Halloween

We carved pumpkins and sugar beets this afternoon. Carving sugar beets is an old tradition in Sweden - and when you put a candle inside they smell like roasting sugar.


Anders wanted to carve 'a pumpkin in a pumpkin' and this is the result.

I spent three days this past week at an EU meeting in Valencia Spain, on the Mediteranean coast. Did not get to see so much more than the hotel - full of Japanese tourists - and the laboratory where the meeting was held - the 'European Photoreactor'. It was a good meeting and I got to see my good old friend Professor Claus Nielsen from Oslo. We ate like the Spanish - lunch at 3 in the afternoon and dinner around 11 PM. We flew through Charles de Gaulle airport outside of Paris and I was worried that the French labor strikes might affect our travel. The flights were fine, but they lost my bag on the way there so I wore the same clothes a second day until the bag returned.

Went for a nice bike ride yesterday, past an abandoned country church to a manor in the countryside. Had a nice view of the other side of the valley where there is a factory turning sugar beets into sugar. Saw a family of swans, two deer, a few hares and rabbits, and a lot of storks following a tractor harvesting sugar beets. Returned from the ride with beets from the ditch for us to carve.