Good vibrations

It's been a long and enduring week the one I just spent with a colleague of mine in Goteborg. There have been highs and lows. A long list of items to walk through in a relatively short time. An excellent start that turned into a somehow disappointing end. So, last Thursday, when everything started looking like unrecoverable, unsolvable and difficult to carry on standing on our bare feet, I proposed to take a break, stop keeping knocking our foreheads on the desk, leave the office earlier than usual and treat ourslves with a quick visit to the exhibition I wanted to see. We rushed to the tramway and jumped on the first "trolley" passing by, to get off as soon as we were beside the main square at the top end of the city "Avenue", where the Museum building stands.

It's been really helpful. At the end of the tour (and my visit to the Hasselblad Center exhibition) we were so relaxed that, instead of punishing ourselves into the tiny hotel gym, we took a long walk down to the piers and through the old quarters behind them.

Passing behind the town Domkyrka (Cathedral) we stopped in front of the windows of the Wiktor Ahlstroms shop and made our way in, to sit for the celebration of this year's baptism of "semla".

Time for a semla

It's been freezing cold, last week, in Goteborg. I was not prepared to it. I was stranded there just a couple of days after a huge snowfall, wearing a coat that didn't prove so much useful this time. And that actually sounded strange to me, as I took it in Norway one year ago, in much worst weather conditions. I think it's 'cause I have had my mind somewhere else all the time.

I realise just now that jumping off the tram, while going back to my hotel room, I always crossed the alleys of the old town thinking deep and silently wondering about all the things that could happen in the following weeks and all those that I wished could have happened in the weeks before. I feel turmoil in my mind. I'm striving to have everything in place. Temptations to change are many and pulling strong.


On one evening, soon after the shops had closed, I found myself alone in the street, waiting for someone to call me and tell if he would have been able to reach me in a restaurant. I've become used to sit alone on a table and look around at the other people having dinner. Sometimes I even feel embarrassed. It happens most frequently when a group of people sitting at your side are enjoying their time so much that their energy waves reach you violently and you can't help but looking with some envy at them. You'd like to take part of their happiness or disappear from the corner were you swiftly snugged in. That's where all your uneasiness comes from.


On this long wait for a call, I came across the windows of a pastry shop. They had just rolled the "open" sign to "closed" and were putting aside the trays beside the glass. I suddenly forgot the worm eating my mind and recalled the times I was in Stockholm, in 2008 and the story they told me about these cakes called "Semla".

Putting aside my deeper thoughts, I said to myself it was the right time have one and knocked upon the door ... and again. But no one came to open. So I went back to the hotel and my mind dove back again into the real of confusion.


I'm sitting alone at the table in my kitchen, now. Wife and kids are sleeping hard. My thoughts are going back to get eaten by a worm. This would be the right time for a Semla.