I have not in fact become an entirely virtual person!

[liv]

In the last few weeks, I have actually been doing some socializing, though I haven't always posted about it.

• Third Meal chez BB, which was convivial as ever.
  
  
• Met up with some friends of my parents' who were over for a conference. We had coffee and some excellent chocolate cakes at Chokladkoppen ['the cup of chocolate'], (which is actually a gay café but then so are most places in the Old City because the Village is right in the middle of the most touristy area). Then we wandered into the trendy district of Södermalm, the south island, to see if we could find anywhere to eat. Ended up at the Fenix, which is the sort of place that if it were in England would be painfully cool, but is actually really nice. Not cheap, but not vastly expensive by Stockholm standards, and the food is well above average. I had salmon with sweet potatoes and saffron sauce, which was exquisite. I am not yet bored of consistently superlative salmon.
  
  
• Finally finished the moving at work, and went out for a farewell meal for the last day of our formerly double group being together. It wasn't terribly successful; the weather all day had been unbearably high pressure and humid, so everybody had a headache (and some were feeling sick enough to cry off altogether), and we were all moody and stressed by the move as well. We went to Snaps on Medborgarplatsen, which is more or less the equivalent of Leicester Square, always seething with beautiful people having nights out. The atmosphere is very nice, with a lovely terrace and a delightful genuinely old interior, like eating in the Great Hall of some castle. But the food was dreadful, basically overpriced hamburgers.
  
  There are good reasons for splitting the group but we are going to be impoverished by no longer working together, both professionally and personally. Most of the colleagues I'm closest to socially happen to be in the half that has now moved into the main building. Hopefully we won't lose touch altogether.
  
  
• Got invited to lunch last Saturday; spontaneous lunch invitations aren't really a big tradition here, which is a shame. I'm pleased that this person, who is originally Israeli rather than Swedish, which probably makes a difference, decided to make an exception. She's an anthroposophist, apparently (this is something to do with Steiner, I learned), and took me to an anthroposophic garden.
  
  
• Met up with smhwpf on Tuesday. We had coffee in the covered market on Östermalmstorg, which is a lovely venue (gorgeous 19^th century brick building, sort of St Pancras style), but the fare was disappointing. The cute little Austrian patisserie is normally reliable but they served us orange juice out of a packet and hot chocolate that was lukewarm. We went straight on to Örtagården for supper, which is a cute little Edwardian tea room of a restaurant above the covered market; they even have live piano music. And their buffet is reliably excellent and generous, for about £10 a head. Finally we headed over to the Old City where smhwpf knew of an authentic Irish pub (of all things to be lurking in the middle of the Old City of Stockholm, as opposed to a tacky Irish bar which are as omnipresent here as in any other city)
  
  
• megamole is visiting next week so I'm looking forward to another fun evening out.

Oh dear, I am so babbly. I was going to do this as bullet points, at least in part because I've hurt my finger, in a completely minor way but it makes typing rather uncomfortable. But I ended up describing everything in detail anyway. Oops.

By the way, I'm screening anon comments just in case some troll thinks it would be amusing to scatter HP spoilers on random journals. So if you don't have an LJ account, you'll have to wait for your comment to appear. I'll go back to my usual open status once Potterdämmerung has subsided a bit.

Comments

[curious-reader.livejournal.com]

You seem to have a fun time.

I managed several times (not recently) to cut my finger on sheets of paper. It is often sharper than my knives.

[redbird]

I know you're not entirely virtual. Were I not sitting at papersky and rysmiel's computer at the instant, I might suspect that I was.