We walked through this nearby arid olive grove yesterday evening just before dinner. With their thick, twisted, and dense trunks, I think olive trees are among the most soulful of all perennial plants.

Maybe I think so because I also happened to be almost addicted to olives. Among the many options at the hotel’s expansive buffet are several kinds of juicy, marinated olives.

I’m kinda sore today. Not terribly sore, though. Not sore enough to keep me from putting my 60-year-old body through yet another sweat-drenching Core class. I’m such a masochist.

Yesterday, I started out with an early hour session in the gym, then a 1000-meter swim, and at 3:00 pm, the aforementioned Core class. Finally, before dinner, Charlotte and I went on a mountain bike ride to the nearby seaside village Kolymbia where I showed Charlotte the beautiful orthodox chapel above the harbor.

Back at the hotel and showered for the fifth time, I was absolutely famished. Neither of us is eating lunch this week, so among several other buffet treats, I enjoyed a generous serving of a classic Greek salad from the above-pictured tray.

There’s something about the Greek salad that goes mostly unnoticed outside of Greece. Even though it’s so simple and reasonably affordable to make – and always beautifully colorful and flavorful – a Greek salad is remarkably hard to locate unless you’re at a Greek, a Greek Cypriot, or, possibly a Bulgarian-Albanian restaurant.

At home or whenever we spend considerable time abroad, I’ll typically serve a Greek salad as a main dish for dinner once a week. Unfortunately, in Asia, Kalamata olives and decent feta cheese are hard to find and usually very pricey. I’m hoping that one day, just like what happened with avocados, olives, and feta will also be produced locally.

Here’s a recipe for an authentic Greek salad, known here in Greece as “Horiatiki” (χωριάτικη σαλάτα):

After an intense few days discovering Warsaw, it felt wonderful to start this week off with an hour-long workout at the gym. First, a 30-minute run on a treadmill, 30 minutes on a wide range of mostly upper-body-focused machines, and then a cooling swim in the sea.

I’ve been sober for 12 days now. Not trying to break any record and it’s really anybody’s guess how long I’ll be on the wagon this time around. But for each day that passes, I feel curiously stronger and more resilient when the inevitable thought or, temptation to have a beer, a glass of wine, or a tumbler with bourbon and soda arrives. Still haven’t opened any of the bottles of bourbon, whisky, or Champagne given to me by generous friends during our last gathering here in Malmö. Don’t miss the casual sipping and definitely not the binge drinking at all.

Even more fascinating is that I seem to have gained a nice buffer, a cushion of sorts, to help me escape from the grips of frustration and stress.

This is the salad the Raboff Wolfpack ate last night for dinner. Right now, Elle is on her way to Spain where for a few months she’ll continue her university studies remotely. So proud of her courage and willingness to take on a challenge.

Unless I’m in Greece, a good choice of different salads is surprisingly hard to find when I’m traveling and it’s usually the first kind of food I crave when I get back home. I just remembered that in the 1980s, while I was still living in Göteborg, I actually worked for a few months at a salad bar called Leonis.

Back in Eastern Europe again. I felt it was time to discover Warszawa for my third visit to Poland. Staying at a hotel down a hill from Old Town, near the Vistula River and the impressive Swietokrzyski Bridge.

After previous visits to Krakow and Gdansk, a visit to the country’s capital seemed almost obligatory (says he who has never visited Washington D.C.!).

Interesting fact: About 85% of Warsaw’s historic center was destroyed by the Nazis and meticulously reconstructed in the years after WWII.

While here, I’ll be focused on a new, somewhat autobiographical book project and dedicating my time before noon working on it.

As part of commemorating our wedding day on August 15th, Charlotte and I went hiking up to Kullaberg, a peninsula that stretches out from the mainland with several really nice nature trails and panoramic views of the sea and the village Mölle below.

It drizzled for most of our hike but we didn’t let the rain bother us from reaching the iconic lighthouse on the top.

As we neared Mölle on the return, the clouds scattered and a bright, warm August sun came out. We eventually went for a swim in the sea, then sipped on chilled Champagne before a wonderful dinner at the hotel.  After dessert, we went for a walk in the harbor and I took my drone out for a spin above the village.

I haven’t tasted a decent avocado in a long time. It’s as if the avocados imported to Sweden are the least avocado-tasting variant on the planet. Which probably means they are the cheapest to import and by implication the most profitable to sell. Screwed again. The avocado we had as a topping on tonight’s poke bowl was more or less tasteless, despite salt and lemon. The texture was fine, but there was just no flavor.

The giant avocado above is from Vietnam and I bought it for about SEK5 at a local market in Hoi An, a beautiful town in the central coastal part of the country. I’m old enough to remember when it was almost impossible to get a hold of avocados in Southeast Asia. Then came the avocado toast and the rest is history…

We lived on the outskirts of Hoi An for about a month and though we ate our dinners at a few different places around the neighborhood, breakfast was always something we made at the apartment.

I am slowly nursing my way back to healthy living again after what seems to be several months of extensive intemperance (again). It’s been a fun ride, for sure. But at 60, the physical and mental recovery time is increasingly wearing and tearing.

I got up early today and weighed whether or not to go to the gym or take a run along the beach. The weather conditions were optimal, so I chose the latter. It was a super-slow jog, yet I still somewhat miraculously managed to run 12.5k. I’ve been paying the price all day with pain in just about every joint and every limb. But the jog certainly helped disperse the clouds hovering above me and I’ve gotten a lot done today.

Seems like 2023 will be remembered for a string of colorful anniversaries…

Yesterday, someplace along the train route from Stockholm to Malmö, I realized that it was 45 years ago this summer when I relocated from Los Angeles to Göteborg. My mother had just passed away and my father, whom I hadn’t seen or heard from in several years, popped up out of nowhere like a springy jack-in-the-box and in a matter-of-factly kind a way, offered to move into our house and take care of me and my younger brother Tyko. If we agreed (and my father couldn’t see why we wouldn’t), he’d move in from the tiny apartment where he was currently living together with his two young children and their mother Adeline, the woman he’d abandoned my mother for some eight or nine years earlier.

My aunt Lillian and grandmother Agnes had flown over from Sweden to L.A. and took care of us during this turbulent time. Both were adamant about declining my father’s suggestion. Even I remember seeing how cynical the idea was and that nothing good could ever come from reuniting with him. Instead, we, brother Tyko and I opted to move to Sweden. I’d leave first and Tyko a few months later. Before long, I was on a SAS flight to Sweden where I’d begin a new chapter in my life.

In retrospect, with fort-five years worth of hindsight, moving to Sweden was the only reasonable option. It provided a healthy distance and above all, a necessary distraction from a childhood saturated with chaos, calamity, and confusion.

That’s not to say that I haven’t subsequently been forced to unpack, dissect and deal with all those years of turmoil and madness. But I am enterally grateful for having had the opportunity to move to Sweden and start fresh.

I put together a new page on this site the other day with images of all of my books. I even added links to where some of them can be ordered. I’ve posted more than 400 clips and short films on Vimeo and Youtube and I’m reasonably sure they’ll be around for a while. But it’s the 21 (and counting) books that I’m hoping will have the longest shelf life (pun intended) of all my creative output. It would be kinda cool if Elle’s granddaughter someday found a dusty old book of mine in an old box and asked Elle if I was somehow related to her.