Viking life was hardly the lap of luxury. The houses were quite sparse, dirty, cold, unappealing. I decided that the Viking age is really quite a bad time period for a romance novel. Maybe I should read a few viking romances and see how authors deal with the problem. Thursday we walked around the adorable town of Lund, viewing its famous cathedral and crypt with Finn the giant and his wife holding up the pillars, before driving south to the Foteviken Viking Museum. Perched on a hill overlooking a choppy sea between Denmark and Sweden, the viking village consisted of a handful of reconstructed viking houses inside an earthen rampart. It was very cold and very windy and only one viking was in attendance, though he was quite knowledgeable and spoke six languages. He let me hold his sword, but I didn’t get a picture.

Afterward we drove to Trollhättan, a pleasant city just south of Lake Vattern, on the Göta Canal, and stayed in a swanky hotel where we could send laundry out to be cleaned, since laundromats are not to be found.

Not only was my flight cancelled, forcing me to stay overnight in an airport hotel after sitting on the tarmac for five hours, but I ran out of romance novels three days ago and can’t find any more in English in the bookstores. Corpus Bones! I read the first third of Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell by Susanna Clark on said tarmac, but it isn’t nearly as engrossing as the reviews say it is. Set in England during the Napoleonic War (a few years before the start of the Regency period), the novel is about two magicians politicking in a country of theoretical magic. It is written in that humorous British style full of asides and anecdotes, but it lacks any passion. There is nothing like a good passionate romance novel to speed away the boring confinement of flying. I shall quite simply go mad with boredom during tomorrow’s fifteen hours of plane flight. Hopefully tomorrow there will, at least, be a flight!

The weather has been horrid. Rain, rain, go away, ciaralira wants to play… We stayed Monday and Tuesday night in Vaxjo at an odd little hotel that locked the door at 6. Tuesday was spent in the Emigrant Museum, which was short on exhibits but made up for it with an impressive research library. My mother searched the records for her ancestors, while I read A Wrinkle in Time by Madeline L’Engle. It was much, much shorter than I remember it, but just as good. I read it in about an hour, and was faced with the prospect of five more days, including another loooong plane ride, with only one more book. Ack!

The drive from Vaxjo, on the eastern side of Sweden, south to Karls-something-or-other (left), along the coast west to Lund, was lovely. We had lunch in the aforementioned city of Karl, famous for its 17th century naval architecture, and while its coastal views were nice, it didn’t stand out in my mind like Stockholm and Lund did. Lund was a beautiful university town full of bikes and cobblestone streets and old architecture, pretty little pedestrian thoroughfares and cafes and fashionable shops. We stayed in another funny little hotel with a tiny room and a bathroom in the hallway, that served breakfast in bed.

At dinner my mother struck up a conversation with the couple at the table next to us. They were architects and were able to tell us about the repressive planning regulations that keep Sweden so rural and picturesque. Apparently they plan for the good of the whole at the expense of the individual, but it looks a hell-of-a-lot nicer than American sprawl. I, as usual, contributed little to the conversation. My mummy told me never to talk to strangers. Ha!