Karl New York City, United States of America.

Part 2, coming next!

Wow, what a whirlwind tour of Australia. I’m back in good ol’ Stockholm and I’m completely knackered. There is much to say so I will break everything down of a couple of days as I really need to get back into the blogging habit. I seem to be sprawling my life across various social networking services and I fail to neglect the core of my life online which is my humble blog, the place where you get the juice, and not just meanlingless bleets.

So I’m back. Australia was amazing. It was really lovely to see everybody again, you’re all looking well! I survived the 24 hour trip back and went straight into my mate Bob’s bucks night and got home and some rediculous hour which, while it was nice to catch up with everybody, it elongated my jetlag by about 4 days and I had a hard time over coming it.

This was taken just before the photo. Kris, Fiona and I all looking very sharp, I might say… stay tuned!

I’m loving the weather at the moment. 11 degrees, riding around eveywhere, sun staying up late. Yesterday I ran 7.5km’s and I’ll do the same today. Summer is on the way!

This Saturday I’m flying to New York City. It’s funny because I’m not as excited as I was the first time. I’m too damn busy to even think about the whole experience. Work has been going crazy, and not just for me, the whole office is on overtime at the moment. At least the days are flying by. I can’t believe it’s Thursday already. I promise to update the blog more when I’m in New York, there’s obviously more to photograph, therefore more to blog!

This last week has been crazy. I got word from my shipping crew that my boxes are in Hamburg awaiting departure to Göteborg. Apparently I need to pay for a courier to get it from Göteborg to Stockholm, even though I’ve paid it all the way. I’ve spoken with my stupid people in Melbourne who seem to not know much about the logistic business at all. Needless to say I’m pretty stressed. In those boxes are some photographic equipment I’ve always dreamed of having in New York, now they’ll probably get to Stockholm the Monday I start work. It was supposed to arrive today.

Argh.

(Clockwise: Hanna, David (my housemate), Thérèse, Bernado, Gustav)

Apart from this nightmare, last night I cooked my biggest meal yet. I had 4 friends over and managed to cook for them, my housemate and myself, 6 in total. Because we don’t have a wok, I was using 2 frying pans at once, pretty happy with the result if you ask me (and my guinea pigs!). Vegetarian green curry! Yummmmmmmmm.

I’ve also been riding my bike all week. I’ve noticed that due to the lack of exercise that I’ve started to gain weight, crap. I used to ride around 20km’s a day, or on average 120km’s per week. Now I don’t ride a single kilometer because of the snow and my diet hasn’t changed. Beer is a killer. It’s been great to get back on the bike again now that the weather has been forgiving, though this morning I woke up to a full blanket of snow and shunned myself back to the depths of T-Bana. Boo. I won’t be taking my ride to NYC as I doubt it’ll be much good given the temperature at the moment (a balmy -11ºc), let alone not having any time.

So, the next update will be from the frosted streets of New York’s downtown district. I’m just off Wall St, where the tourists and businessmen roam by day, and Matteo, Tom, Priscilla and I stumble around drunk by night.
Until then, one love! Don’t forget to write!

… so are our moods. Here’s the beginning of our Monday morning Spotify playlist. Songs about the sun, or have ‘sun’ in the title. It’s been over 2 weeks since we’ve had a proper sunny day, so what better way to get over the fact that you’re inside, than to play sunshine tunes.

So, sorry about the lame updates lately. I’ve been super super busy. I’m working until 9pm each night, getting home, cooking dinner, watching the Wire then passing out, ready to do it all again.

Last Friday we moved offices. Our last place is only 50 meters down the road, but boy what a difference that 50 meters makes. We’re smack bang in the center of town. Stureplan to be exact. There’s so much more action outside our door. It actually feels like I’m working in a city with people in it.

Now I know Stockholm isn’t the biggest city in the world (we’ll get to that, soon), but when you head out to lunch into a ghost town, it can be a little disheartening. Now I’m walking into people as soon as I step outside. The place has a lovely buzz about it.

The office is brand new, custom designed by Fi and built to our demands. It was an old attic, now it has 100mbit internet, a pool table, Rock Band, and 15 ratbags.

The above photo is my new workstation. We came up with the idea to put trees in between our desks. Seeing we are 5 stories above the city, this gives us a little piece of mind when we’re heads down. This is the 4th day since moving in, so when the office is set up again (pool table, XBox, Wii, trees, trees, trees), I’ll provide more flicks, but to give you an idea of the views we get…

This is from our “living area”, the place where we eat, drink and be merry. That circular object below the American flag is called “The Mushroom”. You can’t see from this picture, but the last flag flying high is a New Zealand flag. No love for the Aussies, not even on Australia day.

So, I do have some good news. The project I’ve been working on is taking me over to New York next Saturday. I’m over for a month living on Wall St with Matteo, Priscilla and Tom. I’m very much looking forward to seeing Matteo again, even though the little bugger has already put in his alcohol orders. I can’t wait to get back to the Big Apple. I’ll be teaming up with my mate Justin and coincidently a friend of mine from Stockholm will be in New York for a good part of my trip, look out Manhattan!

Expect lots of juice to be found here when I’m over in NYC. Until then, it’s back to the books.

Stay in touch, one love!

There’s me at third last, however, if you notice the times, I’m actually 26 seconds behind the peloton. The messengers ran the race in a cool hour, and we were 45 minutes behind them. Insane.

This was a fairly long race. I didn’t understand any of the instructions so kept close with my team mates Sönke, Erik H and På (who’s nickname on the list I’m unsure of). The idea was to race to our first spot, get the 2 numbers on the door, do some math, and use that result to find our next location. Rinse and repeat 20 times (throw in a stop that includes vodka and caviar) and you made it. Our group was ahead by about 15 minutes at one point until a slight miscalculation rendered us at the back of the main group. We slogged it through the city and with a little help of my Östermalm knowledge, we were back in the group. It was a long haul as you can see, it was also -10ºc and the snot, sweat, and tears froze to my face as we bashed through the late afternoon traffic.

We finished up at pub, ate bratwurst and drank stout (oops), and I managed to climb home at some late hour. Thanks for your hospitality Sönke! I hope you got home alright mate.

This is me and Sönke starting to ride. For full details of the race in Swedish and lots of photos, read this thread.

Hej då!

My first Stockholm Alleycat. Let’s roll.

Ok, so I haven’t updated my blog in a while. This is because my beloved Macbook has been in the shop getting a new keyboard as I spilled coffee on it on my birthday. I got the bill too… Happy Birthday! To top it all off, I went on a great shoot yesterday at Långholmen with Johnny and Daniel C (both whom I work with), and when I put my camera away I noticed that one of the focal glass pieces from the view finder has fallen out and it’s near impossible to shoot. Another repair coming up, hooray. At least this just a slip of glass, should only be 50:- but that’s not the point. Clutz.

The good news is that I did have a very successful day behind the lens and will be uploading some photos to my Flickr stream shortly, right after I finish my Berlin set (which is sitting on some tool’s desk in St Eriksplan).

I’m currently in the office editing the photos on my PC. Man, I HATE Windows, Microsoft, and anything that causes me to spend an hour downloading, installing, hacking and cursing just to do one simple task. I’m talking about how XP doesn’t natively recognise RAW files. I only shoot in RAW, so when I connected my camera, I was very nervous as to why I didn’t see any photos.

I won’t bore you with details, but for those interested, a small registry hack will allow you to install the Canon EOS Utility (if you don’t have the install CD handy), thus being able to read the files off the camera and begin post production.

Who cares anyway, you’re all on Mac’s, right? I hope so.

Last night my flatmate from NYC, Matteo, cooked us handmade gnocci supreme. It was out of this world delicious. So simple to make as well (not taking anything away from you Matteo, as I know there’s a nack to it), so I’m going to give it a shot sometime soon. Potato, egg, flour, bang. Delish. We got in at 3am and heated the rest up having a lovely midnight feast. The perfect way to avoid hangover.

This morning I returned the favour and cooked up poached eggs, bacon, black beans and toast. It was the first time that Matteo & Johnny had ever eaten poached eggs and loved it. The black beans were interesting and sure as hell don’t taste like Heinz’s finest. Still, it was a good fry up!

Updates from the photo mission coming atcha, till then, hej då!

Happy New Year.

Fi & I had an awesome time in Berlin. What an amazing city, obviously it’s drenched in history, however the most eye catching details are on the trains, in the subways, on the street, in the parks and in empty lots. Graffiti and street art rules this town. It’s the most bombed city I’ve been too. I mean everything is totally trashed, but at the same time it makes the city so unique. It’s finally finding it’s voice and it’s letting the world know. So much creativity is now reaching the outside world, or maybe we’re just now able to peer inside.

Berlin looks rough. Litter lines the streets, everything is tagged or vandalised in some way, however there is no threat of violence and we never felt unsafe. We met a woman on the flight from Stockholm who said she feels safer walking through parks at night in Berlin than she does in Stockholm.

We couldn’t have picked a crazier time to be in Berlin. NYE went for 3 days. It started on NYE with people setting off fireworks and firecrackers non-stop until the wee hours of the 2nd of January. As you can see above, we joined the party. The youth are rebels at heart, and the older generation are grumpy which makes for an interesting mix as the youth are running the town, and the oldies are just putting up with all the chaos.

What’s interesting to note is that we didn’t see any authority for the entire stay. No police, no met-cops, nothing. In fact, you don’t even need to swipe a met card to get into the subway, you just walk in and walk out. Apparently met-cops bust people constantly, however we saw none of that, and the trains run all night. We made it across the city at 7am with no problems what so ever.

Anyway.

I made the awesome mistake of booking a hotel on the other side of the city from the airport, but it was the only place I could find on such short notice. Seriously, it was like landing at Tullamarine and getting public transport to Frankston, just check the amazing view from our hotel window.

We saw Checkpoint Charlie, saw the wall in various places across the city, and walked, walked, walked to a point where we were both dizzy from lack of energy. We refueled on beer and Japanese. By the way, watching Japanese speak fluent German is a trip, especially when trying to order since they don’t speak English and the menu’s are in German! Tasty, though.

We caught up with a friend of a friend, who also is a stockist for NiceProduce in Berlin. If you’re ever in the city, make sure you pop into Van Liebling and say what up to Chris, also check the NiceProduce in the front window (nice!). He was kind enough to invite us over to his friends house for a NYE party. We of course were the only Anzac’s and the best english speakers at the party, so you can imagine the types of broken conversations we had. Kangaroo’s and koala’s (not koala bears damn you!). I also learned the hard way of setting off bottle rockets. Use a bottle. The New Year came around and the custom is to kiss and hug everybody in the room, a strange thing for strangers!

After getting up, we dragged ourselves back onto the streets and headed over to Mitte, a very trendy, highly fashionable and beautiful part of town. We found a lovely pub which used to be a laundry, a coffin maker and a bakery. It’s now one hell of a good find for some hungover tourists. Bratwurst, parma, stout and house red. It was snowing outside, and we were toasty inside. Amazing. Fi even let me break my stout-drought, as apparently my stout-pout has dispersed since moving to Hugo land. Check the hair. It’s gotta go.

We got back to Stockholm to find it well into the minuses and snowing, a lovely omen for us as it snowed when Fi came and it was snowing when she left. It’s a lovely reminder from now.

My friend Gustav is a waiter at a popular restaurant called Grill just off Rådmansgatan. I had the first steak since living Australia and Fi had an amazing seafood skewer topped with all her favourites. We drank a bottle of Chile’s finest and several cocktails which later led to midnight snow angel making, good times!

Now for a little bit of geekism…

Click the image to view a little larger…

This is Schlesisches Tor U-Bahn in Berlin. I wanted to try out the merge photos as a panorama in Lightroom, and I must say it’s pretty damn good. I’ll be out trying some 16mm shots around Stockholm soon to try to flex it’s muscles a little harder.

So that was NY in Berlin in a nutshell. I could type all night but it’s always too much to take in at once. Perhaps I’ll dribble more over a cold beer back in Australia some time, until then I’m sure Fi will be updating her blog with her version of the trip soon.

Work starts tomorrow, will be good to get back into the swing of things. Speak soon.