summer in stockholm

I've been decidedly slack with my writing... which can be interpreted as me enjoying my summer holidays and not spending nearly as much time near a computer. I have had a very busy social schedule - 2 weddings since my week in Lisbon and a visitor from Melbourne. The first was a couple from the swimming club here in Stockholm who met 117 years ago on a training camp and have been together ever since - a lovely ceremony followed by an Italian inspired dinner (delicious!) and a party that lasted until dawn. I lasted until about 2 minutes after the couple retired for the evening... can't leave before them!

The next wedding was a kiwi, Paul, and a swede, Sara, that I had worked with at my first school here in Stockholm (the one with the crazy owner, more principals than I can count and a turnover that would make a revolving door cringe). I had the honour of being the toastmaster for the wedding - which meant keeping the whole show running... only forgot one thing (Sara said she's forgiven me!) and everybody seemed to have a great night. A very international flavour to the whole event - Sweden, NZ, UK, Australia, Norway were all represented, which was then followed by a couple of nights out in the archipeligo with some of Paul and Sara's families, me and Kate D (visiting from Melbourne). Although not the finest weather we had a great time and managed to get a couple of swims in (more like jump in, jump out really).

Kate was here for 8 days and experienced the usual Swedish summer of sunshine and rain. We spent a lot of time walking around Stockholm and even made it out to the archipeligo again last weekend. There we visited Anne and Leif, Anne is the coach of the elite squad at Neptun Swimming Club (I'm the assistant coach!), and Anne and I had to have a very important planning meeting:

The wine glasses are purely for show!

Any comments regarding the likeness of me and the monkey will be rudely rebuked.

Not sure if you've heard that all the water pipes for all the bathrooms are being replaced in my apartment building? Like all good builders they are behind schedule ("due to unforseen circumstances" - you hear that phrase so often you think they should just add an extra 25% to any schedule automatically). It is almost over now, it is all tiled and they just have to fit the basins and lights... they have said they'll finish tomorrow, so I hope they keep to that. That would give me just enough time to clean and wash everything before I head to off to Swedish Swimming Nationals next Monday. I'm there to help out with the elite group, and to hopefully swim the 50 free on the last day - it has been giving me motivation to do my knee rehab more consistently, as has the challenge from one of the girls in the club... although she is a world record holder so it's not as easy as it sounds!

Along with the water pipes saga, the other point of frustration this summer has been the annual quest to update my visa. Which involves sending forms backwards and forwards to 2 different administrative bodies... I'm still waiting on the first! The lovely lady that is looking after my papers at the moment has a wonderful job where she only needs to answer the phone between 10am and 11am... amazingly service minded the "public servants", and now she is probably on summer holidays for a month! When do they do any work??!! I'm sure it will all work out, just frustrating while it is all in someone else's hands. Other than that summer has been very relaxing so far, and should continue that way for another 3 weeks!

relaxing,
rich.