Woke up at Erik’s, had the luxury of a shower with soap, shampoo and conditioner. Plus, Erik had an electric shaver, so I was able to shave for the first time in weeks! After some deliberation, I left the ’stache on. It looked pretty hilarious.
We ate a hearty breakfast of musli and yogurt, bread and cheese, and waited for Martin to wake up. We didn’t get any word from him that morning–he’d intimated a rough late night with Hanna in our group chat–so we decided to strike out without him.
We packed a little picnic and made for a big wilderness area just a short walk out of Uppsala. It was called something like Whogadallen. It was absolutely beautiful–snow covered everything. The sun was pretty blinding. We went through the fields for most of it. Erik told me to be very careful not to step on the ski tracks paralleling most of our route. We chatted about all sorts of things–from Erik’s plans with Sara–last night he had confessed they were together :) to the project he might work on at the ETH, modeling some very interesting physics problems in, what do you know, metamaterials–the selfsame field I’d been so inspired by with Fratalocchi’s talk. We also talked about my travels in Eastern Europe… lots of things! It was great. Erik managed to get a few beautiful pics before his phone died and I’ll try to get those on the image gallery.
Around 1 or so we made it to a picnic spot overlooking the Whogadallen valley, from only a couple hundred feet up–Sweden is very flat. I climbed a tree, shimmying up the branchless base to the first branch. We broke out the sandwiches and chowed, along with a couple cups each of hot tea from a thermos.
We walked back in the shadow of the forest, which was beautiful. Finally, we were nearly back when I got a message from Martin. He wondered if it was too late to join us. Erik had to go home for a meeting, but I would stay and walk with Martin! Unfortunately, all my stuff was at Erik’s place, so I had to run back to Erik’s and then Martin’s place to drop it off, and then all the way back to Whogadallen to meet Martin :P I made it within an hour of the end of the incredibly dramatic Hardcore History podcast on the Cuban Missile Crisis (which is nearly 6 hours long and started back in WWII–I’ve been listening to it in bits and pieces since those last few kitchen cleanings and lentil cooking sessions in Zurich!)
Martin and I met atop a hill under which was buried some thousand years ago a great Viking queen :D We hung out there for a while–I chowed on carrots and peanuts which he’d brought–while the sun fell lower in the sky. Going home we took the long way, which involved cutting through a forest, ducking under a disused agricultural fence, checking out the old hippie neighborhood Martin had lived in with a kind of adoptive family when he left his wild family at 18. Martin, after some prodding, finally ate a carrot, which led to a very interesting discussion on his zero-carb diet. He literally buys nothing with more than 4 grams to the hundred of carbs. He told me how he’d derived the diet from more or less first principles before discovering the wider community, and he made an interesting claim–that humans were specialized, in the savanna, as thermal dissipation champions. Hence no fur and the innovation of sweating. We would hunt down gazelles and other prey by tracking them long distances, using relays of hunters, at speeds just great enough that if maintained by our prey, they would overheat. If this is true it’s fascinating. This was how Martin justified his not only low-carb but overwhelmingly meat-intensive diet. A side note–Martin can easily go a whole day without food as a consequence of his slowly digested food and possibly his steady blood sugar. This could be very useful in certain contexts…
It was nearly dark when we made it home. Martin pulled out the guitar and began to play. I tried to catch on to the melody and sing along. We ate once our food was warmed up, which seemed an eternity to my carb-adjusted metabolism. We watched chess videos and Martin filled me in on the crazy stuff with Hanna. She seemed now to have fallen for Martin again (after their night turned into a mad reprise of their arguments from years ago) but quite naturally, since it was the end of exam week and she was leaving for travels tomorrow, to be in considerable agitation. Fingers crossed there that whatever happens ends well for them both.
Martin settled down with his Q-learning code and I put on some headphones, nearly finished the podcast while doing the dishes.
Late in the evening we filled our cups with whiskey and got going at blitz chess. Again the first couple of games were disappointing, and then we hit our stride. The sucker punches and clutch checkmates were incredible. At one point, after a completely ridiculous game riddled with blunders, I was up a queen and a knight against lone queen. Problem was, I had only 20 seconds and my opponent had a minute. I had a draw by repetition (finally–after my opponent tried like 3 different things to break the repetition), but courageously pushed on for the win. I ran my knight over towards the king. My adversary played too defensively, I got my knight in close, and with two seconds on the clock–the guy should have sac’ed his queen for my knight–I got the mate. Martin cheered raucously and we high fived all around. What a great time. Martin also played some magnificent games. His ability to continually make the opponent play defensively, with unsound but treacherous attacks and constant pressure, is quite something to watch. We also got pretty good at blunder checking one another. By the end of the night we were up about 100 rating points. Finally though, I had to pack and leave on my mad bus journey to Skavska airport. We were definitely both a little bit sad and embraced several times. What a bro. I have no idea when I’ll see the guy again, but I hope that I will. Maybe if he finishes his master’s thesis in Uppsala and comes for a PhD at some US university…
The bus journey was insane. I got to the station well early and discovered I needed to pee. But the inside part of the station was closed. I ran around like a chicken with my head cut off for 15 minutes looking for a bathroom, then finally regained my dignity and my ability to hold. Hopped on the night bus–apparently you can’t buy tickets on the bus but the guy let me on for free–to Stockholm. Blogged for 10 minutes and couldn’t do it anymore. I figured if I kept myself in a sufficiently uncomfortable position for the hour and a half, I could nearly nod off but not miss my stop. I was right. Got off, found a bathroom, then found the transfer to the airport bus, which cost me nearly 20 euro. Jeez! But it was roomy and comfortable and I slept for ANOTHER hour and a half. I got to the airport as the first light of dawn was rising. Trivially passed security and sat at my gate reading Papillon until we boarded. The fellow’s character is really interesting. It reminds me a lot of the guy in Shantaram. A thoughtful intellectual, who socializes with incredible confidence, born of underworld toughness, knowhow, and unbreakable will to survive, combined with a heartfelt generosity and straightforwardness. I don’t know if I’ve ever met such a person–both guys I mentioned were criminals and maybe you have to come from the underworld to develop such a personality (or, more troublingly, to display it–perhaps the intricate bureaucratic structures of civilized life render this attitude unemployable). I found his attitude quite inspiring and wondered what of it I might adopt.
In the queue I was accosted by another socialite Englishman that reminded me of Ivan from the hostel in Nice. This yokel also had no gauge whether I was interested in his dialogue. I eventually stuck my face in my book. Later, after we landed, the guy hopped the bus queue and said hi to me as though I were his longtime buddy, then announced to the other queuemembers that there’s nothing like knowing people to skip the line. I was extremely annoyed by his blithely dishonorable conduct, and if I was more awake, probably would have told him to get in the back of the line like everyone else.
But I’d slept on the plane and was in quite a nice mood after recognizing the baggage claim–this was the same airport my fam had flown into nearly 4 years ago at my high school graduation! That reminded me of the idyllic summer, working part time as a math tutor, playing ultimate twice a week, taking long bike rides–those were great days. Aaaanyway, I got on the bus, paid another 17 Euro–I tried to haggle with the guy and/or discover a cheaper route but to no avail. The ride was lovely–oh I forgot to mention it was SNOWING, it should have been warm, like 18 degrees, but the weather had veered sharply again–because the snow was spread really thickly on the trees, and for miles along the highway there were nothing but trees covered in glistening constellations of snow.
I should probably arbitrarily switch to another blog post now, #nebulousunpatternedexistence