Yesterday was International Towel Day, a tribute to the ingenious work of Douglas Adams. Of course I had to show my appreciation.

Turns out, though, that I was the only Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy fan out and about on this particular Saturday evening. I went to play boule at a bar in a park with a couple of friends. Boule is apparently the new hip thing to do. And hip people don’t read humouristic sci-fi. They wear skinny jeans and have beards. Afterwards, we went to another bar, the one next to the Slussen locks (funny, really, that in Seattle, the locks are this huge tourist attraction – and in Stockholm, they are where drunk people go to pee on a tunnel wall). It was totally crammed with people, everyone was smoking and you had to shout to be heard. Don’t get me wrong, I usually really like this place. Yesterday, though, no one was carrying a towel. And not a single person even acknowledged mine.

So I walked around with my towel, my unique fashion statement, feeling silly and so off. I need to find nerdier friends.

Or at least start haning out at the sci-fi book store more often.

A couple of hours drive from Monrovia lies the small beachside town Robertsport. It is right on the border of Sierra Leone, and the mountainous landscape that is so characteristic of Liberia’s diamond rich neighbor carefully starts here.

This is where the big and important people from Monrovia come to get away. Naturally, this became our first day trip with mom, Hanna and Morris. You know, few things compare to rain forest trees. This grew more or less on the beach, where they just had opened a small camp ground at the Robertsport beach. It was covered with thorns and I was wearing flip-flops, but hey, I’m not made of glass. I’m made of skin and by the time I got down on the ground again, my feet, legs, hands and arms were covered with blood drops and tiny puncture wounds. I’m nothing if not devoted to trees, and the posing in different ways with them.They claim to have the best surfing waves in West Africa on this beach. I don’t really know anything about surfing, but they sure seemed exceptionally good for surfing. There were both beginner tourists on surfing lessons and semi-pro local boys taking advantage of the super long waves. Even I got persuaded to try some surfing, with the help of one of the local boys. Mostly, I just twirled around in the middle of the wave, being tugged behind the board. However, I managed to get up on one wave, lying on the board, and god. The rush! Like flying on the ocean! Now I understand the thing about surfing. I want to do it again!

Afterwards, I was exhausted. Lying in the shade, listening to the waves was about all I could do. I think they’ve had Swedish guests in the beach bar before. Dear, old Selma.

So, I’m applying for an internship at a ministry in Liberia. There is nothing certain about it, but if I get it and I go to Monrovia for a couple of months, Robertsport will definitely be my regular weekend spot, there’s no question.

The other day, I was talking to an old acquaintance of mine that I haven’t met for years. We were trying to set up a date for us to go take a beer together, and I said “You decide, I’m sure you have a very busy life”. He answered: “Well, yeah, but not busier than yours, surely?”.

And that got me thinking. I study full time, and am also ambitious, I read all textbooks from cover to cover and I go to all lectures. I am the president of the geo section’s student council, vice president of the faculty council and student representative in the department board plus three other faculty or university level councils. I work extra as a tutor. I almost never eat out, which means I spend a lot of time in the kitchen, and lately I’ve started going running every weekday morning, as a way to at least get some exercise. I haven’t read that many books lately, but I enjoy walking to places whenever I can and listening to podcasts from the Swedish radio. Which means that I keep myself updated on both world news and pop culture. I’ve also been following several TV shows this past season. Thirteen, if I’m being completely honest. It’s my way to unwind in the evenings. I also usually make sure to spend time with friends a couple of times a week, going on walks with Kirke and Zorro or eating dinner with Hanna, or why not go out dancing with both of them, having TV show marathons with Natalia and lately also having long discussions about relationships with Lina. This past winter, I knitted one sweater, a pair of mittens, two pairs of socks and a couple of smartphone covers. I also made more than 16 liters of apple sauce. All my Christmas presents were homemade Christmas candy or cookies. And I spend a lot of time writing on this blog, in my journal and editing my photographs.

I guess, when I list things like that, it looks as if I’m a pretty busy person. And in a sense I am. I rarely have days when I just hang around at home, doing a little bit of this, a little bit of that – except when I have my isolation days, lying in bed watching TV shows, hiding from all the have-to’s. It just feels like – all those things that I do, I do because I have the time. All the things that other people do, they do because they have to, because they are important, and because they matter. Therefore, I should adapt to their schedules. I usually say that, “You decide”, and then I end up having to read 100 pages of documents for the next board meeting well after midnight. Do I undervaluate my own time? Is that simply it?

I bough a computer today. A small one, that can sit on my lap and fit in a small backpack. It is actually smaller than most of my textbooks for school, which is kind of funny. Considering it can fit so much more than a book.

The computer is mainly for my summer activities. The plan is that I should go to Scotland with dad in the middle of June, then hop on the train and travel around Europe for a month, after which I will return to Stockholm and hopefully spend a couple of weeks at dad’s cottage. Then, it’s off again, this time up north, to the highest mountain in Sweden and the research station that my department runs there. A summer course in glaciology and quaternary geology. For these things, I need a laptop. My lovely desktop, with its beautiful big screen, does not fit in a backpack that I’m strong enough to carry.

But I feel kind of bad about it, too, mixed up with all the excitement of a new toy. I shouldn’t buy stuff. People in general shouldn’t buy so much stuff. It is bad for the environment and isn’t it kind of hypocritical of me to be all “save the planet” one day and then go buy a new laptop the next? It makes me feel kind of stressed. But, you see, the way I’ve rationalized it for myself is that one of the things I really enjoy about living is experiencing new things, especially while traveling. And I’m going traveling all summer. And what I like to do when I go traveling, is to take photos and write about it. That’s how I experience things, through pictures and words. And one of the few things I regret from my North America trip last spring is not having my own computer. That, and allowing the 21-year-old Germans partly spoil my experience at the horse farm in BC and letting Eric give me his cold on my last day in San Francisco. I always had to borrow someone else’s computer in order to move my photos from the camera onto my external harddrive and my tablet. And many times, that made me feel really uncomfortable. I don’t like losing my independence.

So, you see, it’s not the thing in itself. It’s what it enables me to do. – – – Gaah, who am I kidding? It’s a new toy and I’m just as bad as anybody else. I can’t deny that. Hopefully me traveling by train, instead of airplane, all summer will make up for my shopping spree in Mother Earth’s book of good green deeds.

The laptop is so cute. It’s got such a pretty greenish blue color, they call it Pacific Blue on the package and I guess, in a sense it fits – even though the Pacific of British Columbia was mostly gray, and in California a kind of pale blue. In my opinion, my computer is the color of the Baltic Sea. And I’m going call it Portia. (My desktop is called Ofelia. For some reasons, my favorite horses have a tendency to share names with Shakespeare’s heroines. And I like to name my computers after horses that I’ve loved. What that says about me, I don’t really want to get any deeper into.)

 

 

 

 

One of the few sights that people recommend in Monrovia when you ask, is the old Ducor Palace Hotel. Or what used to be. It was the first hotel built in Liberia, in 1967, and one of the few five star hotels in Africa for a long time. It had most things a classy hotel needs, like a pool, a French restaurant and an incredible view. However, it was closed due to the instability in the country in 1989, and during the civil was it was looted, sabotaged and filled with settlers that had nowhere else to go in the wartorn city. And now the disrepair is extensive.

A couple of years ago Gaddafi signed a contract with the Liberian government, with the plan to rebuild what had been destroyed – but then the Arab Spring came and now there’s only a couple of guards there, who, for a fee, can be persuaded to take you on a tour. A huge skeleton on the best piece of property in Monrovia.

The first thing that you meet when entering the hotel is this. It’s not hard to imagine the once upon a time splendor of this place.

 One of the 300 rooms. 

 The view from the roof terrace. West Point out on the sandspit, an area that I was told not to go to – it could be dangerous for an inexperienced white girl like me.

And that glazed tile. The color, clashing with the roughness of the bare concrete.

It was sad and tragic, but still, I couldn’t help feeling it was so incredibly intriguing too. There is an aesthetic with ruins that makes me go wild with my camera. It doesn’t make me proud of myself.

It is odd, thinking that the last time I traveled, I climbed the hills of San Francisco and forced the heat in Phoenix. The contrast could not be more obvious, in the Liberian capital Monrovia. It is the city of the white expat 4WD monstrosities and the Liberians on motorcycles. There are many houses that used to be beautiful, but it is clear that the funds to keep them up has not been around for a very long time. It is hot and intense, maybe not as big as many other African capitals, but enough to overwhelm a girl from sparsely populated Scandinavia.

Shopping there is an experience in itself. And for Hanna and me, all the colorful fabrics from Nigeria and Côte d’Ivore and China made our heads spin. I bought far too much and now I don’t know what I’m supposed to do with all that fabric.

In Sinkor, an area by the beach just east of downtown, all the houses are surrounded by high walls with barbed wire on top. This is where the expats live. The contrast between the roomy and air conditioned apartments and the bumpy mud road outside the gate is almost comical.

But only 45 minutes in crazy motorcycle traffic from downtown Monrovia, you have Silver Beach. The waves are too big for proper swimming, but the palm trees and the desertedness of it all still makes it feel like something taken from a travel magazine. And they serve delicious fish, maybe the best I’ve ever had. Barracuda fresh from the ocean to the fire onto the plate. Incredible.

 

 

I’ve started to feel pretty good about my thesis. Today, Lina and I sent out invitations to our almost-graduation party. I replanted the cilantro and the basil in bigger pots and tidied up the flowchart for the ArcGIS part of my thesis. I haven’t come up with the perfect conclusion of my huge thesis data mountain, but I feel confident it will come. I have made a day to day schedule for my Europe interrail trip that I’m going on as soon as I finish this bachelors’ stuff. I’m going to stay with Abbie in Cambridge, Maija in London, Max in Munich and meet up with Hanna in Belgrade.

Things are falling into place. I go to sleep far to late at night, but other than that…

And I’ve been thinking some more on the Liberia stuff, and decided to write some stuff anyway. It’s the traveling stories that I like writing about, and I have to tell something. I just can’t help myself.

So, here goes…

I started this blog almost one and a half years ago, and gave it the title Geographies of belonging. I liked the idea of it being called geographies something, since I’m a geography student, and I was going traveling. My thought was that I would write slightly philosophical texts about traveling and how different things can make you feel you belong or not. That it might not always be about the place on the map, but more abstract, spacial details.

However, I ended up just writing a straight, conventional travel log, and in the end mostly just publishing pictures and then writing small texts about them. Not very philosophical at all. I prioritized other things, I suppose, and had so many actual stories that I wanted to tell that I didn’t have any time to dive into the deeper stuff. Which is fine, my parents were happy and I have an amazing archive whenever I feel like being nostalgic.

But in a sense, this exploration of different ways to belong didn’t end by me returning to Sweden. I spent a couple of weeks in Stockholm, working at the Tax Agency, going to the summer cottage in the weekends – but then I moved again, this time to Uppsala.

And I’ve been thinking. There are many different ways to belong and feeling like you fit in. In Uppsala, I never really felt comfortable, as a student and at the university. I felt too old to be part of all the getting-to-know-each-other-activities, usually involving huge amounts of alcohol, in the beginning of the semester, but I didn’t really fit with all the older students either. They already had their circles of friends, and all their crazy Uppsala stories. At times, the nation and student club life in Uppsala felt like a cult, which the lone wolf in me couldn’t appreciate. I guess the peace and conflict studies not being as exciting as I had thought didn’t really help, either.

But there were other things too. That I liked the size of the city, being able to take the bike everywhere. Being close to the friends that I already knew but hadn’t met regularly for a long time because they had moved to Uppsala. Already during my first week in my new, wonderful subletted apartment, Hannes came by on a whim and I cooked him pasta and mushroom sauce and we watched Scrubs. And a couple of days later, Frida and Marita, back from their years abroad, came over for some apple pie – or was it soup? All those frequent visits made the place feel like home in no time, and in the apartment, among the apple trees in Kåbo, on my bike along Dag Hammarskjölds väg, studying at the Geocenter just two blocks from my house, running with Svante in the Stadsskogen forest, I felt I belonged.

I still think of that apartment sometimes, and miss it. It smelled so wonderfully of apples.

But, to get back to North America, I got that strong feeling of belonging a couple of times there too. The trip started so well in Edmonton, with Frida in I-House. I was so wholly embraced by all Frida’s friends – and even random people in the house that had no special connection to Frida. There, I wasn’t a guest. I was a new and interesting, albeit short-term resident. I’ve always seen myself as a person who isn’t really comfortable among strangers, one who’s conversations are unimaginative and stiff until I’ve gotten to know a person a little bit better. Well, this turned out to be completely wrong in I-House, University of Edmonton. (Sure, I still get these spells when I feel completely wrong and don’t know what to say in big social gatherings, but at least now I know I have it in me, and that the other stuff is only nerves.)

That’s why arriving at Time Out Farms became such a shock. I don’t think it really had to have ended up that way, not really, I loved the work with the horses and Diane, the owner, was just lovely, once I got to know her a little bit better. But she left the farm with Willie just a couple of days after I arrived to go to their cottage in the mountains for a week, and I was left at the mercy of the three German 21-year-old wwoofers that I just couldn’t get along with. I felt so strongly that they found me annoying, maybe due to my previous horse knowledge, strange and so extremely boring. They were this tightly knit gang and I didn’t fit in, no-one spoke to me directly about it but during our mornings working in the stables they talked German with each other and I felt like they were saying bad things about me all the time, second-guessing my work. I wouldn’t smoke weed with them and I preferred grooming the horses in the afternoons instead of sunbathing behind the main house or taking the car to the mall.

Then Diane came back and I met Jay, wonderful, amazing Jay – and he introduced me to Portia, one of the most intriguing horse individuals I’ve ever known. I got to ride a couple of horses a day and help Jay with the training, which was so amazing – but it also meant me spending almost no time in the house except for meal-times and lying exhausted on a couch in the evenings, reading Anna Karenina. Being so singled out for the riding did not make me more popular among the Germans, and I never really felt I could relax at the farm except for when I was in the roundpen with Jay.

The second farm, Whiskey Creek, was a completely different story. I was the only wwoofer there for almost my entire stay, and Lori, the farmer, might be one of the most generous people I’ve ever met. Already on my first day, I felt that she trusted me. She told me what to do on the farm, but never checked up on me, and she let me come up with routines that fit me. She took me to the movies and she let me tag along on a reggae concert, took me to dinner and movie night at her friend’s house and let me borrow her car to go see big trees and waterfalls. And the whole atmosphere of the place, I felt rooted and calm there, and it was like I filled a space, a puzzle piece that wasn’t really missing, but that blended in perfectly with everything else.

And the cities that I liked the best on my trip were Seattle and San Francisco. In Seattle, I couchsurfed with Miles, this low-key, music loving guy with the most amazing apartment and a way of being that made my fluttering, newly hatched couchsurfer heart just calm down, as if staying with a stranger was no big deal at all. And in San Francisco, everyone told me that I should move there.

Looking back on all these events, I realize what really makes something feel like a place I belong, are the people. The routines of a place, and if there’s room for me to grow, of course – but mostly, if there are people there that don’t question. People that think I’m interesting, and let me take my time.

Belonging isn’t about a place. It’s about a way of being, in relation to others.

I went for a walk. The moon had come out after the rain, it wasn’t cold at all, it almost felt like summer. And the smell. The rain, asphalt, fresh leaves and all the flowers. There are no words.

Walking around Skarpnäck in the dark, listening to Chet Baker, I felt present. Disconnected from everything not here.

And I wanted to share that with someone. However, I have a habit of deleting the numbers to people that I shouldn’t send texts to. I have barely any self-control when it comes to written words. There were a couple of contacts, deleted several years ago now, that I felt like extending a thought to. But I couldn’t. 

So I walked around, smiling like a fool, feeling light and open, all to myself.

*

But hey, if you think you know who you are and feel like getting unintelligible and sentimental text messages in the middle of the night after a light spring rain, let me know. Happiness is always best shared.

I woke up this morning with a headache. I think it’s the stress, and maybe a little bit of hangover and high/low pressure change in the weather. So I’ve spent my day lying in bed, feeling pathetic and talking on the phone with about everyone who would pick up the phone or call me back. After Natalia called and reproached me, though, I poured up a bath and added some bath oil in the water. Orange blossoms. It was supposed to be harmonizing. And I guess it was, lying there in the heat, reading Our tragic universe by Scarlett Thomas. My head doesn’t ache anymore and I feel all soft and limp in my body. Could be a lack of food too, Natalia told me to get a bath and then cook something really tasty, but I only did one of those things. It’s just that kind of day.

I don’t think there is going to be any point to this text, so I’ll just go on telling some other odd bits and pieces from my life.

A couple of months ago, Kirke made me install this app on my smartphone called Quizkampen. It’s a Swedish game app with questions ranging from science to entertainment and media, and you play against your friends duels. I like board games like that too, Trivial Pursuit and Who wants to be a millionaire. Well, now I’ve become addicted to this app, I always have a couple of games going and I’m starting to feel that I’ve  replaced my compulsive texting of strange and quirky messages to people who appreciate it to varying degrees with inviting them to play quizzes with me. It doesn’t help that I’ve turned out to be pretty good at it. Excepting the sports and TV game questions, I’m pretty solid. God, I shouldn’t indulge these kinds of pseudo-communication. I should finish my thesis, and then get a new life project.

Finally, rain! I’ve been waiting for this release for the entire day.

And now it’s pouring. Oh, I’ll have to take a walk later. There are few things that are better than the smell of a real spring rain, with the taste of wet earth and flowers in the air.

I’ve been thinking more about the writing about Liberia stuff. The thing is, now it’s more than a month since I came home and I feel I don’t even know what to write about anymore. Who would be interested anyway?

I guess I feel kind of uninspired today.