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.

Here’s the current collection of books I’ve published and been commissioned to produce since 2005. Counting the 5000 printed for the Chinese version of the World Fair edition of my 2010 book about Västra Hamnen and the 5000 copies produced of the “Vad Sysslar Du Med?” interview book, there could be about 25,000 books with my name on them “in the wild”.

The one project not included here is the satirical guidebook I produced with a friend using the pseudonym Sebastian T. Armstrong called “Penile Photography: An Authoritative Handbook To Improve Your Penis Photography”.

Now you might be asking yourself right now, how the hell did you come up with that idea, Joakim? Well, one afternoon in early 2020, after several jugs of cheap beer in a dive bar somewhere in downtown Malaga, my buddy and I were chatting about how absurd the whole dick-pic debacle was. We couldn’t grasp how men could think that a shitty photograph of their genitalia would do anything but repulse a recipient.

At some point during our marvel of the phenomenon of penis photographers, my friend suggested in passing that someone should write a manual for these sad men to help them at least improve their images.

Maybe it was too many beers or just pre-pandemic boredom, but it was then and there that we decided to produce a satirically-minded, yet genuinely helpful manual for all the penis photographers out there.

You can buy the kindle and the printed version of the book from the Swedish Amazon store here.

This a screenshot from the editing environment I’ve spent most of today in working on “Heavy Metal in Sieng Gong”, my latest book project. The new book will have about 150 pages and be the 20th thus far and the very first with photographs entirely in monochrome. The Gold Master should be ready by the end of this week and once it’s been handed off to my trusty book designer David, I can get back to editing the mini-documentary about the neighborhood on which the book is focused. While five of the 20 books have been filled with interviews and accompanying portraits, this one will be a mostly visual experience. That said, it will have a lengthy introduction for some context and to give readers a basic understanding of my fascination for Sieng Gong.