Thursday, August 11

We flew to Stockholm.  Travel always takes the whole day.  At the tail end of it, we went out with my long lost third cousin once removed Pia.  We spoke of things that happened in the 19th century and ate at a kind of Thai street food place in Södermalm.  (Our hotel stood in Älvsjö, a suburb two train stops to the south. We called it “Alviso”.)  It was called “Motel L”. The hellish thing about it was the LED hallway lights. The impressive thing was that while it was located directly next to a commuter train line, the soundproofing was so good you never heard a train.

Friday, August 12

Friday was full.  We went to a Konditori for breakfast.  I bought some post cards at a second hand shop across the street from Motel Hell.  Our friend David and his familiar, Isabelle, got us at noon and took us downtown where we sat for a long time at a vegan cafe.  It was not accessible at all.  No restaurant aspiring to the hip status of veganism in the states would be so insensitive to the needs of tall people walking with a cane.  Wouldn’t be legal, for a start.  The bathrooms were up a long flight of stairs, and the stairs came with a warning against tall people.  The seating area had stairs all over and then a jackhammer started up.  Dave walked to a DHL to mail the Tesla key back to Brian, and was not successful. We drove to a Mailboxes Etc. and waited in the car while he did that, with better results, then to Isabella’s uncle’s leather workshop where I got some gay post cards, free.  Then to a park where we all wheeled David up a hill and back down and then to our friend Tim’s house.  The roads were not as Google thought.  A large apartment complex is being built immediately west of his house.  Cousin Hans and his wife Lena joined us there.  David left early for a long drive to Gävle.  Isabelle stayed much longer.

Not a whole lot of genealogical talk.  Hans told the story of his job in the Grand Hotel as a young servant, asked to bring champagne to Madonna’s room — he stepped out of the elevator just as her entourage passed, and landed between her and her bodyguards.  They were not happy with him.  He also said the Rolling Stones partied extremely hard even though they were in their 50’s.

Tim made tacos, including tortillas by hand since all you get here is flour tortillas but you can buy masa.  Tim’s take on why Sweden did not make a big deal out of Covid was that they were not afraid their hospitals would be overwhelmed.  They had enough bed space: they converted some wards to Covid, built some tent hospitals, but didn’t end up using them. The US operates with much less margin, and if the outbreak had spread the way it threatened to, people would have been dying in the streets.  Also, Sweden has enough social net that people don’t have to starve if they stay home from work.

We walked to the train station before it was too dark, past all the construction.  There seemed to be a lot of parties happening.  School begins soon.

Saturday, August 13

Traveling always takes the whole day.  We left the hotel before noon, got to Batroun near midnight.  Nothing went particularly wrong, except we took the train away from Stockholm Central one stop before realizing it was the wrong direction, and we stayed too long at the SAS+ lounge and got worried in a long, slow passport line (but one of the other officers let us go in his EU line, when all his other customers were done).

Why we were in the SAS lounge is a mystery.  It just showed up in our boarding pass, that we were SAS+ and had fast entry to everything except leaving Schengen.  Seats 2A and 2B.  Maybe they want to get us addicted to that sort of travel.  Premium mediocre buffet food, hold the premium. The experience is only arguably premium to the extent that the boarding pass scanner — not even a guy at the velvet rope! — allows us into the lounge (but not the “gold” lounge, which looked the same as “+”).

Cloudy weather most of the way.  Glimpses of Slovakia, Hungary, and Romania. It cleared up off the coast of Antalya.  The flight path avoided Kaliningrad and Belarus and Ukraine.  GPS failed as we descended into Beirut.  It had been working so well — I lock it into the window using the window shade, to give it the best view of satellites — I almost suspect the Israelis, Hezbollah, Russia, Lebanon, SAS of jamming on purpose, to prevent any GPS triggered terrorist actions on the ground or in the air.  But GPS fails a lot on its own.

Flying over, you realize how many places you’ll never go.