recap: the road to departure I

I mentioned it before. My life during the weeks leading up to my departure to Burkina Faso were chaos. I ran from place to place and task to task and barely had time to sleep. And I probably didn’t do a good job with anything, not with research preparations nor with socializing with friends. I wasn’t completely present anywhere.

I took photographs, though, and some of them were even quite nice. Or they told a story. I had thoughts of what I should write about them, when I took them, but then I never had the time to actually compose any blog posts. So, I’ll do that now instead. While sitting on the porch of our Ouagadougou guesthouse, in the 30 + degree heat. While the motorbikes, people and chickens out on the street and someone listening to Angélique Kidjo (or someone very like her) in the house next door creates the Sunday noon soundtrack.

My mom had a party in the end of August, and Kirke’s dog Zorro was there. He quickly found a spot where he felt he fit in.

This was just before Natalia left for Scotland and her royal art school in Glasgow. Three years she’s going to be away. I should be used to us being in different places, ever since highschool graduation with her travels in Southeast Asia and Bolivia and mine in North America and studies in Uppsala. But still. Who am I going to watch TV shows with now? We didn’t even have time to finish the first season of Twin Peaks now before she left. I’ve heard of people watching films or TV shows while at the same time being connected via Skype. Maybe that’s what we should do, once I get back to better internet connections. Really embrace this globalized and digitalized world of ours.

I’ll definitely go visit her in Scotland too, though. Nothing can replace a real Natalia hug, or just lying on a couch, eating artichoke and drinking port together while watching something corny like Pushing Daisies or unnecessarily rich like True Blood or Game of Thrones. I like Scotland. I like Natalia even more.

* * *

One weekend, I went to Uppsala to have dinner with Hanna, the Ph.D. student whose work both me and Elli are going to build our work in here in Burkina. She’s on maternity leave now, but being the incredibly generous person that she is, she invited us for dinner in her and her Burkinabe husband’s home, so that we could talk about our work and ask any questions that we might have about Burkina Faso. Hanna’s baby was amazingly cute, as babies usually are, the Burkinabe food that her husband had prepared was delicious, and their general overwhelming positivity toward our work and our trip made some of our worries go away. It was really nice of her, to let us come.

I arrived a bit early to Uppsala, though, before the dinner, so I decided to take a walk though my old neighborhood, from my brief time as a Uppsala peace and conflict research student.

I biked though this park, down the hill from the Uppsala castle, every time I went to the city center, or choir practice at Västgöta nation (sorority?), or to the department. It was beautiful then, in the fall when the trees turned red and yellow and the birds in the pond were being fed by old people, while the water in the Fyris river leisurely flowed by under the Iceland bridge. It was just the same now.

There were still roses blooming in the botanical garden, situated just a couple of blocks from where I used to live, even though it was already the end of September. Fall was uncommonly mild this year.

This is the apple tree where I stole most of my apples that Uppsala fall. Oh, how much apple sauce I made. My whole kitchen was covered in apple rings drying on knitting needles balanced on cups. My apartment smelled of apples from September to November, I just couldn’t let them lie and rot there on the ground, it became an obsession of mine. Taking care of all the neighborhood apples. Night-time ventures into gardens, picking the fallen apples, filling endless bags with them, and then precariously transporting them home on my bike. Thinking back on it now, those apple adventures are among my fondest memories from my time in Uppsala.

Sadly, no one as apple crazy seems to be around now to take care of this season’s yield.

Stadsskogen, the city forest, situated just down the street from my house. Here, I ran together with Svante, the certified hiking guide and crossfit training fanatic who tried to get an outdoor training group started in our very big class. Most times, though, I was the only one who showed up. I guess political science students aren’t very outdoorsy people. And it couldn’t have been particularly rewarding for him, training with me, because compared to him I was incredibly unfit and also not particularly driven in my training. I just thought that it was nice to be outdoors, after all the studying.

Supposedly, it was a great mushroom year this fall. I wouldn’t know. I never had the time to find out for myself.

Uppsala has uncommonly little street art for being a university town. Except for this, I didn’t see any throughout my entire walk.

I spent the night on Hannes’ couch in Uppsala, and had an incredible Sunday brunch at V-Dala nation together with him, his girlfriend Olivia and a friend of hers. They served everything from scrambled eggs and sausages (that I didn’t eat), to a salad buffé and even chocolate pudding with whipped cream. There are few activities that are more enjoyable than spending three Sunday midday hours slowly eating a outlandishly decadent brunch in good company. I could barely move, though, once we had to leave. Maybe it’s a good thing that I don’t live in Uppsala anymore. My combination of laziness and love for food wouldn’t fare well with the brunches.

In the afternoon, I went with Hannes and Olivia to have dinner with his family. Their beautiful ex-rectory home lies in the middle of the farmlands right inbetween Uppsala and Stockholm. The fields are being prepped for the winter. _MG_2125