Ahhh, I'm back from Sweden and it was SO beautiful. It's really hard for me to believe that I allowed myself to get grumpy toward the end of my stay last time. I guess I got sick of the bad weather, but a springtime visit and a reunion with friends hammered home just how amazing a country it is. Right now all I feel is gratitude.
During my visit, I was too busy to blog— we wrapped up the Bonnier Publishing Program 3.0, and many long hours went into the final presentations. I'll deliver the details of the "Dragon's Den" exercise in a minute. Is the suspense killing you? Good, I'll hold off a little longer.
For our final BPP segment, we returned to Thoresta Herrgård, which is breathtakingly, obscenely beautiful in spring. It was sunny almost the whole week, the temperature a perfect 68 degrees, with eye-popping quantities of flowers blooming all over the place. Unbelievably, I forgot to bring my camera! I was so used to just snapping pics with my Swedish iPhone (I'm back to Blackberry-land—which is a really boring place—until the new 4G iPhone comes out next week) that it didn't even occur to me to throw one in my bag.
Anyway, since I don't have photos I'm going to draw some mental pictures to cement the memories. I felt extremely sentimental about leaving Sweden this time around. When I moved home in March I had the idea that I'd be back in a couple of months, but now I'm not sure when I'll be in Sweden next. And spring is the season that makes the rest of life in this country worthwhile. Seriously, you get a whole year's worth of splendor in a few short months. That sounds like a lame bargain, but the vernal beauty is so great that it sustains people through the dark winter. Right now it's the opposite of dark: the sun goes down at about 11:30 pm and starts rising around 3. The sunsets last for hours and the darkest part of night is merely the deep blue of twilight. It's just so gorgeous out that sleeping makes you feel like you're missing something. So, I accordingly made sure to dance until "dawn" on four different occasions during the week-long trip!
So, now, let me share a few mental snapshots with you:
*Upon my arrival in Stockholm, I took an early morning walk through the city and came upon a churchyard ablaze with lilacs, elderflowers and horse chestnuts. All these trees and bushes that had been dormant through the months I lived in Sweden sprung open in a frenzy of life. The lilacs were the biggest and most splendid I'd ever seen! Everywhere, 10-foot-high bushes packed full of fragrant purple and white blooms.
*Vasaparken, near my old apartment—normally empty but for a handful of children bouncing on the orange mountain, and maybe hockey players practicing on the rink, was transformed into a summer hang out spot for hundreds of sunbathers, soccer players and cafe-goers. In fact, all over the city, little parkside cafes which had been shuttered for the winter turned into all-night barbecue joints, beer gardens, and dance parties. It seems that as long as the air is warmish and no rain is falling, no one in Sweden wants to go inside, ever, except to sleep!
*Ah, Thoresta: The country inn with its rolling hills, now vibrant with foliage. It was hard to concentrate on work with those hills all around. All I wanted to do was gallop a horse across them. And the sauna by the lake: Despite my initial horror at the idea of getting naked with colleagues, I finally buckled and got into the hot house with a few of the women on my trip, who I now count as friends instead of just coworkers. We sat sweating and drinking icy beers next to the wood fire with a giant window overlooking a lake. And when things got too steamy, we leapt into the frigid 15-degree water and went for a heart-stopping swim.
*And then there was the camaraderie of hammering out our final projects and the sadness of bringing the program to an end. Huddling in the conference room all day over our computers, we felt at first like we'd never be done in time, but in the end things lined up just perfectly. I was especially in awe of some of the other teams' projects—in particular an online memorial project which initially struck me as a strange idea, but turned out to be the most convincing pitch by a longshot. And, so, who won the Dragon's Den competition? Well, it turned out not to be such a competition after all—we kind of all won. The memorial project stole the show with a heart-wrenchingly good presentation. The kids' site was the sure thing in my mind, and indeed, the dragons loved it. Both of these projects are being accepted for further examination by the R&D department. The "amazing Web site machine" is being developed as a special project by Dagens Nyheter. And the project I worked on, the fashion site, will be considered as part of a new launch by Bonnier Tidskrifter, the Swedish magazine company. But even if none of the sites we pitched actually ever launch, the interest and, well, gratitude the management team displayed made the work worthwhile. It sounds weird, but they actually seemed touched by the amount of effort we put into developing ideas for the company—it was such a refreshing and wonderful response to get from our bosses.
*A visit to the fabulous Östermalm apartment of Miss Ebba Von Sydow, who has startlingly similar taste to mine and owns several of the design pieces that I covet. For instance, we drank champagne and ate strawberries sitting on Hans Wegner butterfly chairs—my favorite chairs, ever.
*Dinner at Nedre Manilla, the historic Bonner home: This was my second visit to Manilla—the first being for the press conference for Sweden's Grand Journalism Prize. But this time was an intimate dinner for the graduates of Bonnier Publishing Program and the top management. Manilla is home to a remarkable collection of art—mostly portraits of authors published by Bonnier from the 1800s until today. Jonas and Carl Johan gave us a tour of the house, and I so enjoyed hearing all the family stories and publishing anecdotes associated with those paintings. It really made us all feel like we are somehow a part of this amazing family's history.
*This image is a bit of a collage of the beautiful people in Sweden: My colleague Madeleine, who is a dead ringer for Alicia Silverstone, done up for the farewell party in a rock-and-roll sequined tank top, a flowing salmon-colored ball skirt and tousled hair. Jonas Bonnier showing up to host the "Dragon's Den" with crazy spiked hair, flowered socks and purple shoelaces. The hoards of beautiful teenagers at the Stureplan nightclubs the week they graduated from high school.
*In fact, there's another stand-out image of those teens the day school let out: Hundreds of screaming teens bouncing to hip-hop beats and drinking beers (yes, it's legal) while crowded onto flat-bed tractor-trailer trucks. Each school had its own truck, and they all wound around the streets of downtown Stockholm, tricked out with dancefloors, sound-systems, fake trees and graduation banners, swaying with the collective joy of all these ecstatic kids who had just ended the first phase of their lives. Stupid things make me emotional—I teared up at the graduation trucks several times. They were all just so damned happy!
*And speaking of happiness, let me not forget the best day of my trip, when I rented one of the Stockholm city bikes (Remember the famous deal? $26 for the whole year!) and cruised in the sunshine around the perimeter of Djurgården, the stunning island designated as Stockholm's "central park." Words can't really do the views justice: the rolling green hills, the ancient city rising across the water, the idyllic Victorian mansions overgrown with flowering vines, the goddamned fairytale swans bobbing in the water, the horses galloping through meadows... The beauty was so magnified it seemed nearly hallucinogenic.
*And then, before I said farewell to Sweden, I took a ferry with my friend Tanja out to a tiny island in the archipelago called Sandhamn, and spent a night reveling with sailors, stumbling through the sand in very high heels, and drinking champagne on the boat of a very dumb 22-year-old reality TV star. Sandhamn is like the set of a Pippi Longstockings film, with little red and white houses set on narrow, winding dirt roads. Except it's also home to a couple of extremely good restaurants, a not-too-shabby hotel and a rollicking party scene. Oh, and it's also an official stopover on the Volvo Ocean Race: sailing's most prestigious round-the-world event.
Seriously, I wasn't ready to leave. It was sunset in the archipelago when I rode the ferry back to Stockholm: a fairyland of cottages trimmed in white, with regal sailboats and huge cascades of lilacs. Goodbye, Sweden. Goodbye, bleak roe and pickled herring and kanelbullar and köttbullar and all the other bullar. Goodbye, minimalistic home design and ridiculously stylish, 6-foot-tall blond people. Goodbye, good friends and amazing, life-changing work experience. Thank you, thank you, thank you. I will miss you so!
