Lysekil, May 9-10

To get to Lysekil from Göteborg, your bus will turn left off the main road at Uddevalle and cut over to the coast. If you fall asleep on this bus ride but are woken up when the bus cuts its engine, you will be delighted to find out that the bus, and therefore you, is are on a car ferry!! We ran off the bus and around the ferry to see all the sights. It’s a very short ferry to the end of a long finger inlet. From there, it wasn’t long until we got off the bus all together and walked along the harbor to get to the Fiskeriverket Havsfiskelaboratoria—the Swedish Board of Fisheries (and the equivalent to our NOAA fisheries in the US). Valerio was expecting Jordan, but not Jordan and Julie, so our surprise plot worked perfectly. We had a coffee and a little tour of the lab before heading back to Valerio’s apartment. He lives 3 blocks from the lab, and has this beautiful view over his balcony to the water. His deck is bounded by his apartment, the fence between he and his neighbor’s apartment, the balcony with the view, and a huge granite rock that is climbable to have a cool view of his neighborhood.

We cooked a superb Italian pasta for dinner—and it should be known that Valerio made the pasta and we were not allowed to have anything to do with it. We would surely muck it up if we tried. :) So Jordan was in charge of barbequing the steaks and I helped along the edges. I sat back and helped with the important things: the wine tasting and the olive oil tasting. Valerio’s family makes their own olive oil on land just outside of Roma. It is the best olive oil ever. We ate it with nice bread and also on our spinach—no need for vinegar when the oil is that yummy! Then we put bananas (in the peel) stuffed with chocolate on the hot bbq and sprinkled them with coarse sea salt...and by then the sun was down, it was nearly 23:00.

After dinner we took a nice long walk around Lysekil. It is a lovely little town with a long history of skippers and seafaring peoples. We walked along the harbor, which has a nice new wooden promenade, and then back through the outskirts of the city center and through little neighborhoods. Valerio pointed out that Swedes like to display light and little treasures in the window—it’s so cool! The front windows were all lit up, some simply with flowers, some with large wooden ships and nautical clocks, etc. There were a few that I didn’t realize were private homes—I went up and was looking in the window at the pretty display before I focused in the background and saw there was a stove and kitchen, with afghans on the couch. It had a really nice, welcoming feel to the whole area, and I learned to enjoy from afar. We cut back to Valerio’s up past the big church, which is disproportionately enormous compared to the population of the town. That’s so you can see it from the water as a landmark. It’s really an impressive piece of architecture, and it’s also nicely visible from nearly anywhere in town.

The next morning I met the guys at the Fiskeriverket Havsfiskelaboratoria for the morning fika, which on Mondays is a meeting too where everyone catches everyone else up on new events. Valerio spoke about his time at a conference in Japan, and about our course in Tjärnö. He also introduced me as visiting scientist—and after the fika I gave a little 15 minute seminar about my work in California with squid. It was fun to talk with the researchers there, and there were a lot of questions and interest, which was nice. I want to try to set up a post-doc there, it would be so amazing to have any reason to live in Lysekil, and if it’s to do something that I’d love and am trained to do, that would be amazing!

After lunch at the aquarium with a bunch of Valerio and Jordan’s friends, we went wandering around to the city center and then I headed out on my own to go to the nature reserve that is on the northern part of the peninsula. The whole reserve is granite—granite boulders and cliffs that then sweep or slope down to the sea. It was so fun to run all over the rocks, and the wind was pretty strong and it was nice to watch the white caps and the fishing boats going by. I spent probably way too long jumping on the rocks with the self-timer trying to get a shot of me playing, but I finally triumphed!!