Exhausting week

I'm exhausted. Completely wasted. My mother has been visiting for an entire week. She has a different pace in her life than I have. I worked from seven until noon most days and then she and I went on excursions around the province, making use of our summer passes. The train service has been struggling with delays due to extreme heat, lightning and staff shortage. We sat in a train for one hour in Lund one day, waiting to go on a ten-minute journey. It's those moments when you miss not having a car.

In this record-breaking weather (incredibly hot and humid) my mother has been very busy at my apartment. She dusted the cabinets, rearranged the ornaments in them (so now I don't know where everything is), scrubbed the balcony floor, defrosted the freezer, ironed my curtains, replanted all the flowers and cooked for us. When I came home there were chores for me too; I hung the curtains, vacuumed and brought the big rug outside to really beat the dust out of it. Very hard job in these temperatures.

Our trips have taken us to main cities and small villages around the province. We have been to fleamarkets in Lund, Malmö and Simrishamn. Purchases included several scarves, new sunglasses and a blouse. We have been in Helsingborg, where I showed my mother my favorite café, Ebba's. We also made use of two gift certificates (winnings) to get back massage in a small village in the middle of Skåne. We would never go to Hörby otherwise, but now we had a reason. Cute town, but not much to do there. Another first visit was to Trelleborg, a town on the south coast. It took forever to get there (no train service), almost two hours by bus. It was a nice place with interesting shops. We also took the local bus from there to the beach in the afternoon. It was the first proper swim in the ocean this year. It was great! There are no strong underwater currents on the south coast (like there are on the coast where the summerhouse is). We also went into the ocean outside Ystad, it was a beach very close to a train station, and that was also a great experience.

I have to comment some more on the weather. It's has been 28-32 centigrades in the entire country (sometimes hotter in the far north than down here)! We generally don't have air conditioning in our homes, so this is very straining. All the fans and mobile AC units are sold out at the stores. After using all the short pants that I own (two pairs), I continued on to wearing dresses for work. This is unheard of. I have never before worked in a dress, because there are no pockets to keep the cell phone and swipe card and everything else I need to bring with me in the stacks. The janitor gave me a piece of string to have around my neck for the cell phone, and a clip for the swipe card to be attached to my clothes. It functions, but it takes some getting used to.

This morning my mother and I went to Simrishamn by train (two and a half hour journey). It's on the southeast end of Skåne. There was a market day and also a fleamarket. There was a stall where they sold old postcards (mainly from different villages, with images of the churches and aerial photos of houses). It's popular to collect postcards from different towns, and I looked for "my" town. There were a few, but one in particular caught my attention. It was an undated postcard, probably from the 1940s or 1950s, of the church, and it had a birthday greeting on it. The remarkable thing is that the addressee was my great grandmother..... I'm sure of this, her address is correct, and also the date matches her birthdate. A truly amazing find. (And I really wonder how that postcard ended up there).

After a great Mediterranean style buffet lunch at a restaurant we had some ice-cream and then my mother took the bus back to the summerhouse. I went on a train journey that lasted three hours. There was railroad work that prolonged the trip. I was very happy to be home again this evening.