Heeej!
David and I went to our getaway house for a few days and the day before yesterday I took photos of our entire day. It was such a great day!

Slept in, like most days here. Breakfast was two avocado toasts with lime, salt and pepper, and a couple of cups of coffee with milk.

Then I found myself in a glass vase.

After that we went to the beach. I spent many many summer days when I was a kid at this exact beach. We used to rent a house in the fishing village Vik, that this beach is part of, for two weeks every summer.
Vik holds a special place in my heart.

It was the most wonderful day! The sun was shining brightly and felt warm on our cheeks, the sea was calm unlike most winter days we've been here before, and I was so very, very happy to be there.

Such a happy gal!
By the way, I think I look very much like my mother in this photo. There is a photo from a couple of years before I was born when my parents were dating. It's the end of the 70s I think, they certainly are dressed like it anyway, and they are on a picnic together, just the two of them. In the photo my mother is smiling brightly and lovingly with a boiled egg in her hand, and this reminds me of that. I think it's partly because my hair in this photo looks like her shorter hairdo did back then.

If you walk by the sea here you'll cross everything from beaches with stones all over, huge cliffs, large rocks like this and then you reach the sandy beach. That's one of the awesome things with Vik. The nature changes for every step you take and it's breathtakingly beautiful every bit of the way.

It's important to make time to step from stone to stone a little when you're here.

I was matching the surroundings perfectly that day in my grandmother's old suede coat, a thrifted velvet skirt and a circle scarf bought at an outdoors market in Amsterdam a few years ago.

Footsteps in the sand. Both human and dog feet.

Found a perfectly situated bench. Felt like I sat in a painting.

Hej!

And hi to David who was photobombing in an very cute way.

We strolled up from the beach to the footpath because our walk wasn't finished yet.
And this, by the way, is a recurring thing when David and I are out walking: I stop to take pictures of something interesting I see along the path and when I look up David is far ahead. Oh, that looks kinda nice; let's take a photo of him walking. Oh! Now he's even farther away! David! Wait for me!
Repeat over and over again.

Our next stop on our walk was this old bunker.

Inside it looks tidier than you would imagine. The door David is going through leads to a pitch dark circular room. You can see more of that room (and me with demon eyes) here.

Ah, daylight!

We were on our way to a really cool abandoned house. Not this one though. This is a fishing shed.
But the house we wanted to see turned out to be gone. So gone that you couldn't even see a trace of where it used to stand.
We went into it in 2009 and took some photos and it was so amazing! A newspaper from the same year we were born (1981), cups from the 70's left to dry on the kitchen counter and old containers for products that have changed designs many, many times since.
So dissapointing that it's not there anymore. We had plans for that house!

The large tree is an alm tree. Almost every alm in this part of Sweden is dead like this one. They all caught a disease many years ago and the ones that are still standing look like this. Beautiful and somewhat scary tree skeletons.

When we walked back to the car we could feel a change in the wind. It got quiet. And a bit darker. Like rain was on its way.
And the ocean looked bluer than ever.
When we drove by from afar we could see rain pouring down on the sea where we just were. And the roads were wet like it had just rained where we were driving. I love that we missed it by minutes just by walking in the right places when the rain was elsewhere in the area around us.

When we got back to the house we were tired from all the sun and air. I even got some new freckles!
We ate some fish stew left over from the day before, and then I had coffee and instagrammed some photos from the beach.

Then we squeezed together in the sofa and slept like this for an hour.

In the evening we lit the fireplace and a bunch of candles and cozied up under blankets in the livingroom.
I ate knäckebröd with mackerel in tomato sauce. The most Swedish thing to eat ever, I would say. So tasty. But apparently it's an aquired taste because people outside of Sweden seem to think it's disgusting. Well, they're wrong. It's amazing.

Then we played Backgammon. Lots of Backgammon.
David is thinking very hard in this picture.

And this is me in strategy planning mode.

And that was tuesday. A great tuesday.

Hope you liked to tag along.

Until next time:

Tjingeling!
/Lotta

Hej!
Am I back from the stupid cold now? I frickin' hope so!
I thought I was cured on monday. Silly me. After working a day and hanging out with a friend one evening and also going for a walk it was like my body was screaming STOP HURTING ME I'M NOT WELL YET! So the day after, it started all over again.
So the quiestion is; am I back to health now? Who bloody knows!

Since I haven't been outdoors much in like, forever, I have been looking at photos from late january and early february when I actually was a very outdoorsy version of myself.
I realised I had quite a lot of photos I wanted to blog so here they are. In a post that shows how different winter in Sweden can be from day to day.

We'll start this post by going back to the end of january when David and I went to Österlen for a few days. Österlen is a part of the very south of Sweden. We always try to visit the sea at least once every time we go to Österlen because it looks so different every season.
This day the waves were rolling in, the water was high and it was windy and not very pleasant. But the nature looked awesome! Like a movie set! the colours, the textures, the mood; I love it!

It was David's birthday and we had planned to stay indoors for the rest of the day and eat cardemom buns (that I made as birthday gift for David) in front of the fire and play videogames. But before that we wanted to get a bit of air and adventure.

In the summer- green reed, standing proudly, waving in the air.
In the winter- yellow brown, wet hair on the swamplike ground.

When I edited these two photos I spent at least five minutes just staring at the colours, zooming in to look at the blury perfection in the back and the sharp tree branches in the front. It's music to my eyes.
And also. Anyone else thinking of the incredibly sad scene in the Neverending Story when Artax dies?

That moment when the wave is curling in on itself.

One day we woke up to frost.

We were going to Simrishamn to have breakfast at a café we visit at least once everytime we're at Österlen. When we got there the frost had already melted away. This is Simrishamn by the way. Cutest town ever.

And the morning when we were going back to Gothenburg again I looked out the window and saw that the world was covered in a layer of ice crystals. I ran out to snap some photos, of course!

Everything is pretty in a layer of ice crystals!

And now for the snowy part of Swedish winter weather.
I already showed you some photos from early in february when David and I went to the forest Iglekärrs gammelskog in hope of making a film. I had my camera around the neck as part of the character I was going to play so it was inevitable that I would snap photos of everything that day.
Let's take a look at a bunch of those, shall we?

It was very cold. As you can see on David's hands here.
He couldn't wear his gloves most of the time because of the touch screen on the camera and also because it's impossible to press tiny buttons when wearing thick gloves.
We were very brave against the cold that day.

David, the camera monster.

Can't get over how much snow it was that day!

And off he goes into the woods.

I think this was the second day we came here. When it no longer was freezing temperatures and snow melted from the trees and landed everywhere around us with a thump.

The lens fogged up a little. Then it looks like this.

And here I am, running through the forest with my cape dancing behind me.
(Unlike Madonna, I know how to move around with a cape without falling. Just saying...)

And that was that. Four different kinds of Swedish winter weather in one post.

And I prefer none of them. But they look quite pretty on photo, don't they?

Tjingeling!
/Lotta

Hej!

Yesterday David and I couldn't wait anymore! We wanted to go film in the woods, snow and cold weather be damned!
So we put on lots and lots of clothes, packed the car and went to that place I told you about in my last post.
We thought it would be less snow in the woods because of all the trees... HA! Stupid city folk!
There was so much snow! And nobody had walked there before us so it was all untouched and incredibly beautiful.
We had planned for a film set in a mossy green forest but this, this was just even more amazing!

The long walk was tricky but beautiful and I had to stop and take photos along the way.

Look at my feet. Yeah.
We hadn't even reached our destination yet and they already looked like that. I'm not really known for my weather appropriate (appropriate schmappropriate) clothes and even though these particular shoes are my most responsible ones they are not meant to hike in snow like this for hours...

Trees were bowing under the heavy snow.

And on top of the hill there was a little red cottage.
I am so curious how in earth they got the material up there to build that thing! There are no roads and the paths are sometimes very tight. I just don't get it.
It's perfecly situated on top of a hill with a wonderful view over a lake, so I definitely understand wanting the cottage at that exact spot.

An old house structure (or something like that) with snow covered stairs.

Hard to see but the small path goes underneath that fallen tree. We could stand underneath it with the tree barely touching our heads.

It was so extremely cold though and after a few hours it was impossible to keep the longing for warmth out of our minds. We kept going for another hour or so. Coffee and fried egg sandwiches helped a little but after four hours it was just not happening anymore. We could no longer feel our feet and hands, more than an instense aching, and it felt really weird to walk on feet that didn't know when they touched the ground.
So we gave up for the day and went home.
We promised to return as quickly as our shoes had dryed and that will hopefully be tomorrow.
The weather is supposed to be warmer then. Yay for our hands and feet, but possibly not so good for the beautiful scenery.
We'll just have to hope for the best.

When we came home and shredded our cold and wet clothes in favour of warm and dry ones, we heated some soup and cozied up under blankets for the rest of the evening. It is quite interesting how the body feels extremely cold at the same time as the skin feels like a furnace.

And if we go back tomorrow we will experience it all over again.

(I'm thinking of covering my feet with first a pair of socks, then plastic bags, then another pair of socks on top of that to keep the wet snow from reaching my feet. Ingenious, right?)

Tjingeling!
/Lotta

Hallå!

Notice anything different around here?
Larger photos, new links on the side, new font and so on.
I am also working on some bigger changes of this place, but we're taking it slowly so it won't be a big reveal, you'll just notice new stuff happening over time (maybe a little reveal, if I can't contain my excitement).

Anyway! David and I have been scoping out forests lately. We were in a hunt for the perfect location for some filming, and we think we have found it!
Then the snow came and destroyed our weekend filming plans.
So instead of spending the sunday filming we've been fixing with this site and eating pancakes. Not too bad, but lets hope the snow melts away soon so we can get to work!

First location to check out was the nature reserve Ängsgårdsbergen right next to the Botanical Garden here in Gothenburg. I had read that they had a group of Japanese pine trees that looked incredible on the photos I managed to google my way to.
So on tuesday we went in search of those.

We found them! And O'boy were they beautiful!

Such a great, moody feel to this place.
Sadly the area was a little bit to small for the project we had in mind. But we're definitely filing this in the "must film something here" part of our brains.

Slow dancing with a Japanese pine tree. Hands on its ass, of course.

When we happened upon a little stream I had to try my rubber boots in the water. They're doing their job perfectly!

And then there was an area of Japanes birch trees too. Also very filmic looking but way too small a place for what we have in mind.
But a neat spot for photos!
I made a cute little GIF that you can see here .

And then, on wednesday we went half an hour by car outside of Gothenburg, to Iglekärr Gammelskog that is one of the really old forests in this part of Sweden. We had decided that this was the place we wanted so we packed our car with camera equipment and I dolled up accordingly and had my cape on.
We didn't know what was waiting...

We knew beforehand that we would have to walk for a while.
This was the easy part.

Soon we were starting to get tired becuase the roads were very steep, it had started to rain, and we had a lot of things to carry (I hide everything under my cape).

And then it turned even harder. The trail pointed upwards, at many places the path was completely covered in water and we had to walk over rocks, roots and through thick vegetaion to reach the place we had read about.

But then, when we were so tired that we could hardly take another step and our arms were sore from all the carrying we started to get deeper and deeper into the woods.

We decided that Yes, this is the place where we're going to film but not today. It was starting to get dark and the wind had picked up around us. We needed to walk the long trek back to the car before it got dark because it would be impossible to find our way back without light! (Plus, my perfectly combed hair had turned into a more wet and wild style and that is NOT what we're after for this project!).
But first things first: Fried egg sandwiches and coffee!

We sat on a fallen tree trunk and ate our own packed excursion food, and I said to David: We have become "outdoorsy"! When on earth did that happen?!

The way back to the car went fairly quick because it was all downhill. Plus, we had the added strength from fried egg sandwiches and coffee!

So, let's hope for some mild weather in the coming week! We will not be able to make that trek with ice and snow underneath our feet, it was difficult enough as it was.
But that place, it was just magical! You'll see...