Swedes are getting ready for the dark months. I love that time of the year.

My colleagues and friends call me weird, they don’t get it at all. I just love it.

Don’t get me wrong, the summer has it’s really nice moments. Stockholm in the summer is just drop-dead-gorgeous. Given the fact that Stockholm is located on about 14 islands means that there is a lot of water. It’s never really hot, and never really cold (okay, that changes in the winter ) and people are sunny on average. Sitting at one of my favorite restaurants at Fjällgatan looking out over the water, Djurgården, Gamla Stan is just really nice in the summer.

The winter is dark, days are short, people stay indoor as much as possible. -17 degrees Celsius is not uncommon (up north in Sweden we are talking about  values of -40 as not being uncommon ).

But it’s this harshness that makes it attractive to me. I’ve always been a guy that liked the rough side of nature. No palm trees but rocky mountains, no lying on the beach, but diving in the sea at 30 meters. Hell, I sound like an outdoor sports/activity guy! (those of you who really know me know if there is any truth in that ).

So… yes, the winter is coming, only not this weekend. We’ve been promised 25 degrees tomorrow.

You might have noticed that the URL of this website now points to a .com domain instead of a .be domain. The reason for that: I moved from Belgium to Sweden full-time so I thought it would be more appropriate to have a generic domain (Why not a Swedish? Because it’s EXPENSIVE to have a .SE domain. This .com domain costs me around 20 USD for years, the Swedish equivalent would me set back around 138 USD for 2 years. Quite a difference I would say )