Stockholm

On Easter Monday we flew to Stockholm for a five-day stay there. I’d only been to Gothenburg in Sweden (with the St. Olaf Orchestra fifty years ago) so I was glad we could see this great city. Our hotel was just one block off the shopping street where the terrible truck attack had happened on 7 April, and on Easter Monday there had been a special memorial in the cathedral. So once again there were flowers everywhere along the way. It was powerful to see the continued outpouring of real strength and unity by the Swedish people. Very impressive.

We looked around our neighborhood, found some good fika in an espresso place, and checked out some possibilities for dinner later in the week. Fika is the lovely Swedish practice of coffee and pastries any time of the day!  In the evening we found some Swedish food very near our hotel and had a simple dinner.

On Tuesday we headed out to see things. We had fabric stores to find and good recommendations of things to see from our friends Ann and Peter Cohan and John and Lynn Williams who have all spent a lot of time in Stockholm. We started out to go to the City Hall and never got there. (We had two more attempts as well! Another trip.) We went to the Palace and did a tour of that and then stopped for fika. It was good that we stopped, as its was starting to snow in earnest. We enjoyed our fika at a good café call Grillsta Huset in Gamla Stan. It was very good. We spend the rest of the afternoon exploring the Gamla Stan neighborhood, which is Stockholm’s old town.

 We finished the day at a terrific restaurant called Knut - amazing cooking with an emphasis on food from the north of Sweden. Larry’s starter was divine nettle soup!

Wednesday we completed our palace tours with a walk through treasury. Then we went to the Changing of the Guard at the Palace. It was as good as Buckingham Palace with a little more initimate setting! The band a was very good and had a little concert in the middle that included an arrangement of Justin Timberlake’s Can’t Stop the Feeling which had the audience (and the band) swinging and swaying!

We went for fika again at Grillska Huset, and the walked again through Gamla Stan and found a couple beautiful things to buy. We then headed off to the Södermalm neighborhood to a fabric store and a coffee shop. The fabric store was amazing and huge with lots of clerks and customers.

The coffee shop, called Drop, was very good indeed.

We checked out some things for dinner and ended up back in Gamla Stan at a long-standing café called Marten Trozit and once again had an excellent meal.

Thursday was a real treat. John and Lynn Williams had connected us with their friends Anders Bodén and Ingrid Backmark. They joined us for the whole day. We went to Skansen, the open air museum (the first of it’s kind in the world) and enjoyed it very much.

Sami Storage House at Skansen

A very clever Swedish Brown Bear

Ingrid and Anders confer over coffee.

After a nice fika there, we went to the Vasa Museum, which was amazing. Nothing like an exciting story of a failure from the 16th century to make for an extremely interesting time!

The Vasa

  When we left the Vasa, we had time (in the cold and rain) to indulge in the Swedish street tradition of Korv - hot dogs! Very tasty. The wind and rain were really picking up now, so Anders and Ingrid took us back to their home. Here we all are waiting for the tram:

They have recently - two months ago - moved out of a house where they lived for 32 years and into a condominium. It was very nice, and they fed us with a traditional Swedish meal. That also included snaps (schnapps) and lot of skoals! It was just a wonderful day, and their hospitality to strangers was amazing and beautiful We so enjoyed their company.

On Friday we did a little more shopping (chocolate, fabric, and Gudrun Sjöden). At 2 p.m. we went on a four hour food tour that Michlle had arranged ahead of time. It was really good. We went to all kinds of local purveyors and enjoyed significant tastes of what they serve. Our guide Gunnila was exceptional. If you are in Stockholm we really recommend this: www.foodtoursstockholm.se/en/

London

            O, To be in England                
            Now that April 's there,   
            And whoever wakes in England   
            Sees, some morning, unaware,   
            That the lowest boughs and the brushwood sheaf            
            Round the elm-tree bole are in tiny leaf,   
            While the chaffinch sings on the orchard bough   
            In England—now!

The opening of Robert Browning’s Home Thoughts from Abroad was our experience last week in London. It was rather cold and damp, but spring was definitely locked in wherever we turned. Browning was having a pretty good time living in Italy when he penned these poignant words, but his nostalgia for the homeland is truly understandable!
                               
Larry and I are traveling with my cousins Sharon and Michelle Stoffel on a rather whirlwind journey to London, Stockholm, Luleå, Helsinki, St. Petersburg, Oslo, Vangsnes, Ålesund, Bergen, Manchester and back to London. Phew! 9 plane rides, three car rentals, two train trips and a boat - a lot more moving around than we usually do when we travel. But we’re doing a lot of family places. Sharon and I are cousins by virtue of our fathers being brothers. Her maternal grandparents came from the area around Luleå n Sweden, and mine came from Vik i Sogn and Ålesund (my grandmother) and Bualandet (my grandfather) in Norway. Sharon and I are almost exactly one year apart in age and the same grade in school - even went to the same Junior High in Seattle - Marcus Whitman. Our families were small and we got together a lot all through the year, so we knew each other’s maternal grandparents as well as our fathers’ families. Our Winder ancestors are English, and we’ll be visiting that area in Lancashire as well.

We started out in London (always the best start!) and a convenient beginning. Michelle owns an  internet fabric business (www.stylemakerfabrics.com) so they’re looking for fabric stores everywhere. Michelle identified certain places she wanted to see along the way. So in London we headed right off to Liberty of London and also to other smaller shops. It’s interesting to have a theme like this when you travel as it often puts you in neighborhoods you wouldn’t normally see.

Easter Saturday began at the the Borough Market - a big favorite of mine. Larry hadn’t been there before either. Larry and Michelle had a great time with their cameras, and we stopped on Monmouth Coffee, one of the roaster on Michelle's list. Along with her fabric business she works for Seattle Coffee Gear - - www.seattlecoffeegear.com - and was looking for highly rated local roasters to bring some treats back to her colleagues.

 On Saturday afternoon we headed for two fabric shops: Sew Over It in Islington and the amazing Shaukat fabrics in South Kensington. Going to Sew Over It also allowed me to go to my favorite London knitting shop, Loop. Here are a couple shots from the fabric shops:

Just one room among many at Shaukat Fabrics!

This was the Easter weekend, which is a big holiday not only in the UK but all through Europe. Friday and Monday were Bank Holidays, and pretty much everything was closed on Sunday as well. We had our Easter feast on Saturday by going to tea at Fortnum and Mason, which was lots of fun and really good. Then we made our way to Westminster Abbey for the Easter Vigil there. Right next to Westminster Abbey is St. Margaret’s Church. Way back there in the 11th century. The Benedictine monks of the Abbey were annoyed (really!) that so many people were coming to the services at the Abbey. So they built St. Margaret’s right next door for the “regular” folk. Our 6th  great-grandparents were married there in the 17th century, so here’s a picture of Sharon and me in front.

We waited in line in quite cold wind to get into the Abbey for the service, and had a nice time visiting with people from around the world. The vigil was was beautifully done, with baptisms of two the Abbey choristers,  and we enjoyed welcoming Easter with about 500 other people in that glorious building.

On Easter Sunday we took the Tube to Kew, to the Royal Botanical Gardens. It was a moderately nice day, and it is clearly an Easter favorite for the London area. There were lots of families there enjoying the rather cold and windy day. The children had a scavenger hunt featuring the Finnish character Moomin, and it was fun watching them all run around looking for the botanical features for the next step of the hunt.

There is an incredible current installation at Kew called The Hive. It actually connects digitally with a real hive so. The lights on the installation turn on and off when the bees move and you can hear their hum inside. Here's a picture of this amazing construction:

We made our way back to London in the later afternoon. Easter night’s dinner was an excellent pub meal at The Victoria near our Paddington Hotel.

For all of you who have followed us here, I'll add to it when we travel again this Spring to Scandinavia. In the meantime, you might want to check out my new blog on books and reading: https://theincompletereader.com

Australia 2016 - Easter Monday

We had lunch today with Normal Habel. Norm is a pastor, an Old Testament Scholar, and a Holden faculty person from the 1970's who lives in Adelaide. He is from here. He ended up in St. Louis at Concordia Seminary and then returned to Adelaide in 1974 after everything blew up in the Lutheran Church Missouri Synod. Norm is a fascinating and creative person with a deep passion for the environment. He is part of the planning for a big conference here in July, 2017, called EcoReformation. It sounds really good. We talked a lot about Holden, and church, and many other things. A very lovely time.

We then made our way back to our apartment, including a stop at St, Peter’s Cathedaral, the aforementioned Anglican cathedral we did not attend! It was an interesting and beautiful place.

I then remembered that I had not bought sago, that important South Pacific starch that is an integral ingredient in the Norwegian fruit soup I make. Over the years I have commissioned various people to bring me some when they visit down here, and I have been grateful for that service. But now when I have opportunity, I totally forget! And we found out that even more stores are closed on Easter Monday than were closed on Good Friday! But all is well. I have a good stash at home, and my cousin Sharon keeps me supplied from a New Zealand friends of hers.

So now our bags are packed and we are ready for a long 24+ hours of airports and flights tomorrow. We arrive in the US on Tuesday, but then head down to San Diego to visit Seattle friends who have been living there recently.

Australia 2016 - Easter in Adelaide

This morning we attended worship at St. Stephen’s Lutheran Church. South Australia is littered with Lutheran churches, but we picked this one near where we’re staying because they had a really strong up-front statement on their website about ordaining women in the Lutheran Church in Australia. (One person told us that the Roman Catholics will ordain women before the LCA!)

So there we were at the 10 a.m. service, labeled “traditional,” the third of three. We were certainly in the right age group as the nave filled up. As I looked around I started thinking that maybe we should have gone to the Anglican cathedral after all. Maybe this was going to be more “traditional” than I thought.

The organ prelude was good, and we stood for the processional. (Oddly, the “March” from Scipione by Handel!) And then the opening hymn - “Thine is the Glory” - was introduced and the congregation began to sing. I said, “This is what Lutheran is - this powerful, amazing singing that fills room, and head, and heart.” As we talked later, Larry had noted the same. What a heritage of song with have with our sisters and brothers in Christ throughout the world.

The Children’s Word was very well done - a skit linking Christmas and Easter. Very funny moments and a well prepared cast. The sermon was really good. The pastor started out saying that all the Easter treats - bunnies, and so on - are pretty northern items. So Australia needs its own Easter symbol for the day being in Autumn. He offered the Granny Smith apple as the sign, and did a wonderful job talking about new life coming from the rubbish heap, just as the Granny Smith apple was begun from such a circumstance. And he had Granny Smith’s for each of us to take home with us.

After church we went to the South Australia Museum. We especially enjoyed the excellent presentations of Aboriginal Culture.

The day ended with snack for supper and the last Doc Martin (which we saw in England in October) and a Call the Midwife we’d already seen as well. But it was fine.

Australia 2016 - Barossa Valley

Saturday was our day to go to the famous Barossa Valley wine region. It’s about an hour NE of Adelaide. Again we drove through lovely country, including more bush fire areas. We were headed for Bethany, the first German settlement in the Barossa. Paul Kretschmer had contacted his good friend Robert Schrapel whose family has owned Bethany Wines for 5 generations.

Rob graciously gave us over an hour of his time on a very busy day. He’d given his regular crew the Easter weekend off, so he was doing everything from the tasting room to the wine vats! (There were other people doing the tasting room as well.) He took us up a hill behind the winery and showed us the whole valley and told us the story of its settlement. Ans Englishman named Angas first came there, and then invited Silesians from Germany, Lutherans who didn’t want to comply with their duke’s order to merge all the Protestants. An interesting story. He then gave us a private tasting of their wines. We had a wonderful conversation and a great time. I had met Rob briefly in 1976 when he dropped in at Holden for three days to visit Paul Kretschmer.

Rob gave us a good lunch tip and suggestions for the rest of our day. We had a great lunch at the Tununda Bakery where we also bought the last 4 hot cross buns for our breakfasts! Then we headed for Settesfield, one of the original German settlements. On the way we went by Gnadenfrei Lutheran Church - St. Michael’s it is also called - and went in as a group of women were decorating for Easter Sunday. They were putting up way cool stuff!

Settelsfield was very interesting and very touristy. We appreciated the Jam Factory craft studios. It reminded us of the Archie Bray Foundation in Helena, Montana, where an old factory has been turned into studios and support for artists.

We then went and looked at Wolf Blass. The very famous Barossa winemaker has a virtual wine city and it was pretty impressive!

We then headed home by a wonderful road through a gorge - beautiful, and another different landscape.

We splurged for dinner at the restaurant next door. Very good.

Australia 2016 - Good Friday

On Good Friday we went looking for open things and headed into the Adelaide Hills to go to Hahndorf. The drive into the hills was very beautiful - reminded us a little of home! We went up a pass over Mt, Lofty, then down into the town of Hahndorf. This is the first German settlement in South Australia, and it’s kind of the Leavenworth of Australia, although not quite as over-the-top. We think everyone else in the area decided to head this way as well, finding open resturants and shops on a really beautiful day. It could not have been more pleasant. We had a good time exploring, found some things to purchase, saw lovely art and had a nice lunch.

When we left Hahndorf we wandered through back roads and made our way to the Cleland Wildlife Park. Although we arrive just an hour before closing, we did get to see the Koalas they bring out for people to hold and pet, albeit very briefly. We saw others asleep in their Eucalyptus perches, and walked to other areas to see Emu, different varieties of Kangaroo, Wallabees, and lots of birds. It was a beautiful spot and we’re glad we stopped.

We wandered down another back road to Adelaide and were rewarded with spectacular views over the city and the Gulf of Vincent, on which Adelaide sits. There are many gulfs and bays and peninsulas all around Adelaide, the Southern Ocean cutting into the land at many places. A truly beautiful Good Friday drive, with the St. Matthew Passion playing from my phone.