I can’t remember when I last smoked. But when I saw this public ashtray in Copenhagen today, I was instantaneously reminded of what it was like being a smoker. Now, I wasn’t a pro smoker like my father, who could easily puff his way through three packs a day. But admittedly, I was a party smoker and I partied a lot back in the 1980s and early 1990s. But once Elle was born, I pretty much quit. These days, only on an extraordinarily rare occasion does the very concept of smoking enter my mind. That said, I still vividly remember the sound from when opening up a pack of Marlboro Gold Pack Lights, lifting up the wafer-thin metal foil, and the distinctive smell of tobacco that arose from the 20 neatly packed cigarettes. I have a few other evocative memories from that era. None of which I can share here.

Being neighbors with Copenhagen (and Kastrup) is an excellent reason why Malmö continues to be an attractive place to reside. Today, I took the train over Copenhagen’s Central Station, Københavns Hovedbanegård, and walked in the Sunday sun to Kødbyen where I saw an absolutely mind-bending immersive, challenging and, ultimately, creatively inspiring exhibit by visual artist, filmmaker, and Professor at the School of Media Arts, The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, Jane Jin Kaisen. Wow! It’s so rare for me to feel the way I did when viewing her work. For more info about Jane’s exhibit, click here.

More or less on a mid-week whim, Charlotte I went to a tiny jazz concert together with pals Michael and Gg last night at Hotel Duxian in Malmö. The place was packed and the three-piece band, Johanna Jarl Jazztrio, was jamming with Johanna on lead vocals, Sven Erik Lundeqvist on piano, and Aaron Mandelmann on bass. Interestingly, the older I get, the more jazz resonates with me on an emotional level.

I don’t each much bread these days, but once in a while, the craving for chewy sourdough or Italian Focaccia overpowers my sensibilities and I indulge with a vengeance.

The above is a photo of today’s lunch, one of my staple dishes, an Egg-Salad-Salmon-Avocado- Sandwich. Its amply accessorized with garlic and chili-marinated green olives, cucumber, and a cluster of sliced cherry tomatoes.

The Focaccia was fresh from the baker’s oven and absolutely delicious. I first covered it with a thin layer of Hellman’s creamy mayo and a dab of Dijon mustard. Before serving it to Charlotte, I topped the sandwich off with a sprinkle of black, Japanese sesame seeds.

This Resurfaced was captured near the train station in Kyiv, Ukraine in 2021.

It’s been almost a year since the unbelievably tyrannic, hostile, and war-mongering Vlad invaded Ukraine after amassing troops on his Belarusian dictator pal Lukashenko’s border.

The other day here in Malmö, I spoke with a young couple from Kyiv. They both live here temporarily (just like the Ukrainian family we have housed in our co-op’s guest house) but miss family, friends and the life they so drastically were forced to leave behind about a year ago. It was the second time in a week, the first being in Bansko at our hotel, that someone from Kyiv told me that cafés, bars, and restaurants are starting to open up again in the capital.

How will this war ever come to an end? How will Putin ever accept an uncompromising retreat, i.e, defeat without losing face? A seemingly unsolvable conundrum.

The only feasible solution is if he and his closest pundits and allies are peacefully or forcefully removed from the Kremlin. But I’m not hearing of any such shifts in the works.

In any case, it was brave of the eighty-year-old Biden to covertly take a 10-hour train ride from Warsaw to Kyiv and back. It strikes me as interesting that the Russian armed forces haven’t taken out Ukraine’s rail system. How hard can that be? What is the strategy behind that decision? Questions, questions.

Here’s an another Resurfaced from Sofia. The whittling process, choosing which images are “keepers”, usually takes a few reviews. I’m guessing that I’ll have about 4 or 5 left once I’ve gone through the whole batch. That’ll do fine for a book about this project.

As fun and inspiring as it was to go skiing last week, I missed my early morning gym sessions 4-5 times a week. I typically wake up at 05:00 am and slowly get ready for the 7-minute walk to our neighborhood sports center, Kockum Fritid. I have a doctor’s appointment this morning in Lund, so today’s gym session was short but sweaty. The view above is what it looked like at 6:05 am today. The big red rig to the right is some kind of press used during Malmö’s shipbuilding era.

I try hard to visit train stations wherever I travel. So, when I heard Bansko had one of Bulgaria’s smallest and was functioning (albeit with a minimum of arrivals, departures, and destinations), I just had to check it out. Perhaps not the most spectacular train station in the world, but it certainly has an amazing backdrop of the Pirin Mountains.

In late 2021, just as the pandemic was tapering off, Charlotte and I had an interesting fall remote working as “digital nomads” from a sleepy seaside town in Croatia called Zadar.

We made friends with a few folks while we were there, among them was Richard, a fellow nomad from the UK. One afternoon while chatting in a local bar, Richard mentioned that he’d spent some time in a relatively obscure ski resort called Bansko in the mountainous region of southern Bulgaria.

As Bulgaria had been on my bucket list for quite a while and I hadn’t skied since our last visit to Chamonix in 2019, I was intrigued. So here we are after an uneventful night’s flight to Sophia from Copenhagen.

We’re in Bulgaria to produce a story about the UNESCO World Heritage-listed village Bansko, the co-working scene, and what it’s like on the slopes.

After last year’s visit to Albania, several trips to Croatia and Greece, and a short stay in Serbia, I’m digging the Balkan Peninsula more and more. So far, the folks we’ve interacted with here in Bansko come across as being friendly, soft-spoken, and genuinely helpful. This is to be expected since this is a popular tourist destination among skiers from Great Britain, Romania, and neighboring Greece. But still, the politeness doesn’t seem contrived or forced. It’s there, somewhat hidden underneath a layer of shyness, which I find to be a positive characteristic of folks from the Balkans.