I still have keyboard problems and as my old computer is so slow and keeps losing the internet connection, I do prefer using the new computer despite the issues. I figured out that I can write in Word (as it is only when I use Internet Explorer that the keyboard is not working properly – definitely a virus!!) and then cut and paste in WordPress… Anyhow, I am sorry that I haven’t been very active on other blogs, I have been reading but writing comments in Word, cutting and pasting just takes too long. I have sent another email to my brother (the computer expert) and hopefully he will be able to help me out with solving this problem ASAP.

It really is the time of visitors, my Swedish friend B’s mother arrived on Thursday evening and on Friday the three of us had a lovely lunch in the OSJ. Then O’s brother arrived on Friday evening and we had lots of joint plans during the weekend. However, B and her mother M are a little quicker in the mornings than us, so we ended up doing the same things but just after them!

I never get tired of taking photos in the Old San Juan

On Saturday we visited the “jardín botánico y cultural” in Caguas, a town south of San Juan. A “feria de artesanía y trovadores” (a handicraft & troubadour fair) was taking place and the place was packed with visitors, Puerto Rican troubadours and handmade objects. We met up with B and her mother and said hello before they left. The botanical and cultural gardens were interesting, and we walked around looking at the flowers, parrots and different palm trees. I read afterwards in the brochure we got that the gardens are located on an old sugar cane plantation, la Hacienda San José that has been converted into an outdoor museum.

A waterlilly and a dragonfly

Unfortunately the excursion ended with me stepping in a hormiguero (ants nest) – tiny, tiny black ants but oh boy, could they bite!! It really hurt and burnt, and my right foot is covered in still-itching bites (that I got a very big mosquito bite on the same leg from the OSJ-lunch on Friday doesn’t help – my lower right part of the body is definitely not very attractive at the moment…)

Relaxing on the roots of a big tree in the Caguas Botanical Gardens

Sunday morning we were slow to get ready and as the day before, our Swedish friends had already visited the location for the Sunday excursion way before we even left home! It took us a little longer to get ready since we were preparing a pic-nic to bring with us… Plus the fact that the brothers needed a lie-in 

Muddy trail to the cave

Our destination was a cave that both O and I happened to hear about last week from different sources. It sounded really interesting, especially as we still haven’t made it to “las Cuevas de Camuy” (the Camuy caves) one of the most famous sights in Puerto Rico. They were closed for almost a year after a fatal accident happened, and since the re-opening we have only tried once to go but were too late and the tickets were sold-out for the day.

Entrance to the first cave

This other cave is a bit of a secret and I won’t tell you exactly where it is located –the locals don’t want it to become too known, which I can understand… Let’s just say that it is on the road between Arecibo and Utuado, overlooking the Río Grande de Arecibo. It was only a 10-minute walk to get there, but we got lost a few times and since the trails were very muddy we had to be careful not to fall. We actually missed the first cave that you can walk through to cross the mountain instead of walking around it like we did.

Exit from the first cave – you can see one of our fellow cave explorers holding up a flash-light

Once we arrived to the hole, which is the entrance to the Cueva Ventana, we were hesitating a little – it did look very dark, even though we had brought two flash-lights and there were a few concrete steps leading down… All of a sudden I saw a flickering light in the first cave and two guys appeared. We joined them for the second cave; it felt reassuring to not be completely alone and not knowing where we were going.

The entrance is quite big, even if it is almost like a hole in the ground next to the mountain, and you definitely need a flash-light (B and her mother had used a tiny pocket light, I am amazed that they managed). As we only had two lights, I was without one and tried to follow the other ones – which mean that I can’t really describe the interior of the cave much since I was focusing on where I was putting my feet on the uneven floor.

We crossed one big “room” with a high ceiling and we could see the murcielagos (bats) hanging high above us. Then the cave grew narrow and we had to bend over to not hit our heads. In front of us we could see some light and there it was…

La VENTANA (the window) that has given the cave its name! With a wonderful view over the Río Grande de Arecibo, the green Karst mountain tops and small houses perched on the mountain sides. It was definitely worth the 5-minute walk in the pitch dark.

Afterwards we had a simple lunch in the Bosque de Cambalache, in the community of Garrochales (Barceloneta). It is a forest we should try to visit again, since we only used the pic-nic area by the entrance this time. The forests are generally well-organised in Puerto Rico; usually with a little forest ranger cabin where you can get information about trails etc, simple toilets, and covered pic-nic areas with tables, benches and barbeques.

Exiting the cave

On today’s programme: Old San Juan with J-I and B’s mother, I am brother / mother-sitting

Sorry for not replying to your comments but I am having computer problems / I don’t know if it is a virus but my keyboard is not working properly. I have to press the same key several times when typing, and it is extremely frustrating! Sometimes it works like normal - like now for example (of course!)…

Have tried to scan the computer for viruses etc but nothing shows up on the virus-protection programmes. Anybody out there who’s had the same problem?? I had it on my old laptop but the problem disappeared after a while…

O’s brother J-I arrives tonight.

Havea nie kened (see, the problem has reappeared!) – that is supposed to read Have a nice weekend!

I get this question all the time here in Puerto Rico, and apparently O gets it as well – about me, his wife, not about himself (he speaks Spanish, English and more French than he thinks). He told me yesterday that he brags about his wife who speaks several languages and understands even more (Danish, Norwegian, understand written Dutch). However, personally I always feel a little embarrassed when I start listing the languages – Swedish, English, French… and nowadays I guess Spanish but not so much Italian anymore.

First of all, because it is not that many – not if you have lived in Brussels where almost everybody [in the European Commission / Parliament circles] speak at least three languages. And secondly, because I don’t write French very well, nor Spanish and my Italian is almost non-existent, so I don’t think that those languages count fully. Some people will find this statement false modesty, but really, I know a lot of people who speak these languages (and others) much better than I.*

When I lived in Italy 2000-2001 my Italian was passable – I communicated with my Italian friends in Italian and I could get by, but I haven’t spoken many words of Italian since 2005 when I visited an Italian friend in Valencia. Since then I have concentrated on learning Spanish and the languages are just too similar [for me]. I have an Italian ex-colleague who is married to a Spanish woman; they both speak each other’s languages + French (and English of course) and they now live in Portugal and are learning Portugese (only Romanian missing!) - I don’t know how they do it, but maybe it is different when your mother tongue is a Latin language?

How do you define knowing a language and what do you consider to be fluent? I do consider myself to be more or less fluent in French, even though my grammar could be much better… I read books in French, as well as in Spanish (and used to read also in Italian), which I think is a great way to improve your [at least passive] understanding of a language. It doesn’t matter that I don’t understand every single word, as long as I understand the context.

Just today I was asked the question again, and after the “oh’s” and ”ah’s”, I felt once again the need to explain that as a Swede, living abroad, you need to speak other languages as nobody speaks Swedish… And remember, I have lived in three bi-, tri- or quadlingual countries; Puerto Rico (Spanish & English), Belgium (French, Dutch & German) and Switzerland (German, French, Italian & Romansch), so I am used to people speaking more than one or two languages around me.

A lot of my friends also speak at least 3 languages, and have lived in at least 3-4 countries – so I am not that special. Take the example of my three best friends from my hometown [in Sweden] who live in Oslo (also lived in Denmark, France, Switzerland, Tanzania); Copenhagen (previously lived in France, Luxembourg, The Netherlands, Italy and Switzerland) and the south of France (as well as Spain). All of us have foreign partners and communicate in different languages every day – at home, at work and in our social lives. It is not something we think about too much, we just do it 

I read a very interesting book, The Story of French by Jean-Benoît Nadeau and Julie Barlow, about the history of the French language and I will probably come back to this publication, but what is interesting with the Canadian authors is that they are a bi-lingual /bi-cultural couple who speak both English and French. Jean-Benoît is French-speaking from Quebec, and Julie is English-speaking from Ontario. Apparently they had a period when they swapped the language spoken at home every other week! A very interesting method to guarantee language equality and improve both persons’ linguistic knowledge. Maybe something O and I should attempt, but at the moment I am just looking forward to my B-I-L arriving tomorrow, which will force me / us to speak Spanish at home for a week!!

Read more about my own language history here.

*) And I was taught to compare myself to the ones that are better than I, not worse. I guess my father’s way to make sure that I excelled in school…

Today is my second anniversary living in Puerto Rico and since I moved from Belgium to Puerto Rico, what better to celebrate than to show you a couple of songs with Belgian artists singing about Puerto Rico! Oh yes, there is such a thing:

The first song is called “Manhattan – Kaboul” by the Belgian singer Axelle Red and French singer Renaud. You might wonder what a song about Manhattan and Kabul has to do with Puerto Rico – well, the song starts with these lines:

“Petit Portoricain, bien intégré quasiment New-yorkais
Dans mon building tout de verre et d’acier,
Je prends mon job, un rail de coke, un café*…”
(NB the Franglish!)

The two artists sing interchangeably, Renaud as a Puerto Rican working in the Twin Towers on 9-11 and Axelle Red as an Afghan girl in Kabul. Read more on the very interesting interpretation of the song here.

The second song is of course Vaya Con Dios song “Puerto Rico” and you might remember that I have already mentioned it several times**. Vaya Con Dios is / was a Belgian band and the song about “my” island came out in 1987. It is the first thing Belgians think of when they hear of the country Puerto Rico and I think most of them know how to hum the song. Quite a few of my colleagues and friends used to sing it for me before I moved, and they played the song at my farewell party in the office! 

I have actually also heard the song sung in Spanish on the radio in Puerto Rico but I have no idea who the artist is.

“Wake up Angelita, your mama just turned off the light
Manolo is already waiting by the old water-pipe
Her shoes in one hand she carefully walks down the stairs
Holding her breath ’cause there’s danger and love in the air.

Aie aie aie aie aie aie Puerto Rico…”

And thirdly, a Puerto Rican singer who is virtually unknown in his home country but famous in Belgium, where he nowadays lives - Gabriel Ríos! He sings in both English and Spanish (not French or Flemish!?). Here’s a song in Spanish called ”Tu no me quieres” (“You don’t want me” – the video actually has the lyrics subtitled in English)

If you are interested in Puerto Rican music, without any Belgian references, check out this blog post that I wrote last year.

*) Rough translation: “Little Puerto Rican, well integrated almost [a] New Yorker, in my building all [made] of glass and steel, I take my job, a line of coke, a coffee”
**) As a reminder that I live in Puerto Rico and not Costa Rica…

I hope some of you have discovered the sepia function on your cameras since my last sepia-tinted post. Here are some more pictures for you to enjoy while I tend to some housewifey chores in preparation for our next visitor; my third B-I-L (brother-in-law) who arrives on Friday.

Piazza della Repubblica, Milano

Paris

Deux cafés à Paris…
I have a very cool photo in sepia of my beautiful French friend S smoking from this “fika” in Paris, but as I have as a principle to not publish photos of non-bloggers and as she has since then quit smoking, you won’t get to see that photo. However, I love it as it is “très French”.

Juleboda, Skåne

The Golden Gate, San Francisco

The Golden Gate from Chrissy Fields, San Francisco

Casa de Doña Lupe vineyard, Baja California

Ales stenar, Skåne

What is very interesting with these photos are the different shades of sepia – the first photos were taken with my old camera and are more yellow-ish, while I took the last two with the new camera and they are more pink! Strange…

Last Monday my French friend E called me to ask if she could come to drop off a surprise… I was very curious when she gave me a little container with some liquid, and a small bag with three slices of cake. She explained that it was a “Amish Friendship Cake” and that she would email me the instructions on how to take care of it.

She also told me that her mother had received a similar “chain-recipe” back in France a few years ago, but it was for bread and it was called “Herman” for some reason. The funny thing is that when I spoke to my grandmother a few days later, and told her about my cake project, she also knew of ”Herman” (actually “Här kommer Herman” in Swedish, which means “Here comes Herman”) and the so-called “starter” liquid that you have to nourish before baking! It reminds me of the sourdough that my mother subscribed to back in the 80’s – she would get it by mail. And coincidentally my friend Erika has today written about the sourdough starter (in Swedish) that she keeps in the fridge.

Amish cake starter in a container

Back to the Amish Cake, there are lots of recipes on this kind of cake on the internet, but below are the instructions that I received. It is very easy, for the first five days you don’t do anything, except “mushing” the bag (or in my case, stirring a little in the container). The liquid starts to become a little inflated and bubbly but that’s just the natural “fermentation” and nothing bad. You add some simple ingredients and then continue “mushing” for another couple of days, before adding some more ingredients, divide the mix in five parts and make your cake with one fifth of the fermented mixture.

If you are interested in starting a “Amish Friendship Cake” for yourself and your friends, check out this link for a “starter recipe”. I think that it is quite a nice idea to share a recipe with your friends and “pass it on”, especially nowadays when everything is supposed to be so “instant” (all those semi-made cakes and cookies in the TV commercials).

Recipe to Pass On
Accompanying these instructions when you make this bread and wish to give it to a friend should be a Ziploc bag of starter. Keep the starter on your countertop.
DO NOT REFRIGERATE!

Day 1: Do nothing
Day 2: Mush bag two times during the day.
Day 3: Mush bag two times during the day.
Day 4: Mush bag two times during the day.
Day 5: Mush bag two times during the day.
Day 6: Add to the bag:
2 Cups flour; 1 Cup of milk; 1 Cup of sugar
Close the bag, letting out as much air as possible. Mush thoroughly.
Day 7: Mush bag two times during the day.
Day 8: Mush bag two times during the day.
Day 9: Clip off corner of the bag and squeeze into a large bowl.

Add to the bowl:
1 Cup flour; 1 Cup of milk; 1 Cup of sugar
Stir thoroughly. Measure out four 1 Cup starters into Ziploc bags.
Give these bags and a copy of these instructions to other to enjoy.

To the small amount of starter left in the bowl, add:
1 Cup oil; ½ Cup milk; 3 eggs; 1 tsp. vanilla
Mix well then add:
2 Cups flour; 1 Cup sugar; 1 ½ tsp. baking powder; 2 tsp. cinnamon; ½ tsp. salt; ½ tsp. baking soda; 1 or 2 small Vanilla instant pudding mixes; 1 Cup chopped nuts (optional)
Mix well. Spray 2 loaf pans with non-stick spray. Sprinkle pans generously with cinnamon and sugar mixture. (1 Tbs. cinnamon & 4 Tbs. sugar) Shake or stir together. Pour batter into pans and sprinkle tops with more cinnamon/sugar mixture generously.
Bake at 325 degrees for 1 hour or until toothpick comes our clean.
Tomorrow starts Day 1 again.

Amish cake starters for my friends

Comment: Since I prefer cardamom to cinnamon and didn’t have any “Vanilla Instant Pudding Mix”, I decided to use cardamom and some Belgian dark chocolate (Côte d’Or, 200 grams) instead. Maybe a strange combo but it turned out really tasty!

Speaking of chocolate, I read on a couple of Swedish blogs that it was the “Day of the Swedish Brownie cake” (Kladdkakans dag + recipe on Erika’s blog) last Sunday. However, since I started making Elle’s Chocolate Cake many years ago, I just can’t make a chocolate cake with cacao powder (cocoa), it has to be real chocolate! So call me a brownie snob, but try my recipe in the link above and taste the difference! It contains very little butter (25 grams) but 250 grams of dark chocolate…

Amish chocolate cake

And now for the etiquette discussion: One of my friends here in Puerto Rico and I have lately been talking about weddings. Her daugher recently got engaged and now they are starting to plan the wedding. Apparently the future mother-in-law has mentioned that it is custom that the bride’s family pays for the wedding, which we can all agree used to be the custom in most cultures… However, nowadays I would say that, at least in Europe, both families as well as the couple, would share the financial burden of a wedding.

I just asked O if he and his parents would expect my parents to pay for a possible future wedding of ours and he said no (my parents are probably thinking “phew!”). He explained that he thinks that it depends on how many guests the different families are inviting and that there are some expenses that traditionally have been covered by the groom’s family and other ones by the bride’s family. This will be an interesting topic once we decide to organise our “real” wedding…

What do you think? Who paid for your wedding? What is your impression of how it works in other cultures?

Margareta Ribbing, the etiquette expert of the Swedish newspaper DN has written about the same topic here.

After recovering from the excitement over the almost-disaster of buying plane tickets on-line, let’s do some pillowtalk: 

Yesterday I was checking out some posts on one of my favourite interior design web-sites; ApartmentTherapy.com, when I saw the following comment “Do Swedish people not use or need pillows?” on a post about a Swedish summerhouse and it made me think of the cultural differences of pillow use.

An American bed in Pennsylvania

In the US a bed doesn’t seem to be entirely made until it is covered in pillows and shams. Sham is another American word that I had never heard (in the bed context) until I moved to Puerto Rico! It always makes me think of a scene in Sex and the City where Charlotte and her then-husband Trey are arguing while un-making the bed, pillow by pillow (or shams?)… It is quite a funny scene, even though they are discussing the serious subject of infertility, but the whole pillow&sham situation makes it silly.

So, no wonder that the American (I presume) reader of the Swedish summerhouse post thought that the pillow-less beds looked a little bare (see bedroom photo in the post linked above)! I guess that the pillows might have been removed for the photo shoot or maybe the people owning the house don’t use pillows! In my family, both my parents sleep with very thin pillows, and I am always complaining that the pillows at home are useless (too flat).

In our summerhouse (guesthouse) we have both pillows and some decorative ”shams” – but just one on the bed and two in the sofa

When I arrived to our furnished apartment here in San Juan, one of the first things I did was remove all the decorative pillows and shams that were covering the bed! I think that I counted to 8 pieces, and I was actually a little confused – which ones stay in the bed and which are to be removed when sleeping?

Some of the pillows and shams on the floor next to the bed before I gave up and hid them in a wardrobe

Don’t get me wrong – I LOVE pillows and sometimes go under the name of “The Pillow Girl” (O’s nickname for me). I need at least three pillows – two for under my head and one to hug while sleeping. O uses one… Recently we bought new pillows (memory-foam) and I tried twice to sleep on one – but it hurt my neck as it was too high. Funny, O now uses one of the memory foam pillows even though it is higher than two of our old feather-down pillows together.

However, you can call me lazy, but I don’t want to spend 5 minutes every night removing stuff from the bed… We actually never use the bedspread (överkast), and just re-arrange the sheet (duvet when living in a cooler climate) and the pillows we sleep on in order to make the bed in the morning.

All these pillows are to be slept on – except for the “king-size” pillows behind the smaller pillows, that are used to cushion against the hard bedframe

Nevertheless, there is one place where I don’t think you can have too many pillows and it is in the sofa! The other day when Saltis and I were sitting down for a cup of tea in their sofa, she made the remark that her husband always gets annoyed with all the pillows in the sofa and throws them on the floor – O does the same!! Is it a girl thing to like pillows?? What do you think – do you also have lots of pillows in your sofa?

And a question: In which European country do you have SQUARE pillows (for the bed)? In the US there is something called Euro-sham, which measures 26″ x 26″ (66 cm x 66 cm) and I am curious where that measurement comes from? I am trying to think of the different pillows I have slept on in different countries – they all seem to have been rectangular (usually longer than the Swedish ones, which are 50 x 60 cm).   

For those of you who are interested in definitions:
Pillow: a bag or case made of cloth that is filled with feathers, down, or other soft material, and is used to cushion the head during sleep or rest
Sham: a cover or the like for giving a thing a different outward appearance: a pillow sham. A pillow sham is used for a pillow that is only decorative.
Cushion: a soft bag of cloth, leather, or rubber, filled with feathers, air, foam rubber, etc., on which to sit, kneel, or lie.
(source: Dictionary.com)

And American pillow sizes:
Standard: 50 x 66 cm (20 x 26″)
King: 50 x 91 cm (20 x 36″)
European: 66 x 66 cm (26 x 26″)

Spanish twin beds and a thin rectangular pillow can be seen on the right. I like how the chandelier is reflected on the wall in the photo. This is the room where we used to sleep, but nowadays we have our own room at O’s parents’ place.

And a funny pillow story to finish off:

In the autumn of 2002 some of my fellow masterini* and I, who happened to all live in Belgium, organised a reunion in Brussels. Among us, we managed to host everybody in our homes so nobody had to sleep in a hotel. I lived in a tiny attic apartment with a small bedroom + a sleeping loft, and we were 7 of us, so I had asked my Austrian friend T** to bring a mattress, since he was driving from The Hague.

The friends that I were hosting arrived from different corners of Europe, and T was a little late as usual. When he unpacked his car I asked him about the mattress. He said “Oh, I decided to not bring a mattress, but I brought my pillow“!! Well, the pillow was big (square when I think about it!) but a little small to sleep on, so I guess he wasn’t that comfortable during the two nights he stayed at my place… But as the saying goes “as you make your bed, you must lie in it”!  That he was utterly shocked by the fact that we were two Swedish girls and one Swedish guy sharing the sofa bed is another story 

*) Nickname for the students who have studied my Master’s programme in Venice – it really should be masteroni after graduation but the Italian diminutive just stuck..
**) Austrian T was the one who took over my apartment in Brussels when I moved to Puerto Rico – but he has since then moved back to Vienna.

I thought that it was time to show some more photos from our week in Spain in July… while I tell you about probably the most stupid thing I have ever done!!!

Last week we finally booked the tickets for:

1) our cruise in December! Yes, we are finally going to see some of the other islands in the Caribbean, before we move back to Europe (February??). Since we arrived to Puerto Rico two years ago, we have been contemplating how to see more of the region and everybody has told us – go on a cruise… I have always been very sceptical to the whole cruise-thing but it does seem to be the most practical way to island-hop!?

The cruise will take us to St Thomas, Dominica, Barbados, Antigua, St Kitts and St Maarten over 7 days leaving from San Juan (of course) the first weekend of December.

2) tickets to go to Spain for Christmas! Since O and I have already celebrated Christmas with my family (2007), in Puerto Rico though and not Sweden, it only seemed fair that our first European Christmas together would be spent in Spain with O’s family. We leave on the 23rd December, arriving on Christmas Eve’s morning to Madrid and hopefully somebody will be able to pick us up by car (otherwise it is two changes with the metro + train). The tickets to fly to Spain for Christmas were more expensive than our 7-day Caribbean cruise!

A typical sign in Spain – what we in Sweden call the Spanish turn (spanska svängen), a way to avoid dangerous left-hand turns on busy roads

3) However, not as expensive as our tickets from Madrid to Copenhagen in January could have been… After we had booked the above travels, we for some reason waited with buying our tickets to go to Sweden (via Copenhagen). Maybe we felt that we had to give the credit card a rest? I checked for tickets via different ticket search websites and yesterday I finally found the cheapest tickets – flying with Finnair via Helsinki! Ok, a bit of a detour but we are trying to save some money on travels…

The cheapest tickets I found were through a Swedish online travel agency and when I tried to pay with O’s credit card I encountered some problems. On most websites when you buy a plane ticket you first fill out the name(s) of the passengers and then you have to fill out the name of the credit card holder, credit card number etc. However, on this website there were no boxes for the name of the credit card holder as the name of the main passenger was automatically chosen. O has two surnames like all Spaniards, so on the passenger details I filled out his complete name, as you should but then I realised that his Belgian credit card only mentions one family name – in other words there was a discrepancy! The other problem was that yes, it is a Belgian card but O’s billing address is in Puerto Rico… Needless to say there was a problem with the payment.

The papal (!) castle seen from the village

I tried several times, changing the names – so I would be the main traveller and thus pay with my credit card – at least the names on my passport and card correspond, but no, I kept getting an error message (my billing address is my parents’ in Sweden). I then tried to book the same ticket through the Belgian website (same company) but it didn’t work either, probably due to the billing addresses not being in Belgium.

Then I had the brilliant idea to check if maybe the tickets were equally cheap on Finnair’s website – the difference was a few Euros, and voilà, it worked fine with O’s Belgian credit card and address in Puerto Rico. Happy that all the December-January travels were finally booked, I checked my emails for confirmations and what do I see: I have TWO bookings for the same tickets!! The reservation from the Belgian website had somehow gone through despite all the error messages!!! Arrrggggghhhhh!

O, who is always the one to keep his calm and not to panic like myself, asks me for the Finnair phone number and calls them to explain our problem – and is told that there are THREE reservations in our names for the same flight!

What to do, what to do? The Finnair lady tells O to contact the Swedish travel agency and explain to them the situation, but unfortunately their customer service opening hours are 13-17  (Swedish time) so we need to wait until the morning (Puerto Rican time). In the meanwhile I calculate that we have paid more than 1000 € for SIX tickets Madrid – Copenhagen (not refundable) and that I definitely shouldn’t get any Christmas presents this year (or next)…

The village seen from the palace

To make a long story short (??), this morning I checked our emails and both O and I had received notifications that the payment of our tickets through the travel agency had not gone through, I found a FAQ on the website saying that you can’t pay with a Belgian credit card on the Swedish site, and I call the customer service and the helpful agent cancels our reservations and tells me that they would have been cancelled anyway at the end of today since the payments had not gone through.

Fingers crossed that we haven’t been debited anything extra, we should have ONE reservation valid and payed for with Finnair and hopefully we will be going to Sweden on the 2nd January for 8 days, to celebrate my sister’s 27th birthday and my grandfather’s 90th!

Vikings in Spain? A medieval market in O’s village this summer – fortune tellers in Viking runes (alphabet)!?

Lesson learnt: PATIENCE! Make sure that your online reservation / payment has not gone through before trying another alternative. And book through the plane companies’ web-sites when possible (that’s what we ended up doing with our tickets to Spain from Puerto Rico as well - American Airlines had the cheapest tickets!).

And maybe we will all get Christmas presents this year…

You might remember this plant, that we saw in the dry forest, Guánica, a few months ago… It has tree-like flowers that sprout high up in the air and once they finish blooming, the whole plant dries up and dies.

Well, today I was looking through our photos from Spain this summer, and what do I see – the same plant in a photo from O’s village (bottom right-hand corner)! I showed it to O and asked if he hadn’t recognised it… Nope!

But the question is – what is the plant called? I never know how to search for plant and flower names on the internet – I have tried describing it in a google search but I never have any luck. Same goes for bird names…

I like playing around with the sepia function of the camera:

I have realised though that sepia needs clouds – a sepia-coloured sky without clouds (or in this case too many clouds) isn’t interesting, it’s just too flat… The Rotunda, Guggenheim

Tarot readings – only $20

I love the lit-up Blackberry screen in the girl’s hand, underneath the Roosevelt Island aerial tram and the Queensboro bridge in the background

Cozy Corner flowers

The Ritz Diner where a blog brunch took place in November 2008, between 4 Swedish bloggers, three husbands and two American-Swedish daugthers

New York fire escapes

The Queensboro bridge again

The Met

The Met, again

Amazing to know that some of my relatives probably passed through this hall on Ellis Island 100 years ago or so

All the stories these luggages could tell us… Ellis Island

The view from the 38th floor