Recently I have this recurring thought: friends are the way to change your mind, to avoid getting stuck in habits and rumination. People connect for different reasons I'm sure, but this is mine. A day spent with a friend gives you a different perspective on yourself, new ideas to pursue and a different rhythm that persists for a while after you separate. The difficult part for me is that friends in this sense are really hard to come by. Not only do you need mutual appreciation and time but a shared desire to open up to vulnerability without one imposing on the other. This last part might actually not be possible to reproduce reliably. It's so easy to veer off into superficiality, which for me actually is not neutral but slightly hurtful, or into some sort of passion, where it becomes painful to be separated and makes the concerned people want too much of the other. I am grateful for the fact that I was able to reach this equilibrium with a small number of people. One of them is my friend N who has shown me around Stockholm and the Swedish mentality many times, alone as well as with his gf K, whose presence even adds quality to our encounters. To be able to like a friend and their partner is another of these unlikely events that cannot be taken for granted! Because of this friendship, I have decided to take my GF to Stockholm as one of my favorite places - in late Summer - and show her a bit more of my world. She liked it. The people and architecture are just different enough to matter to a casual visitor, the quality of life is high and because she let me design the whole trip it was very laid-back and chill. We were in more coffee shops than museums, ate more ramen than meat-balls and spent more time sitting than chasing around tourist attractions. She wanted to see [[Sodermalm]] and made me discover the footpath around the brewery and other industrial buildings all the way up to a view of the town hall and [[Riddarholm]] where they have what surely is the school with the coolest view in the universe. Our friends showed us around the old dock worker's quarters at night, scarce lighting and small wooden houses, hardly a soul in the streets, mysteries accumulating around the lifts the dockworkers had used to gain the harbor below the sudden cliff. The next day, my gf A started to feel weird. "Something is off in this city", she said. "Are you not feeling well? Did somebody make you feel uncomfortable?", I am worried. No, no, it's nothing. The day goes by like before, walks in green parks, coffee and cardamom pastry, the architecturally entirely novel [[Engelbrektskyrkan]], ramen. Nothing helps, the feelings are off. Maybe it's the geography of the city spread over many small islands? It might be that she's going to come down with the same cold I have been schlepping around. Too much coffee? Could be. The feeling gets stronger as our meandering carries us over to [[Sodermalm]] again. "The feeling is stronger here!" I tell this jokingly to K over chat who is entirely serious. "It must be because of the witch trials!" I am a sceptic. But as we walked around, A told me she had this feeling since N and K showed us the nightly [[Sodermalm]] around Sofia Church. By accident we find ourselves around there again and A is uncomfortable again. Towards the end of the 18th century, K explains, a group of women had been accused of witch-craft and burned next to Sofia Church. They even put a memorial up for the unnecessary prosecution of apothecaries and herb-women. A is relieved. That's what she has been feeling. Great injustice from the past. This is part of an ongoing discussion we're engaged in between the science-is-the-only-thing-that-works me on one side and the it-can't-explain-everything-we-need-to-keep-an-open-mind her on the other. "You cannot deny that I have been feeling things exactly where they happened". I can't and have to say it's stunning. What's more, I believe with Wittgenstein that everything we can think is potentially real so why not. But as long as we don't have experiments showing us lingering traces of past people that can still interact with a contemporary mind - I hold my breath. Luckily, our friends have plans for us that lead us outside of [[Stockholm]], to the university town of [[Uppsala]]. K had studied here and shows us the town with the knowledge and nostalgia you'd expect. I have always loved universities and here that life style is particularly pronounced. Students organize themselves in "nations", where they hang out, socialize, compete. Libraries and book shops are everywhere, buildings show that the city had been geared towards science for hundreds of years with the botanical gardens and general hospitals and imposing faculty buildings that I have gotten used to in Vienna. Behind the church which is the holy place of the [[Church of Sweden]], there is a small park filled with rune-stones. K has some knowledge about them and introduces them well. In reality, not much is known about them and their content was generally prosaic like someone honoring a brother's death or the construction of some bridge. But the names mentioned carry a lot of mystic might, amplified of course through current popular culture: Åsmund. Ingjald. Igulfast! Apparently there was a very talented rune wright by the name of Öpir here. At some point we are all tired and I ask too many questions. At the statue of a figure with a cane on a column I go: "Who's this dedicated to?" "That's the patron of pole dancing", N laughs I accept. Years ago, my friend F excused herself for not being a good tourist guide. I told her: just tell me stories, we write our own memories, the facts can be checked later. Writing these words I'm on the Swedish Runemap. It turns out the fellow's name was [[Jakob Ulvsson]], the founder of the University of Uppsala in [[1477]]. What do you think will be easier to remember? Uppsala Cathedral is on a hill. When you descend on the south side, you see an arched passage and street made famous by [[Ingmar Bergman]] in possibly the most depressing Christmas movie ever suggested to me: [[Fanny och Alexander]]. The depressing part happens in the house of the man of faith marrying a young actress and taking her and her two children to his home reigned by perverse austerity before the series resolves in possible the most pardonable [[Deus Ex Machina]] in cinema. That house is the [[Upplands Museum]] that you find if you follow the streets to the fountain of [[Saint Erik]]. "Legend has it", K points to the fountain, that when King Erik was killed on top of the hill, his had rolled down to here and a fountain sprung out of the ground that could heal people. "Would be great if it still had water", I say with dry humor, because my cold is solidly obnoxious. [[Saint Erik]] was one of the great people of history, I learn today, who brought Christianity to Sweden and went on a crusade against the Finns, who apparently kept swearing they'd convert when they needed help against foreign armies and as soon as they left, just wouldn't do it and then got killed in [[1160]]. On the way back we cross a bridge for a selfie and K tells us about the canoe competitions held here every year, the festive atmosphere, the joys of student life and I imagine the cheering crowds along the riverbanks that are rather quiet today. Would I have come here under any other circumstances than curating a well-balanced friendship, my trip to [[Uppsala]] would have been mostly done in that small coffee shop in the street leading up to the castle called "Arrhenius". [[Svante Arrhenius]] was a highly interesting character, involved in the creation of the Nobel Prize, where he favored friends and blocked his enemies, was involved in eugenics and racial hygiene as well as the development of contraceptives and won the Nobel prize himself for showing that solid salts disassociate into charged ions when dissolved. He also found the relationship between atmospheric CO2 and temperature, in other words the greenhouse effect, which is probably the reason for using his name on this shop. On their card they're selling a "Mexicano" instead of "Americano" "What is a Mexicano?" The guy is clearly a student and happily explains: "Our boss thought, if Trump is going to rename the golf of Mexico, we are renaming Americano".