apples and onions

if you are ever sitting in a floating sauna in the swedish countryside, sweating your head off in 90C heat, and you are playing the game apples and onions (also known as roses and thorns), where you pick the highlight and lowlight of a certain past period of time, it is always better to say the onion, or lowlight, first. even though i like onions. when i play this with my campers during the summer, i like to have them say their lowlights first, so that they can then be completely overshadowed and taken over by the highlight. so, looking back on the past week, here is a game of apples and onions. onions first.

i am an idiot. the morning of the sauna was, and i quote, the best day of my life. jokin, but not really. we went to stay at johan's country house and his parents made us this ridiculous swedish breakfast and then we went to the sauna, floating on a mostly frozen lake, and spent 20 minutes dying of heat exhaustion before plunging into the icy lake, which was cathartic and terrifying and amazing. the point is, the heat is supposed to open your pores and all the bad stuff (toxins but also, i like to think, stress and negativity) is supposed to leave you, and then the freezing water is supposed to be this shocking cleansing agent and you're supposed to feel all renewed and stuff. and i was, trust me. in that tiny sauna on that massive frozen lake outside of stockholm where there was a wood stove and a dog to play with and a head scratcher (one of those half-whisk things that massage your skull and OH MY GOD HEAVEN) i felt a kind of peace (don't laugh) that i haven't felt in awhile. it wasn't new or completely unfamiliar--but different.

so while all the stress of trying to straddle the atlantic ocean (i've given up, actually) disappeared, so apparently did my sense of logic and reasoning. because later that day, in the afternoon of the best day of my life, i realized i had left my passport on tucker's desk in copenhagen, a 5 hour train ride away. i realized this, of course, while trying to check into my flight from stockholm to milan monday afternoon. i called tucker and god i love him but his stoic response of "...did you need this...?" was the perfect start to a whirlwind 48 hours of operation get into denmark without a passport and take a metro two flights multiple buses and many tears home.

so that was kind of an onion. another onion was that i almost got arrested by a danish metro officer because i'm sorry that i cannot read danish (it's a character flaw, i know) and did not know that the piece of paper i had on my person was actually a receipt and not, in fact, a ticket and i have only been in copenhagen for 12 hours and most of this was spent wearing tucker's sweatband and watching family guy (to be fair, i'd already done the whirlwind copenhagen tour a few days earlier, after stockholm but before the country house, so i felt entitled to a night of quagmire and bitch stewie [get my episodic reference?]) and i was not actually trying to smuggle drugs into the metro just because i had a wallet full of kroners that i didn't have time to exchange back and NO I DO NOT HAVE A DANISH SOCIAL SECURITY CARD BECAUSE I AM NOT DANISH. I AM NOT DANISH. I AM SORRY, BUT I DON'T LIVE HERE. FOR THE NINTH TIME. AND AGAIN. FOR THE TENTH TIME.
that was another onion. nothing sets me off more than when short men who look like hitler think their dumpy metro uniform makes them TOUCHED BY A HIGHER POWER TO MAKE THE LITTLE PEOPLE BENEATH THEM MISERABLE.

but apples! there were so many.
1. suzanne was in stockholm. this was clearly fate, and meant that in a span of 5 days and two cities i was hanging out with a high school friend, a college friend, a camp friend, and italy friends, which was ridiculous. and we went to an ice bar, in which we put on these massive furry parka things and bumped into lots of other people wearing parkas and drank out of ice cups and just lived our icy lives.
2. johan made reindeer and we watched titanic. that there is no better man in this world than the character of jack dawson = apple. that he does not actually exist = onion.
3. the sauna, duh.
4. seeing my skinny friend tucker (he claims he eats alot but this is simply not true) in copenhagen, which i could tell was a wicked hipster, progessive and awesomely liberal city despite the freezing rain.
4b. christiania, the seventh smallest country in the world, which is a micronation inside copenhagen and has only three rules: no violence, no hard drugs, and no weapons. which means a lot of love, people. and hash. and love. and weed. so love.

and more. there were the two little girls posing like mannequins in the window of the hard rock cafe in copenhagen (something my sisters and i used to do ALL THE TIME); drinking coffee in a stockholm prison from 1300; the hilarious multi-story swedish club we went to where literally every girl was a legitimate supermodel (not joking) and we were in a corner in our jeans and cardigans laughing at this; the train back from copenhagen where we sat across from one (1) cat in a carrier and two (2) dogs. not sure if this was allowed.

so in conclusion, there are many apples in scandanavia. some onions, too, but onions are good. especially if you sautee them and eat them with ketchup. (call me giada, but that is my specialty.)

oh i forgot! my luggage is kickin around in rome still. but hey. just add ketchup...