Lovely ones, apologies for the radio silence. Wow, nearly three months have gone by: an entire summer. And what a summer. One where it has been an everyday challenge to climb high enough to see the bird’s eye view. Instead I have spent most of the time either buried in the trenches or with my head spinning. It is an act of mindfulness to gently pull on that string that we all have attached on top of our heads. You know the one that, if we just keep pulling, lifts us up higher and higher, so that when we are alongside the clouds we actually see the big picture of our lives.
I am writing this from Singapore, where I arrived just a few hours ago. It is late and I have slept about 9 hours in total during the past two nights. The apartment in Helsinki is now emptied, boxed up, and wrapped in plastic. Tomorrow hell breaks loose and the replumbing team begins to tear up the bathroom and the pipes in the entire building. And I grabbed my backpack and shut the door behind me. For a long while. Quite probably for good.
There are so many cliché ways one could describe starting a new chapter. I will not attempt any of them. Instead I will focus on sleep – and starting tomorrow, on noodle soup. I am hoping that this combination will slowly pull me up so I can see the big picture again.
(Singapore; July 2018)
My favorite crib in Stockholm is Stallmästaregården, an old gasthaus with creaky old wooden floors, the feeling of staying at someone’s private mansion (not a hotel), and the loveliest staff there ever was. I used to stay here every week, and returning after a year felt like taking a warm bath (the food in the excellent -reviewed restaurant helps, too).
Lund, one of those lovely university towns that faintly smell of cow barn in the morning.
Another gray day, this time at London Heathrow terminal five. Summer sun, when will you arrive?
In my mind, daffodils are flowers of old houses inhabited by sweet old ladies. In Finland they are mostly bright yellow wild daffodils. But oh, those special moments, when walking past a garden I would spot the smaller, white poet’s daffodil, with a little red crown. I could look at the intricate and symmetric architecture of a poet’s daffodil for a very long time.
On my first ever visit to London, in 2000, the London Eye was brand spanking new. The lines for a spin were days if not weeks long, even if each pod takes 25 people, allowing for plenty of space to move around. Originally I remember it was called the Millennium Wheel, and the rumor was that it was going to be dismantled after a while. 
I am glad that the London Eye is still up, 19 years later. I suppose Brits had to have an iconic, modern landmark, as the French have the Eiffel Tower.
And 18 years after my first visit to London, I finally got to ride the thing. I excused myself from work early, took the tube down, navigated through the throngs of visitors and found myself in a nearly empty VIP lounge with a glass of champagne and the sun pouring in through the windows. Because if you wait for something for nearly two decades, you must go through it with style.
(London, United Kingdom; March 2018)
Good morning, Stockholm. New view of the city today: above Karolinska Institutet’s old brick university campus buildings, and the brand-spanking new, eponymous, monster hospital.
These are the Eastern suburbs of Helsinki from above, at night. The bright spot to the far left is Vuosaari harbor. The black triangle cutting in to the top third from the right side is Vartiokylä bay. I grew up running around it and taking a plunge at the end. When my family moved to this part of town in the early 80s, our street was unpaved and ended in fields of crops and horse stables. The houses were all built right after World War II. There was an old broken horse-pulled rake of some kind lying by the side of the road for years. There were meadows and forests and a brook.
This was Helsinki in mid-March, caught underneath the ever-swirling polar vortex of the winter and spring of 2018. The cruise liner looks like one that shuttles between Helsinki and Tallinn, the capital of Estonia. All cruise liners on the Baltic Sea are icebreakers, too. One has to dress according to weather, you see.
After 6.5 years I was back in Amsterdam. It was beautiful, as always in spring, and every cell in my body screamed “get me out of here!!!”. For four days I stayed on the South side of the Singel, and mostly even on the South side of the Amstelkanaal. At least I got to explore areas new to me.
(Amsterdam, The Netherlands; March 2018)
This blue marble 