Crazy times. Getting ready to come back. Return Aug. 28, a year to the day since we left. Prospect of job-hunting exciting and frightening.
Here’s where we spent the last month or so:
MALMO
What Malmo looks like; that’s a bike counter on the right
We were in Sweden when Bergman died. I saw the news on BBC that morning and actually broke it to my friend’s girlfriend and her mother, with whom we were staying. Eighty-nine is old enough, the mother said. Later I read Woody Allen in the New York Times hoping Bergman had died in flat grey weather, the favorite shooting weather, he said, for all great directors. Woody wouldn’t have been disappointed. It rained all that week.
In fact it’s rained all summer in Sweden. The rain perfectly underscored the country’s sepulchral mood following Bergman’s demise. Soon newspaper stands all over Malmo and Lund carried pictures of the auteur under blaring headlines: Bergman Dood. It was the same in Copenhagen which historically at least is practically the same place.
COPENHAGEN
Rain, rain, rain, every afternoon it rained. We asked for it when we got to Sweden by claiming we were so sick of hot dry weather — the kind that pursued us from Turkey to southern Poland — that we wanted rain. Our friend Steve, with whom we stayed in Sweden, said we were in for it and he didn’t lie.
On the right that’s Steve, Tess and Marc in Copenhagen
AMSTERDAM
Houseboats; row houses; Rembrandt’s Night Watch, sculpted
It wasn’t until we got to Amsterdam that the weather improved. It improved so much the locals couldn’t believe it. Our first weekend there — which happened to be Gay Pride weekend — was three straight, I should say consecutive, days of cloudless warmth such as Hollanders never see, not even in August, usually. We took advantage by visiting most of the city’s many parks: Vondelpark, Rembrandtpark, Flevopark, many others. And by walking everywhere.
That’s a working windmill on the left; it’s also a brewery
In the Stedelijk Museum
GENEVA
That’s the Jet d’Eau to the right (459 feet high); and speaking of eau …
These are all over town, and the eau is potable
We spent three days in Geneva before hopping a train to Sion to meet our friends Flora, Uli and Martin for a four-day hike in the Dents du Midi. But that’s another story …
Geneva is beautiful and cosmopolitan. The Lake is blue and black and flows up the middle of the city to become the Rhone. Water is all over and gives the city a clean feel.
And of course there are the clocks … This one is famous:
In the end it was good to know Nashville (and Montana) were just around the corner …
ime on our trek the weather accommodates our desire for unobscured 
spectacle. To our left, just a little northwest from where we’re standing, rises the snowcovered eminence of the Dent de la Chaux, and to the north the unclimbed (by us) Haute Cime. Below we descend into a flower- and cow-littered valley that sweeps down to the Lac de Salanfe, the largest lake in these parts.
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