BACK IN THE USA

ARGENTINE RESIDENCE -- Got back last night from a long plane ride across the Atlantic so I thought I'd share my experiences from the last two weeks.  We spent another week in Stockholm seeing more sights and visiting friends and relatives, including my half-cousin (if that's what you call it) who's about 30 and works setting the odds for tennis matches for a sports betting firm.  Basically in college he made a program to figure out what to bet on, and this firm saw that he was making a lot of money and called him up to hire him, so now he travels to all these tennis matches and stays at supersweet hotels, including that crazy one in Dubai.  We also went to the royal armory where there's all this armor and weapons from the middle ages - crossbows, swords, axes, everything.  Then we went to the House of Nobility to check out my mom's family crest.  Finally we went to an AIK soccer game, Stockholm's biggest team, and watched them lose 2-0.  But the fans were crazy, they had a huge drum to bang and all these different chants and songs and something that was the Swedish equivalent of yelling "asshole" at an enemy player.

Last week we went to my uncle's farm/horse ranch which was really fun since I got to hang out with my cousins and go shooting.  We were supposed to go into town for a night but my brother Anthony got sick and ruined all my hopes of tryna with some swedish jauns.  My uncle has the title of Baron and they have kind of like an old manor house that the family bought 100 years ago from another family. This leads into an interesting China story (love you Louie).  Back in the day, I think the 1600s/1700s, noble families would get porcelain china sent to them with their crest on it.  My uncle's name is Uggla (Owl) so they sent for china with an owl on it.  I don't know if they have owls in china, or maybe the workers had never seen an owl, because all of my uncle's family china has an owl body with a cat's head.  Weird.  Apparently the chinese were so good at copying things that one family had a watercolor picture sent, but on the voyage to china the picture got wet and the paint smeared out, and the chinese thought they were clouds and copied onto the china too.  Even crazier is that another family sent a picture of their crest with arrows pointing to the various symbols with labels saying what color they were supposed to be, and when they got the china a year later the chinese had copied the arrows and labels too.

Anyways, glad to be back, hope to see someone tomorrow for cleanup day at Penn Tower.

-Per