School started again on Monday. It has been a very busy few weeks--since mid August really, when my mom was visiting me in London. In this time I have played tourist for three days straight in London after succeeding in seeing very few of the tourist attractions all all summer long. I had a few nice final days with people from work, breakfast with the flat mates and finally a trip to the Angel bar in Bermondsey with Ladis my last night in town.

Sunday morning I flew to Copenhagen and met my friend Erik, who was in my course my first year in Umea. We spent my 2.5 days of holiday just relaxing, and boy did I need that. Late mornings and long breakfasts in the early afternoons at cafes here and there. We rented bikes and wandered the city. We "couch surfed" with a Brazilian living in Copenhagen and went for dinner with some of his friends. I was fully on my way to recovering from summer in London.



I began my journey back to Umea Wednesday morning. The plan was to spend my five hour layover in Arlanda in the city, meet up with some friends there and maybe grab lunch or coffee and just wander a little more. But the airline had another idea and I spent my morning in the Copenhagen airport checking the status of my flight every 45 minutes only to discover it was delayed a little longer. (Oh well, I had my computer and managed to get off some emails to the new students before it ran out of juice.)

Finally, I was back in Umea. As I climbed down the stairs from the plane, the familiar sense of satisfaction eased into me as I took in my first breath of that fresh pine filled air and again, I had the somewhat puzzling but ever so comforting sensation that I had come home. (This fondness for the tiny city of just over 100,000 is a bit curious: All the while I lived in Madison, I despised the city and wanted to move somewhere bigger, more diverse and with more activity and life. Now I have moved to city even smaller, more remote and with an even more homogeneous population in the far north of an already quite docile nation. The difference here is extreme, however. Umea does not feign to be a large and bustling city. It makes no claims to be diverse or booming. Everything here is close to nature, calm and quiet--yes, maybe the quiet is too much sometimes, and the perpetual light in the summer and spring nearly as unsettling as the dark of winter--but I still fine a wonderful sense of ease when I return).

Yep, everything looks about right here.