Update from Stockholm

The main tourist plaza in Stockholm, Kungstradgarten, holds many, many festivals. This one is, as you can see, a Thai festival, with outstanding music and lovely dancing, along with wonderful food, of course. We were heading home for supper, but changed out minds when we came across this happening.

Well, it's been a while since I wrote anything. I was lucky in that I had a spurt of creativity and did some work on my book, plus we had a couple of days of sightseeing that were wonderful. However, my reality is that, while Ireland seemed to be GREAT for my immune system and RSD, Stockholm seems to be hell on both. I have so far been struggling, off and on, with pain and slight disability (a painful limp makes large cities difficult), as well as a stomach virus last week, a sore throat/cold virus this week, and have gotten my first wart (caused by a virus, I know) since I was about 12. The pharmacist looked at my finger and said, "Oh, that looks good: only one." Meanwhile, it turns out that Sweden uses an amazingly effective homeopathic-herbal blend for treating sinus congestion (I will bring lots home),but uses nothing to treat runny noses, other than a "very strong" nose spray that combines a decongestant and an anti-histamine, and can only be used for a few days. The pharmacist said she had never heard of using regular antihistamine pills to treat runny noses ("they are used for a bad mosquito bite or for allergies," she said firmly), and was quite shocked and disapproving when I bought the recognizable British antihistamine loratadine (recognizable because ALL of us got terrible colds while in Ireland a few winters ago) to treat my runny nose. Her attitude seemed to be that runny noses are not a part of colds--only STUFFY noses are. I don't know how to interpret this--all English-speaking countries recognize that runny noses are an intrinsic part of having a cold, and that without treatment, one ends up with a very sore, red nose and a very congested chest, not to mention an even sorer throat. Whatever the supposed nature of Swedish colds, the loratadine worked, along with the homeopathic-herbal concoction, and I am left with a sore throat, hoarse voice (but those who know me will understand that a hoarse voice is a great improvement over the more common alternative)and a compulsion to drop off to sleep every 20 or so minutes, sitting up. Needless to say, I have not been out of the apartment for a couple of days at all, and slept ALL day yesterday.

By the way, those of you who have read "Eat, Pray, Love" will recognize in this story the difference between Donald and myself: Donald is one of those people who, as Gilbert describes them, "could drink a shoe-box full of water from a gutter in Calcutta and not get sick." I am, like Gilbert herself, what Anna and I like to call a damn "princess-and-the-pea;" a person whose constitution is so annoyingly sensitive that ANY thing throws it off and makes me either sick or in-digested or in pain somehow. I hate that about myself, and envy Donald, but it does not seem to be anything I can change--believe me, I've tried. And so I try to accept my body as it is, and also to accept these moments (days)of being "indisposed" with grace and humor, even when they interfere, as they always do, with work or play. But it still makes me want to swear.

The GOOD news is that, in between all of this, we went BIKE-RIDING (yes, we rented bikes and went biking. I was SO proud of my physical stamina and strength, until that night, when I literally was up most of the night in tremendous pain. Next really nice day, we'll have to do it again, so I can build up some tolerance, I guess) on Djurgarten, the island that houses the Vasa museum, the Nordic museum, Tivoli, the amusement park that has multiple nausea-inducing rides, and multiple parks and small palace-museums. (This is the garden at one of them) In other words, it is the pleasure-island of Stockholm, with little there that has to do with the workaday world, besides the stunningly gorgeous Italian embassy, housed in an old palace.(Sailboat from bike path).

Another day, we walked around a few small islands in the middle of Stockholm, wandering and wandering, as it was another beautiful day. (These are the old customs houses, for collecting taxes from boats arriving in the city with various wares.) When our feet would get too tired to continue, we would rest them for a bit by sitting and watching various boats go by, or by watching the Tivoli rides and listening to the screams, with me remembering with awe that there was indeed a time in my life (between ages 15 and 18) when I actually enjoyed riding those things: roller-coasters that spin you upside-down as they turn corners, "salt-n-pepper-shakers", rides that bring you up and up high, and then suddenly drop you with all speed.

Last night I saw 3 stars from our window, and the night before I saw the moon, which appeared to be full. Those are among the few glimpses of the night sky I have seen since leaving Montague, as nighttime seems to be a time of clouds in both Ireland and Stockholm. The weather here changes like it did in Ireland--every 15 minutes or so. You cannot tell what it will be like in a couple of hours, based on what it is like right now. And the weather predictions that I find online for the city seem to be entirely created by throwing darts at a chart: not only do they have little to do with reality, even right at that very moment, but, and this is crucial to an understanding of how weather works here, ALL OF THEM DISAGREE WITH EACH OTHER. So tomorrow's weather prediction may say, on one website, that it will be largely cloudy with a little sun; a second one will say that it will be light rain; a third will say it will rain HARD all day; and a fourth and fifth say that it will be full sun, with the warmest temperatures of the week. This pattern of contradictory predictions continues every single day. They also disagree with each other about the temperature, with the spread being may be 8 degrees Fahrenheit or so. So there is no way to plan when one might take off from work and take a boat to an island, say. I am trying to get my head around the fact that Sweden, of all places, that bastion of modernity and technology, does not care about predicting the weather in a rational way (this is easier to accept about Ireland, since so much is non-rationalized there). I suppose that one must simply accept that, just as in England or Ireland, the weather will be unpredictable, and that one must bring an umbrella wherever one goes, even on the sunniest day.

It all does, however, make one want to go somewhere that is predictably warm and sunny for a few days. NO wonder people here all migrate to southern Europe whenever they can, for long weekends or longer holidays.