While Absolut may be Swedish, the local hard liquor is aquavit. Like vodka, it’s distilled from potato or grain, but flavored with herbs such as caraway seed, cumin, fennel and coriander. It burns like turpentine on the way down, then explodes in a subtly flavored bouqeut. The name, derived from the Latin aqua vitae, means ‘water of life’. Which, in short, pretty much sums up my overall view of all vodka’s relatives.

The Swedes also have a number of local beers, most notably Spendrups, a light lager. The city’s formerly strict licensing laws led to a slew of beers with relatively low alcohol content, but the recent easement of such restrictions has birthed new, visually and gustatively identical, brews, which contain up to three times as much alcohol. Makes for great games of liquor roulette.

###

Supposedly, Stockholm’s subway system is copied off of New York City’s – down to the width of the rails and the wiring of the electrical system. Still, the cars and platforms are new, perfectly operational and exceedingly clean; in other words, absolutely nothing like New York’s at all.

###

As I had hoped, there’s a certain type of tall Scandinavian blonde female that abounds here. Unfortunately, there are as many ugly tall Scandinavian blondes as hot ones. What a disappointment.

###

As my brother and I walk one way, a beautiful six-foot-tall Swede walks past in the opposite direction. I turn to my brother and say: “quick, you hop onto my shoulders, and we can go back and hit on her.”

###

Sure, the allegory of Babel might imply it’s a sign of impending doom, but for lazy Americans, the world standardizing on English as lingua franca makes things far, far easier.

Plus, the resulting conversations never fail to thrill me. Earlier today, in the Royal Palace, the exchange between a Swedish guard and a Chinese tourist, about the age and origin of a nearby tapestry, put even the best Laurel and Hardy routine to shame.

###

Finally, Stockholm and Sweden itself: I don’t know why I never noted this before, but it seems this city and country aren’t a real land mass at all, but rather a loosely confederated archipelago of small wooded islands. Twenty-four thousand – 24,000 – small wooded islands. Excuse me?

Despite this lack of solidity, Stockholm is remarkably beautiful – often called the ‘Venice of the North’, it looks to me more like Amsterdam, though with wider, prettier canals, and fewer pot cafes.

Other parts of the city remind me nearly of Toronto or Vancouver – quieter and friendlier than American cities, but a real city nonetheless. A city with a feel and daily flow comfortable enough that I could even imagine escaping here on a more extended basis. No, I’m not expatriating to Stockholm any time soon. But, when I leave tomorrow, head across the Kattegat and down into Copenhagen, Denmark, I’ll be more than a bit sad to leave this little collection of islands behind.

A Fortune 500 CEO once famously quipped, “if you never miss a flight, you’re spending too much time in airports.” Clearly, I am, as I’ve never once missed a plane. This is the influence of my mother, a woman who not only always arrives two hours before any flight, but also arrives as much as a full hour before movies, just to guarantee prime seats.

Thus, after childhoods of her training, my brother and I show up to the nearly deserted American Airlines terminal slightly before midnight on Friday, stroll through check in and security, mosey past rows of closed duty free shops, and pull up to our gate an hour and forty-five minutes before departure.

My perfect plane-catching streak continues.

###

Note scrawled down while waiting in boarding area:

Girls with British accents: Yes, please.

###

As I’m a terrible, terrible plane sleeper, I try something I’ve never done before: I pop two sleeping pills as I board the JFK to Heathrow flight. My brother does the same, then jokes about the possibility of us passing out from their effects on the walkway just outside the plane’s door. Instead, we make it all the way to our seats before dropping into deep, uninterrupted sleep for nearly the entirety of the six hour flight.

###

We wander around the concourse of Heathrow’s Terminal 1, too groggy to go through with our planned Guinness pint. We also pass on sandwiches at Pret a Manger, a stop suggested by my parents, who discovered the sandwich chain while passing through Heathrow one week prior. I don’t mind skipping it, however, as there’s a branch downstairs from my Manhattan office. Several others of the British stalwarts on the concourse – Thomas Pink, FCUK – have locations within walking distance of my apartment as well. Homogenize the world enough and one place is nearly indistinguishable from any other.

###

The customs line at Sweden’s Arlanda Airport is long but exceedingly blonde and well-mannered. From there, we hop the Arlanda Express Train, and, on the twenty minute ride to the City Center, glimpse Stockholm for the first time.

Looking back through my archives, it seems there’s at least one sort of blogging I can consistently carry on while traveling: writing about the trip itself.

So, over the next week, as I explore Stockholm and Copenhagen with family in tow, I’ll be writing about it here. I’ll aim to post every day or two, and if historical precedent bears, each will likely be a collection of snippets, rather than a single long narrative account.

##

The cast of characters: me; my parents, who have been in Norway for the past week already, and are now en route to Sweden; my younger brother David, who, in turn, has been here with me in NYC for the past week.

The plan of attack: David and I subway to JFK tonight, hop on a 11:30pm British Airways flight to Heathrow, drink Guinness during a three hour layover, then hop back onto a BA flight to Stockholm, arriving at 5:40pm tomorrow.

The mission: for the Sweden leg of the trip – find the Swedish Bikini Team, the Swedish Chef, or, at least, some Swedish fish.

If anything derails my best attempts at regular blogging, it’s time on the road. Away from home, my life is usually too chaotic to regularly fit a significant stretch of daily drafting time – an unfortunate necessity for a writer as painfully slow as I. Then, even once I return, the work piled up in my absence still keeps me away from the keyboard.

Which, in short, is an oblique apology for the late lack of content. But if I don’t want this already desiccating site to shrivel up and die completely, blogging-while-traveling is a skill I’d best pick up, fast. I head out of town, yet again, to Sweden and Denmark this Friday evening, then return to New York just long enough to unpack and repack for the Toronto Film Festival, which will take me away from home until mid-September.

Don’t get me wrong; I’m thrilled to head out into the world. As Seneca observed several millennia back, “travel and change of place impart new vigor to the mind.” It’s just that, these days, I never seem to have quite enough time to fully consider one completed adventure before being flung into the next. Perhaps, then, it’s William Hazlitt’s more recent (just centuries old) quote that’s more apropos: “I should like to spend the whole of my in life traveling abroad, if I could anywhere borrow another life to spend afterwards at home.”

“Every now and then go away, have a little relaxation, for when you come back to your work your judgment will be surer. Go some distance away because then the work appears smaller and more of it can be taken in at a glance and a lack of harmony and proportion is more readily seen.”
-Leonardo Da Vinci

Off to the airport to escape for the weekend. Assuming I can find internet access, blogging to continue apace.

The north of Israel is a land of cellphones. For towns that still lack plumbing in large percentages of the houses, routing phone lines is a definite second (or twenty-second) priority. Which is all to say that getting online isn’t particularly easy – it usually depends on the good graces of shop and restaurant owners willing to unplug their credit card terminals for me to log on. That makes checking email tough, and blogging nearly impossible. So, my apologies for the recent lack of posts.

That said, here a few more random thoughts that have bouncing around in my head during the spare moments in our long, long, long shooting days:

ï You know you’ve been gone for too long when you have to look up your own office telephone number.

ï “When the country falls into chaos, patriotism is born.” – Tao Te Ching

ï The Arab citizens of the Galilee maintain the gift culture of their forefathers – compliment someone’s shirt, and he’ll literally offer it to you off their back. The region’s Jews, similarly, being largely of recent Eastern European extraction, come from a world where a four course meal is happily presented to guests as a light afternoon snack. Let the two cultures cross-pollinate long enough, as they have here, and any time you walk within 100 feet of someone’s home, they’ll empty their refrigerator onto their porch-front table, refusing to let you go until you’ve eaten with them, until you’ve drank several cups of the strongest coffee in the entire world.

ï About that coffee: As Chris, the film’s director, this morning pointed out, when we arrived nearly a month ago, it seemed undrinkably strong, like condensed espresso mixed with day old coffee grinds. Now, it seems just about right. Combine that with the Coke ubiquitously served with meals, and I’ve somehow gone from an essentially caffeine-free diet to more or less mainlining the stuff. On days off, when we aren’t plied with cup after cup of coffee as we move from house to house, I find myself in serious withdrawal: migraine, light shakes. Returning to my New York caffeine-free life is going to be a bitch.

ï Shortly before I left for this trip, I managed to break my camera’s main lens. And, as I didn’t really have time to get it fixed in the whirlwind of frenzied pre-trip preparations, I convinced myself that I didn’t really need to bring it along, that I’d be fine simply grabbing occasional snapshots with my pocket digital. It has since occurred to me that I made the completely wrong choice. Still, I’m looking forward to the remaining handful of shorter trips to Sakhnin, as I suspect there’s a great and imminently publishable photo-essay to be found here.

ï Karmiel, the slightly larger Jewish city next to Sakhnin where we’re staying, is a great reminder of how little I get for the money in New York. Here, one of the players on the team has a huge three-bedroom house with mountain views from his backyard that he rents for about $500 a month. Dinner for four – with drinks and dessert – runs $50.

ï That said, Karmiel’s – and Sakhnin’s – cultural life leaves a bit to be desired. Outside of the soccer team, it seems to be mainly limited to watching goats. When our trip ends in a week, I’ll be more than ready to head back home.

In the hotel room where I’m spending the night, I can pick up someone’s wi-fi signal from the neighboring apartment; two weeks of dial-up was a great reminder that the internet really only changes your life when it’s always on, and moving at high speeds. No wonder AOL and Prodigy sucked.

That said, a few things I’ve noticed here in the past few days:
– Coca Cola is vastly better in glass bottles than in plastic ones.
– Israeli toilets have two levers, the smaller of which uses the lesser volume of water needed to clear out a ‘number 1.’ Growing up in similarly drought-ridden California, where the water-saving alternative was simply not flushing (as we learned in summer camp, “if it’s yellow, let it mellow; if it’s brown, flush it down), the Israeli approach seems a bit more appealing.
– While nearly ever restaurant takes credit cards, you can’t tip by card – you have to do so with cash. Presumably that’s to save waiters from paying taxes. If so, I’d happily boost up my tip by Israeli income tax’s 17%, because when most of the meals you’re paying for involve a whole documentary crew of people, having enough cash on hand to tip is a real pain in the ass.
– Also, it seems sushi bars have yet to catch on in Israel. Having recently eaten at one of the few in Tel Aviv, I’m pretty clear on why.

Listening to conversations over the past few days, I’ve found my long-forgotten (and, even at its peak, already remedial) Hebrew to be holding up much better than expected. I understand about every second or third word, which is usually enough for me to at least get the vague gist of the conversation.

Where that falters, though, is on humor – apparently, understanding jokes requires far better comprehension than I possess. And, while shooting interviews, that’s a problem – when someone’s best material falls flat, they’ll often try to explain it (or, at least, disclaimer it as an intended joke), interrupting the flow of the conversation.

So, to avoid that awkward situation, I’ve taken unconsciously to mirroring the expressions of the Israelis around me. When they look sympathetic or impressed, I catch myself doing the same. When they burst out laughing, I can’t help but do so to; at very least, I smile and shake my head knowingly.

Yet, while I usually feel like I’m doing a surprisingly good job of following along, in the middle of each faux guffaw, I can’t help but think to myself: actually, I have absolutely no idea what the hell is going on.