I thought I was escaping the worst of winter by spending a week on Gotland. Instead it followed me here. I’ve got friends living there, and made plans to visit before I really understood how short of Schengen time I would be.¹ So it’s been a long, sleepy week on the outskirts of Visby, which I had hoped would be a bit warmer than Oslo. And it was, for a couple days, before a winter storm blew in and blanketed everything with snow up to my ankles.

So be it. Gotland is famously a tourist destination but like most of them it’s highly seasonal. I’ve been assured it’s a completely different place in the summer. In the winter lots of places are shut down and it’s just a whole other vibe. I’ve been happy visiting a couple churches² and the medieval walls and tromping through the town a bit, and otherwise holing up and getting some work done. Visby’s a ridiculously pretty town with a remarkably preserved medieval core. It’d have been nice to see it when it wasn’t below freezing.³

But a sleepy week doesn’t mean I slept through it. I’ve found the lack of distractions to be very productive. I’ve got a number of projects in flight and kicked off a few new ones. Nothing solid or worth announcing yet; there’s a reasonable chance they’ll all collapse yet. But hope springs eternal. Fingers crossed something pays off.

I’ve been cooking whenever I get a chance. If I had to guess, I’ve cooked more since September than I have in the entire five year period before it.⁴ It was absolutely necessary for the week on Gotland, since my friends live far enough into the countryside to mean there’s no restaurants in the vicinity, and their culinary ventures are mostly limited to cheese on bread. For someone who is trying diligently to cut out both cheese and bread, this was disappointing.⁵

In my previous life I’d just have loaded up on veggie burgers and faux chicken nuggets, no big deal.⁶ Now, in the nine days I stayed, I cooked about a third of the time and had leftovers about half of the time.⁷ Understand that I’ve rarely cooked as a day-to-day thing before; the closest I ever got was those few times I decided to get better at cooking by working through a cookbook.⁸ Most of my experience has been cooking elaborate and fancy things for large groups of people. I’ve limited experience making things that are all that healthy, let alone easy to throw together after a day of work.

But I’m figuring things out. My biggest success this time was probably the Cauliflower Mashed Potatoes. Potatoes are one of those high-carb, low-nutrient foods which are annoyingly delicious, and mashing them up with cauliflower sounds like one of those absolutely dreadful health cop-outs where you improve the nutritional profile of something by removing everything that made it edible. In fact I’d made them before and thought they weren’t great. It turns out my initial failure was a combination of ill-chosen potatoes and the lack of an immersion blender. This time I took care to ensure everything was mashed together properly with olive oil⁹ and the result was fantastic — rich and buttery and compulsively edible. The cauliflower makes the texture smooth without adding all the fat the dairy provides while upping the nutrients and halving the calories. Shockingly good.¹⁰

On Sunday I caught the ferry back to Stockholm. They sold a combo ticket for the bus to the ferry from Stockholm which was cartoonishly overcrowded — people standing in the aisles overcrowded — and I really thought that was illegal, but what do I know?¹¹ I was intending to meet a friend for dinner but they canceled, so I had the evening to myself. I crashed at a hotel in Stockholm, where I’m typing up the last part of this. I’m checked in to a flight at noon from Arlanda to Edinburgh. I’m spending the rest of the month in the UK before I head to Portugal and the first step of what may, or may not, be epochal life changes. I’d have a better bead on that if the Portuguese immigration authorities would get to my application already, but I’m trying not to freak out about it.

My time in the UK was scheduled after I realized how short of Schengen time I was going to be come May; this is an attempt to extend that far enough that I can attend everything I want to over the next few months before I’m well and truly trapped in Portugal.

I’m planning on returning to Gotland come August; there’s a medieval week which is famous across Europe and even without that the countryside alone is apparently worth the visit. But like so much, it depends on forces beyond my control. I’ve been reasonably adept at navigating my way in and around visa restrictions up until recently. We’ll see how long that holds.

Next: Manchester (MAN) to Lisbon (LIS)
Prev: Oslo to Visby

Footnotes

¹ I’ve got loads of time now, but that’s all going to burn off like a flash fire once I spend a month in Portugal and it’s going to be gone until I get a residency visa. I’ve had to husband my days in April carefully, and it’s all going to run out in May.

² There are 92 churches remaining on Gotland which were built before 1350. Gotland went big into Christianity when it finally arrived.

³ In the last few weeks I’ve visited two cities with claims to be the best preserved — both UNESCO World Heritage Sites — and both times they’ve largely been covered in snow. It’s what I get for traveling in the off-season.

⁴ The sole exception here was the latter half of 2020, when I was staying with friends and the pandemic had most everyone trapped. And even there I was splitting cooking duties with my friends and ordering a lot of delivery food.

⁵ I was somewhat taken aback to discover my friends don’t even own a microwave, which made reheating leftovers something of a challenge.

I’m not criticizing. The joy I get from cooking is in cooking for others, and even with my health on the line I can’t generally be bothered in putting in the effort without having someone else to help with the leftovers. I’d toast the bread and melt the cheese, but that’s an aesthetic critique at best.

⁶ When I found myself rattling around a house in Ireland in the middle of nowhere — Donegal, during the lockdowns — I survived on pasta with canned sauces and grilled cheese and frozen pizzas and potato chips. In retrospect I should have put more effort in trying to incorporate a leafy green salad or two.

⁷ The remainder was either fresh fruit or lunch at cafés and one dinner at a local Indian restaurant. Probably not the only Indian restaurant in the world with a bronze plate featuring a moose on the wall, but I’m guessing it doesn’t have a lot of company.

⁸ I still highly recommend this as a strategy. Cooking every recipe removes the most onerous part of the process, at least for those of us with executive dysfunction: trying to decide what the fuck you’re supposed to cook night after night. You just cook the next thing in the book.

Obviously, choosing the right cookbook is essential. I recommend something fairly broadly based, and even then you get these weird periods where you’re stuck making different kinds of coleslaw for a week. I tended to be pretty faithful to the order of the recipes but jumped around between the appetizers and main courses and side dishes for a little variety.

⁹ No butter or milk; I’m still cooking vegan

¹⁰ The recipe is dead simple, too. Roughly cut up 2 russet potatoes and bring to a boil from cold water. Once boiling add a medium head of cauliflower chopped into florets and reduce to a simmer. Let simmer for 15 minutes or until soft then drain them, add 1 tbsp of olive oil, a couple tbsps of vegetable broth, mash them until they’re a consistent texture, and add salt and pepper to taste.

If you’re fancy you can chop up a couple chipotles in adobo sauce and toss them in there, or maybe some chives and roasted garlic. It’s pretty great as is, though.

¹¹ The bus is super convenient but also weirdly cramped, like budget airline seat cramped. Next time I’ll take the train.