The family came by today! Every single person in the Swedish Pivic clan visited, so check the pictures available here and the film [MOV, 2MB], where Emelie goes on a ride.

A few days ago, Mikaela and I visited two of her friends, Patrik and Staffan, who have a wonderful summer country house a little bit outside of Tierp, which is located roughly a couple of hours of train-riding from our home. The trip there was nice, yet it took a while for me, the city-boy, to get used to the bugs, spiders and animals who were bigger than I (and wanted to eat me). I got stung by wasps and bitten by gad-flies, which hurt. We had a lovely time; Patrik is the perfect funny, bitchy Stepford Wife and Staffan is a very nice guy with a very fast sports-car.

We dined in the evening, drank lovely drinks, ate grilled meat and totally disagreed on whether Sweden should keep the monarchy or not. Hell, as long as people who are born into power and get money for doing practically nothing (update: cutting ribbons and holding speeches is the definition of "nothing" when they get a lot of millions for doing it) except abusing their power (explanation: the king isn't allowed to speak out on political issues, yet does so often) and invoking their privileges as often as possible. And well, I guess that the fact that democracy and monarchy can't really co-exist is a little number in its own. Oh, how I hate the monarchy.

The day after the food-and-wine-orgy, we all went swimming in the sea. The day was gorgeous, and we all had a very nice time. The lads took us on a tour of an old town, where we saw a house as it looked appx. a hundred years ago, visited a furniture shop, went to a little flea-market-house where Mikaela picked up some really nice china and we all drank coffee and ate raspberry tarts. And I actually met two kitties during this little trip. One was very plush, while the other was very starved and tired-looking. I hate people who get cats only to just let them out into the wild open when they've gone tired of them. Fuckers.

The trip home was not fun in the least. I was dead tired as I slept poorly in the country. I woke from wafting a wasp from my face, and the make-shift bed didn't help, but I suspect my drinking probably did its fair share as well. Speaking of sleeping, Mikaela and I will quite soon invest in a Tempur mattress. After getting one of those, I think it will be hard to sleep on any other surface.