Swedish shrooms

My parents pick a lot of mushrooms. They served me food with mushrooms, and they also had large parts of the house converted to mushroom drying stations.

Autumn trip to Stockholm

I spent every single day of vacation I got this year on a 10 days vacation in Sweden ending last week. It was nice, and it has been 8 years or so since I last visited Sweden in the autumn. The general image of Swedish autumn is that it is cold, dark, and rainy. That is how it started, but there were some nice days too.

Central Stockholm in the background

We saw some kids walking in the high grass, which was deemed suspicious.

One good thing about going there in October is that no one is on vacation in October, so you can find everyone you know. I usually go in the summer, since that is the best time to visit Sweden, but then lots of people are on vacation and you cannot find them.

Falling water

This time I ended up spending the first 40 hours with my brother's dog. My brother and his wife were going to a concert or something, so they asked me to look after the dog since I "don't have anything to do anyway". It was nice to hang out with a dog again, though he did seem to think we should start the days awful early. We walked around in the nearby forests.

Some of my mother's roses were still going strong.

People taking not only pictures

Now our Ginko trees inside the university has started dropping their fruits. Lots of old people come and collect these. They are said to be both healthy and tasty. They smell really really bad, though.

Taking pictures of people taking pictures of leaves

Today the weather was very nice, so there were lots of people photographing leaves inside the university.

Autumn colors

It is now cold and the leaves of the trees are changing color. This is apparently a big deal in Japan, and many tourists come to Hokkaido to see trees with leaves that change color (tourists from the far south of Japan or Taiwan are common, and their trees do not behave like this). This means that there are lots of tourists with huge cameras taking pictures all over the campus.

In Sweden, leaves turn red or yellow just like here, and I have never considered it an interesting happening like people seem to do here. "It is so beautiful" seems to be the basic thinking here, while most people I know in Sweden think more along the lines of "Oh no, it is Autumn again. Which means cold, rain, dark, ..."