I just published my new photography book with visual impressions from over 25 years of visiting Österlen in southeastern Skåne. There are some sample images from the book over here: www.raboff.com/osterlen-book

Don’t get me wrong – I love our Condo-by-the-Sea. Sixteen years of sunsets, sea breezes, morning and evening swims, and the occasional seagull serenade have etched themselves into my daily life. When we’re here, it’s home in every sense of the word.

And yet… I won’t – can’t – quit traveling. It’s what I’ve done professionally for the better part of my career as a working photographer – and for a couple of decades before that.

This year alone, I’ve checked into 19 hotels in six countries.

Part of this “habit” may have less to do with me and my addiction to hotels and more to do with my marriage and collaborations with Charlotte, my better half, who is an online entrepreneur. She eats, sleeps, and breathes hotels – particularly boutique hotels. Charlotte runs the popular site www.hoteladdict.se, which is basically her 24/7 addiction to all things hotels.

Still, I wonder: is it the surface-level allure – fresh sheets, tiny shampoo bottles, the anonymity of a room – or is it simply that I’ve aged out of hostels, guesthouses, and camping, and so travel and hotels are inherently inseparable?

Planes take you places – hotels embrace you once you’re there. They’re little cocoons of safety and comfort – sometimes an oasis when you’re visiting a bustling metropolis, sometimes even a safe house.

Maybe it’s the novelty – not knowing how a hotel will perform in relation to what we’ve read, whether glowing reviews are spot-on or wildly generous. Or whether someone forgot to mention the construction project next door… something that’s happened on a few occasions.

Whatever the reason, I’ve accepted that my urge–addiction, lust, call it what you will – for hotel living isn’t going away anytime soon.

And because every good confession deserves a list, here are five things I look for when booking a hotel:

1. Is the bed comfortable? Hotel beds are far from perfect, but they are usually decent. Nowhere near as comfortable as ours, though.

2. What’s in the minibar? A treasure chest of overpriced curiosities? Is there at least complimentary water?

3. How is the lobby? Equal parts catwalk, living room, and sociology experiment?

4. Is there a gym? These days, the hotel has to have a gym or at least be in the immediate proximity to a local gym.

5. Is there a co-working space? Is there a quiet space in the lobby, or can we borrow a conference room to work in?

   The image above is from a now-defunct hotel that we stayed in a few years ago in the legendary ski and spa resort Bad Gastein, way up in the Austrian Alps.

Lisbon is on my mind today. The news from the Elevador da Glória – a funicular we’ve ridden up and down that extremely steep, narrow cobblestone street between Restauradores and Bairro Alto – is heartbreaking. Lives lost, families changed forever.

Charlotte and I have lived and worked in Lisbon long enough to have enjoyed the city’s everyday hustle and bustle. But also the tiled facades, mornings that smelled of freshly ground coffee, the breeze coming off the river, evenings when that steep street came alive with excited voices bouncing off the ancient buildings that line it.

Because I’ve shared a little of Lisbon’s ordinary life, this tragedy lands deeper within me.

That’s why I believe travel matters. Not the checkbox kind. Rather slow travel with time spent, names learned, a few words of the language stumbled through, small routines adopted.

When we let a place get under our skin, empathy isn’t an idea anymore – it’s a reflex. We don’t mourn “the news”; we mourn people, streets, neighborhoods that feel familiar.

Hoje, sinto muito, Lisboa – today, I feel with you. May those lost be held in memory, and may the city I love find strength again.

I just came across this image in the Kockums Fabriker archive. I shot it in one of the many factory workshops I documented, most of which have since been obliterated. While it didn’t make it into the book Varvsstaden, all those stickers brought me back to the summer of 1988, when I worked as a dockworker unloading thousands of boxes of bananas in Göteborg’s harbor.

Each box weighed about 20 kg, and I typically unloaded between 1,500 and 2,000 boxes per day — the equivalent of roughly 30 to 40 tons of bananas each shift.

About a decade after that humbling summer job, Charlotte and I moved to Malmö – just as, coincidentally, the importation of bananas also shifted there.

Here’s my writing spot while here in Greece. I’ve written chapters of “The Aging Man’s Survival Guide” and “Phobias & Fears” in this exact corner – first in the fall of 2023 and then again in the spring of 2024, when we were here producing a story about the concept of health travel and this fabulous sports hotel.

My corner is quiet, cool, and comfy – without too many distractions. While writing, I typically listen to relaxing electronica broadcast in decent quality from Soma FM’s Drone Zone channel. Soma FM is out of San Francisco and it’s been my go-to station for more than 20 years.

Depending on how focused I am, I write 4–5 hours a day, seven days a week. Yeah, it’s both a calling and a curse.

Currently, I’m working on a chapter about the spring and summer of 1988 when I was a dockworker in the harbor unloading boxes packed with unripe bananas for Banankompagniet, the Swedish company in Göteborg that at the time imported all bananas to Scandinavia.

It was a tough, honest, and well-paid gig that allowed me to save enough money for a six-month trip to Southeast Asia that fall.

I’m fascinated by how many details I still remember from nearly forty years ago. And when I only have a few fragments of retention, I’ll often reach out to old friends and acquaintances to see if they recall some detail that I feel needs to be included in a particular scenario or episode I’m writing about.

I still get a real kick out of making books. There’s a rhythm to it – a steady pulse that begins with an idea, swells through weeks of editing, and finally slows into the quiet satisfaction of holding the finished piece.

The square 21.5-centimeter format has become a favorite – perfectly balanced for single-page compositions, yet generous enough to let panoramic, double-spread images breathe wide open.

Above all, making books that share my love for places – landscapes, cities, and corners of the world I’ve visited more times than I can count – feels like a calling unlike any other I’ve known.

I have at least a dozen more books ahead of me, and right now I’m deep into one about Österlen in southeastern Sweden. It’s a place I first set foot in back in 1998, armed with one of the earliest pro-ish digital cameras: Canon’s DSLR D30, with a whopping 3,1 megapixels and a CMOS APS-C sensor.

Compared to my three-year-old iPhone 14 Pro Max, with its computational wizardry and intelligent image processing, the D30 seems prehistoric. Yet those first frames still carry a raw, unpolished charm – proof that it’s the eye and heart, not just the gear, and certainly not the megapixel count, that creates the image that tells the story.

Yesterday, I shot the background image for this chapter’s collage at Copenhagen’s Central Station – a place that always feels like a portal. Standing there, with the clatter of trains, feels like I’m already en route to somewhere else entirely – leaving landlocked Scandinavia for a place where luck and serendipity tend to write my most memorable stories.

You can order my books from:
• Adlibris by clicking here
• Akademibokhandeln by clicking here
• Bokus by clicking here
• Amazon.com by clicking here

The best thing about dining in Stockholm? All the dive bars and no-nonsense restaurants. The places with sticky floors, laminated menus, cheap beer – and seriously good food. I’m talking about spots where the lights are maybe a little too low, the music’s a little too loud, and the service is fast, friendly, and refreshingly unpretentious.

Last night we hit up Verona along Ringvägen, on Södermalm and a proper old-school Swedish pizzeria completely free of fluff. The pizza? Crispy, cheesy, and flavorful. The pizzasallad? Mama mia. Tart, crunchy, addictive. Places like Verona don’t scream for attention – they just quietly earn your loyalty. Long live the world’s real-deal restaurants!

Photo: Charlotte Raboff