we had to do it last weekend in November. And since my other sister Amy had to be present it had to be in Scotland. And since AC loves Edinburgh so much we decided that’s where we were going to go, much like we did when Amy turned 40 two years ago. But we couldn’t let AC know what was going on at all so we served up plenty of curveballs to keep her guessing. Then Ryan Air did what they do best – cause problems. Out of the blue the cancelled the flights to Edinburgh! Fortunately we got our money back but it still meant we had to look at options, and KLM it was. Unfortunately with KLM it means stopping by Amsterdam! And we’ve kept her in the dark all the time and even got her thinking she was going to Budapest. And we all lied that we were too busy to go and she was going all by herself. I actually didn’t have to lie – because we did have a mandatory kick off on the friday, and the kindergarten was closed and my wife had to attend a funeral and there was a sci-fi con that I was going to miss!
But on Wednesday the 27th my father Lars, brother Jocke, sister’s boyfriend Matte and my sister’s son Alex got into the car and drove not to Skavsta, where Ryan Air flies from, but to Arlanda. And to terminal 2 (which is for non Star Alliance flights). And then they boarded a flight to Amsterdam and she had no clue what was going on. Unfortunately they couldn’t keep it secret for long once they got to Amsterdam since she had to state her final destination to pass a checkpoint, so the cat was dragged out of the bag there. Meanwhile I was in Sweden working since I didn’t have enough paid vacation days to go. And it also kept her from thinking I wasn’t actually going. But on friday I had already a vacation day granted and my wife handled everything herself so I could actually go! Made the same trip as they did and when I arrived I just came into the pub with a bang and joined the fun!!
Most of the weekend was spent at pubs. Or walking around wondering where to eat – trying to find a place that can take 9 people spontaneously that vegetarians and non-vegetarians can eat at during Christmas shopping-days wasn’t easy! On Friday evening we found some place on George Street/Charlotte Square but that turned out to be really disappointing. Atleast for me – never had such a dull burger before. Then bed at 1 am for me. Up the morning after to enjoy a full english breakfast at a bakery on Rose Street. Then some shopping and a quick visit to a pub before we had to say good bye to my sister Amy and her daughters that had to go back home to Aberdeenshire. Then some more shopping before we ended up at KFC. Because we don’t have KFC in Sweden so we had to try it!
Then one of the highlights and biggest surprises – “Limbo“! Matte had googled “what to do in Edinburgh” for that weekend and that was one of the things that popped up. So we dished out some money to go see it. It was a bit of a gamble. And man did it pay off! It was a great combination of circus acts, dancing, music, comedy and one or two magic tricks. But the most surpring thing was the energy and chemistry of the performers! It was just awesome! If you’re anywhere close to Edinburgh you have to go see it! And the bendy guy, Jonathan Nosan, is really active on Twitter so he’s a “+Follow” for sure!
After that we tried another pub but realised we’d be better off buying two 6 packs and going back to the hotel and talk about stuff. Then off to bed and up – at 3:30 am! The flight left at 5:50 am but we had luggage that needed to be checked in “an hour before the flight” so that’s the way it had to be done. Then stopping in Amsterdam and waiting for the flight home. As we boarded that flight I saw that Maria Montazami was on the same flight which was kinda fun, I like her. Also on the flight was the medical rescue team that flew from Sweden to the Philippines to help with what they could. And they had some stories to tell. I’m really glad we have people like that! When we got home it was ofcourse awesome to see my wife and son waiting for me in the arrival hall, it was one of those Hallmark moments!!
I hate flying. Well not the actual flying part, but all the stuff that goes with it. Everytime I go flying I’m reminded how we as a civilization needs to come up with a transport-system! The saying “time is money” would indicate that there is a helluvalot of money to be made from such a patent, right?
Ryan Air used to fly to Edinburgh directly but now in time for Christmas they’ve cancelled that line so we had to go with KLM instead with a stop in Amsterdam. When flying home we started from our hotell at 4 am on sunday morning. I arrived home at 1:45pm. That’s almost 10 hours. Out of that only 4 hours were spent in the air!! First it was the taxi to the airport, got there early because we needed to check in 2 bags as luggage, then security checkpoint then wait…. and wait. And off to Amsterdam and after we landed it was atleast 10 minutes to the actual terminal, then another checkpoint. Then wait. And more wait. And then the next flight and we got home. And waited for the luggage. And then going home from the airport is another 30 minutes (which for Arlanda is pretty decent since we live on the “right side of town”, for the others it’s atleast a full hour.
That is such a waste of time! Not that I’m too important for this, not at all. It’s just .. a waste of time. 10 years ago when I was travelling to our embassies around the world I didn’t mind as much, probably because I got paid even when sitting at a pub on the airport. But now that it’s my spare time, I kinda mind. In this modern age where hours are important and your life is so stressfull, having a transporter to instantly beam you over to where you’re going instantly might be worth it. “What about all those transport accidents in Star Trek” you ask? Well what about all those air crashes in real life!? But considering how many gazillion people that work in logistics would get laid off I guess that’d be bad for employment figures, not to mention the airlines 🙂
I’ve finally upgraded my image gallery and imported it into WordPress with a cool addon. Took me about 3 days of work to get it sorted and adding comments and stuff but it’s been fun going down that memory lane again.
Here are some of my favorite galleries:
As usual the password what the company I work at is know as in Sweden.
When I got a job at this here place one of the bonuses was that we could travel at a discounted price. Unfortunately we only do charter so that travel is pretty much bound to those really touristy sunny parts of the world. And my wife have had an item on her bucket list to “dive in the turquoise water of Greece”. So after looking through all our hotels we decided to go to Platanias on Crete and stay at Minoa Palace. We also agreed that it was best for everyone if Sam stayed in Sweden for alot of reasons – and some of them selfish I’ll admit. And since neither of us are fan of temperatures over 35 degrees we also agreed to go late May / early June.
So after sorting it out with our family who would take care of him when and where we did our best to explain to him that we’d be away for a few days but gave all the assurances we’d be back and said goodbye to him at the dropoff zone at Arlanda airport at about 6 am on thursday (May 30th) morning, checked in and then enjoyed a very early beer and shrimp sandwhich since we hadn’t ordered food on the plane.
The flight was ok but a bit boring for me, I usually sleep on airplanes but this time I couldn’t. Then we arrived at the hotel and man was it nice!! It really was top notch! But when we got to our room we were really disappointed at the lack of sea view, that we had paid for. We were so disappointed that I actually went to complain at the front desk – and they looked at their bookings and simply snapped their fingers and we got a new room with awesome sea view! Then my wife had to go dip her feet in the ocean and then we kicked back to enjoy a cold nice beer at the beach bar. We spent the next 7 days walking the same road in Platanias (there is just one road unless you want to go along the beach which I don’t recommend) trying out all kinds of different restaurants! The people were very nice and polite, especially the people at the resaurants! There weren’t that many people who tried to force you into their restaurants which was a nice change!.
To go through some of the restaurants to recommend:
We also found a great restaurant when we took a trip with the Fun Trains out to Therisso Gorge but I have no idea what it was called but they served up a great and simple dish of lamb! We really wish we had done more of those Fun Train trips because that was fun.
We also took a city tour of Chania as well but it wasn’t much to write home about, except for the harbor where there were a gazillion restaurants lined up and yes, people trying to force you into their restaurant 🙁 But we already had an evening of Meze planned, but after 4 hours and 8 small dishes we were still kinda hungrey so when we got back to the hotel we took the liberty of taking some desserts from the dinner buffé at the hotel.
Other than we spent the week in the sun by the pool and a quick little visit to the gym to work off that saganaki. But by wednesday we were actually missing our Sam and both felt that we could really go home today. But that wasn’t up to us. But on Thursday (June 6th) we boarded the flight home and when we finally got home I was rushing to the car to see our son again who was really happy to see us again. But so tired after a week of playtime with the family that he feel asleep in the car on the way home!!
Basically we had a blast! There were some things we wish we had done differently but that’s the way it is. Next time we will take Sam with us and go to a real charter resort.
Feel free to check out the pictures here. And you should know the password by now, right?
I have finally had the time to index and upload all the pictures from our week in Platanias in Crete – so enjoy! You’ll have to do without my colorful commentary but I think you’ll live.
Wow, that felt good – getting away from it all for a week!!
So on Thursday 30th Helena’s mother dropped us off at Arlanda and drove away with our son. We knew he would be in a good hands and promptly checked in and bought our first pint – at 6 am! Got on the plane, I introduced myself to the cabin crew and got a really friendly welcome and off we went. We landed, got to the hotel and went to our room only to find that the seaview we were paying for was very, very limited. So limited that I actually went to complain and was expecting to have to argue what classifies as a “sea view” – but nope, the fixed a new room for us by Sunday so we were happy with that.
We walked around the town of Platanias, tried every restaurant we could find and we basically lamed around for 7 days trying not to do anything but work on our tan and we were pretty successful. With the first part of that – not so much with the latter!
I’ll write up a full report later when I have time but for now this’ll do.
But man it’s good to be back!!
Oh man I’ve got that “Chuggington”-song playing in my head now! Our son Sam just loves watching trains on YouTube so it’s Thomas The Tank Engine and Chuggington all the time!!
But life is proceeding pretty well. It’s ok at work, I’m having daily battles with Sharepoint 2013 trying to get it to work with an upgrade from our Sharepoint 2010 which isn’t as simple as going from 2007->2010 mostly because of the claims thing. At home I’m having weekly battles with our budget, trying not to spend much for anything ’cause we’re off on vacation in about a month. Finally! And my woman has just recovered from being i’ll for about 2 weeks. For her the worst part is going back to work only to see that noone has done nothing and her mailbox is swamped with stuff and she already had a backlog … she’s what you could call a single point of failure, and if it was a small company there wouldn’t be much fuzz, but this is one of the biggest phone operators in Sweden so they really should know better.
Also planning to build a deck on the front of our house. I built a huge one 3 years ago on the back but my woman wants one in the front too so that’s what I’ve got to do. So I’m keeping myself busy all the time 🙂
Yeah I know I’ve been very quiet here. And that’s actually a good thing because I’ve kept myself busy! Since I’m new here at Thomas Cook I don’t have the full pot of vacation days so I could only take 3 weeks vacation. And I’ve been busy non-stop!
We went to Söderköping for our annual ice-cream binge. Like three years ago we stayed the night so we could enjoy it one more time. But unlike three years ago when we stayed at a local hotel this time we decided to rough it a bit and rented a small cabin at a local campsite. And it was indeed a small cabin, no loo, no kitchen and bunk beds. So after rearranging that so we basically slept on the floor we went for our first taste of ice cream only to be met with a queue we didn’t want to be in. So we walked around town, found a little cafe that sucked big time and then we made our way back and after two hours the queue was still way too long. But the only option was to give up for today and that wasn’t on so I got my ass in the queue and after about an hour we got a table and it was good! Sam enjoyed it too, last time we was there he was like 6 months old so that wasn’t as fun for him as this time around. Then we went back to the campsite and put him to bed and we spent the rest of the evening in bed watching a few episodes of “White Collar” on the laptop. Then we finally fell asleep and on the morning after it was cleaning up, going for a second round of ice cream (this time without the queue) and then going back home. All in all a great little trip.
Then we teamed up with Helenas friend, her husband and their 2 year old daughter for a 24 hour cruise. As I’ve stated before about these cruises it’s mostly about getting drunk or laid than to actually go someplace but this time it was actually a very kids-friendly cruise. They had converted their entire conference deck to rooms with different activities for the kids. One had a ball-pit, the other videogames etc. and Sam really enjoyed that ball-pit! The two departure times we had to chose from was either 7 am or 7 pm . If we’d gone 7 pm we’d barely be able to get onboard and get comfortable before Sam had to go to bed and that meant one of us had to stay in the cabin for the rest of the evening. So we chose 7 am and not sure that was a good choice cause we had to go up at 4:30 am and leave at 5:15 so Sam was really cranky all through the breakfast buffet but after going back to the cabin and sleep for two hours he was ready to deal with it. It was a lot of eating, some tax-free shopping and some beer. Also got to see the F1 qualifying at a bar on the boat! Overall he totally enjoyed that trip and so did we, probably gonna do it again (next year will probably be for free thanks to American Express rewards).
And fortunately thanks to my sister me and H got atleast one day for each other when she took Sam to Skansen (a zoo in Stockholm). Unfortunately he didn’t care much for the animals there but he got to “drive” the cars on rails so he was pretty happy!
Other than that we mostly spent the the vacation working on the garden and home improvements or having guests over and a day welcoming my sister with her family who flew in from Scotland last Tuesday. So yeah, it’s been busy and I haven’t take the time to update this here place but here I am 🙂
Ullared is a very very small town in south of sweden known for one thing – “Gekas”, a huge outlet with very cheap prices on alot of stuff. I never heard about it until my girlfriend asked if I wanted to tag along when her mother, brother & his wife were going. “I guess…”. I didn’t know why considering we live just next door to an outlet that makes that place look like an anthill. But off we we went! At the very least I’d get a good road trip!!
So on saturday morning at 2 am (!!) we got into a rented car and drove 5 hours there to find a queue of around 100m. At 7 am!! And so the opened, we did our shopping and it wasn’t that good prices, except on jeans (but I’m waiting to find out what quality you get for that amount!). We checked out at a bit after 10 after paying $300 for stuff we never needed (and the others paid even more) and had a quick burger at BK and then I saw the queue that was well over 500-600 meters! It was huge!! And for what?? It’d take hours for the people in the back to queue there, and it wasn’t that cheap!?!? And then we drove home.
And I still don’t know why? I like road trips but if I’m gonna spend 16 hours in a car (3 hours to her brothers place and 5 hour down, and then the return trip) it’d better be worth it! And this wasn’t. But it was a good laugh and if it’s one of those things you have to do as a swede, I can now check that box.
We had a few IT issues with our Brussels office a few weeks ago which proved just how much we’ve neglected that office so we decided to go down here and check it out. I’m here with a collegue from our Malmö office. As you may remember I was here about 5 years ago too (yeah, it’s neem THAT long!!) but it hasn’t changed much. The Vinge office is in the exact same building as the embassy so I’m familiar with the area and where to eat 🙂
What was interesting was the little 7-eleven like store in the “Sweden”-building (it’s called that because of all swedish business having their offices there + the embassy) and they had made it “their thing” and offer a whole shelf of swedish products, like “Dill-chips”, skumbilar, Stockholm-beer and stuff. Pretty funny stuff to see in Belgium.
Gonna be doing alot of cleaning in the server room and last minute “anything IT related I can help you with?”-questions to the staff before we go home at around 17.
I miss travelling, staying in hotels and eating at restaurants all the time. But then I also miss my girlfriend.
And now I’m back to my kick ass life here in sweden after a few days with rain in Barcelona. After some shopping we got on the plane, bored for 3 hours, then had the worst landing ever, and for the first time in my life I had a girlfriend that was waiting for me at the arrivals-zone in Arlanda!… or I would have had she managed to sort the parking out, but it’s the thought that counts! Then a small BBQ dinner with her parents and then just hanging out, talking and just holding eachother and how wonderful it felt. I love my life right now! And today I woke up next to the most beautiful woman in the world .. and I left her there cause I had to go home and see the recording of the F1 race from sunday! It sounds terrible, I know, but come on, there is no way in hell I’d been able to go all day today without hearing the result somehow!? And now I’m here at work updating my image gallery and saying “good times” 🙂
Everything was great down here. Yesterday evening it got a bit cold and one of my female collegues forgot her jacket so I, being the perfect gentleman, borrowed her my leatherjacket. Then after the dinner she went off on her nightly escapades (and me on mine) and this morning I got my jacket back … minus the credit card and ID card I had in my pocket. We’re assuming someone stole it when she handed it in at one of the nightclubs. Anyway, card is blocked and I had to file a report with the police down here because of the ID card and now we’re back on track, going to lunch now then go around town and a posh dinner tonight and wild night after and tomorrow back to Stockholm. Everything is great, except for that little dent and the fact that I miss my girlfriend. (I love saying that :))
Not even the non-stop rain is getting me down 🙂
Just a small update to say hi from Barcelona 🙂
Ok, I’m back to sweden and one of the first things I’m doing is trying to transfer this site to a new server. Here’s hoping that goes as well as I planned.
We had a blast in London! Walked around half the town, went out to Biggin Hill for the airshow, did even more walking and enjoyed some pub food and some texas food and alot of beer. All in all a kick ass weekend! Will write a day-by-day entry later when I have more time.
Speaking of song lyrics I just heard one that totally describes my relationship to that girl – Depeche Modes ‘Enjoy the silence’. All I ever wanted all I ever needed is here in my arms. Words are very unecessary, they can only do harm. As long as we were just lying in her soffa holding each other it was heaven and I wanted to stop time. Then we started talking and it screwed it all up. Anyway I’m off to london now, I’m in the car to the airport and writing this on my blackberry. Hi-tech for the win! Will update when I get back. And by then I’m 32! Have fun.
The expansion to Warcraft was released today. Good bye.
(but before I go through the portal, here are the pictures from Italy)
Oh that was one of the best weekends of my life ! ! ! The background story : When I’ve played Warcraft in our old guild, “Evil Inc”, we had alot of italians. One of them was called “Dago” (real name is Mario). So now that our guild is kind of splitting up me and my buddy Mats decided that we have to pay him a visit seeing as we have been playing and talking to eachother over the internet for a year now. So on friday we started our journey to Milan…
Friday : After an uneventful drive to Skavsta we checked in. Knowing Ryan Air hates luggage we decided to only have one carry on with us each and they warned us about new regulations and bla bla, “whatever, I’ve done this a few times”… but oh no, now there are really strict regulations regarding how volume of liquids per container and all that stuff so they confiscated my shampoo, hairspray and stuff. And after that I walked 10 meters to the tax free and bought new stuff. Doh!
Flying down there was uneventful, found the bus into Milan and taxi home to Mario at around 9 pm. Then we decided to go out for a real italian pizza, a beer and just talk. Naturually it was one of the best pizzas ever and we had no problem talking about everything. Then we got home to his place at midnight. Great time to go to bed… NOT! Mario had called some of his students from the snobby school he works at and set us up at Milan’s hippest club where they had VIP passes. I don’t do the club scene that much but that was pretty sweet and they were great, but unfortunately you can’t talk that much. Came back at 4-4.30 something and tried getting some sleep but failed _totally_!
Saturday : After not sleeping at all it was time to get up at 11 for breakfast (and got served coffee in bed!). Then we went out to the shopping part of Milan where we found a huge, sweet cathedral and Mats went crazy with my camera ’cause he loves these things. And my own church – the Ferrari store! After some shopping it was time for lunch – best lunch ever! And after that we went out to his home town of Piacenza where we checked into the Holiday Inn and got an hour of sleep before we went to the next party! We met up with some 20 other warcraft players and some other randoms in a nice little restaurant outside of Piacenza and we sat down for a very long 4 dishes (and 4 hour!) long meal. It was so fun meeting all these people I’ve played with and the bizarroness of the situation, 2 clueless swedes with 20 crazy italians, half of which could barely speak english, it was just great fun. And the food was absolutely awesome! We got home at around 2.30 and this time I had no problem falling asleep.
Sunday: We got up at around 11 and got ready for another long day. We were all very very very tired so we stoped by a nice little street cafe for coffee and walked around the town for a bit, checked out the local cathedral and then we met up with some of the people from the night before for a little lunch. It was suppose to be little cause they said it was a “slice of pizza”. Yeah, it was a slice of a pizza – a 2 meter pizza!! And the crust was like an 3 cm. thick and 1/2 cm thick layer of mozarella all wrapped up in ham. Massive but oh what a feeling. Somehow everything tastes better in Italy 🙂
After that we went out to a little midevil tourist town and walked around in there for a while looking at swords and stuff we’d never get through customs, but it was nice anyway.
Then we went back to Milan to get the bus back to the airport. After the checkin and security screening and again being robbed of my shampoo and now even hairspray we were ready to get going home. But oh no, due to fog the plane had been redirected to it’s alternate airport so we had to take busses over there. That shouldn’t be a problem, right? but it took around 3 hours and we lifted off at 23:59:30 as opposed to 20:35:00! The reason I know it was 30 seconds before midnight is because the captain kept yelling that the aiport shuts down at midnight since it was close to a residential area and we had to leave NOW! And we made it with 30 seconds! Landed at 3 and got home and crawled into bed at 4 am, got up at 10 and went back to work!
Oh man what a weekend that was! It totally owned everything! The food, the company, the atmosphere, everything was just awesome!!!
(pictures coming soon)
After almost two years I’m going back to Italy today! Only for the weekend, coming home on sunday night. It’s a perfect example of just how social playing computer games can be – I’ve gotten to know a bunch of italians that I’ve played WoW with for about a year and now that our guild is splitting up and the WoW expansion coming on tuesday we thought “it’s now or never”. So now it is! So me and Mats are just about to leave now for a weekend that will be awesome!
And today I did something I’ve never done before – I passed the annual “let’s see if your car is road-worthy”. They have pretty high standards, MTV actually had a problem finding a car for “pimp my ride” since all cars were in such good condition due to this. And I’ve always failed on the first one, but that’s good cause you get a list of things that’ wrong and you go to the shop and say “fix it!”. But today it passed with flying colours!!
I like to think I have a pretty strong psyche. And I have a pretty good ability to take a step back and analyze things. Which is why it’s so funny knowing and pinpointing the small little things that are making me somewhat depressed right now. Unfortunately it doesn’t really solve any of the current problems and there isn’t really anything I can do about them except wait them out and hope it blows over. Which it always does. But it’s still a pretty funny thing to do and it’s a good sign that I’m not _that_ depressed. And that possible girlfriend I had going isn’t returning my calls. Guess I shouldn’t have said anything…
But one small bit of good news is that I’ve finally added a page with a day-by-day description of me and my sister’s latest trip to Scotland. So, it’s not all bad.
Last weekend I came down with the cold from hell. And it’s finally starting to go away. It was so bad I had to take prescription painkillers to make it down to Gothenburg since I was suppose to do some work down there, but when that was done I called in sick for the rest of the week. And now I’m back in Gothenburg again. Never been a big fan of this town but after beeing here a few days I guess it’s ok. The beer tastes just as good anyway. But it’s too grey for my liking!