While Absolut may be Swedish, the local hard liquor is aquavit. Like vodka, it’s distilled from potato or grain, but flavored with herbs such as caraway seed, cumin, fennel and coriander. It burns like turpentine on the way down, then explodes in a subtly flavored bouqeut. The name, derived from the Latin aqua vitae, means ‘water of life’. Which, in short, pretty much sums up my overall view of all vodka’s relatives.

The Swedes also have a number of local beers, most notably Spendrups, a light lager. The city’s formerly strict licensing laws led to a slew of beers with relatively low alcohol content, but the recent easement of such restrictions has birthed new, visually and gustatively identical, brews, which contain up to three times as much alcohol. Makes for great games of liquor roulette.

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Supposedly, Stockholm’s subway system is copied off of New York City’s – down to the width of the rails and the wiring of the electrical system. Still, the cars and platforms are new, perfectly operational and exceedingly clean; in other words, absolutely nothing like New York’s at all.

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As I had hoped, there’s a certain type of tall Scandinavian blonde female that abounds here. Unfortunately, there are as many ugly tall Scandinavian blondes as hot ones. What a disappointment.

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As my brother and I walk one way, a beautiful six-foot-tall Swede walks past in the opposite direction. I turn to my brother and say: “quick, you hop onto my shoulders, and we can go back and hit on her.”

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Sure, the allegory of Babel might imply it’s a sign of impending doom, but for lazy Americans, the world standardizing on English as lingua franca makes things far, far easier.

Plus, the resulting conversations never fail to thrill me. Earlier today, in the Royal Palace, the exchange between a Swedish guard and a Chinese tourist, about the age and origin of a nearby tapestry, put even the best Laurel and Hardy routine to shame.

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Finally, Stockholm and Sweden itself: I don’t know why I never noted this before, but it seems this city and country aren’t a real land mass at all, but rather a loosely confederated archipelago of small wooded islands. Twenty-four thousand – 24,000 – small wooded islands. Excuse me?

Despite this lack of solidity, Stockholm is remarkably beautiful – often called the ‘Venice of the North’, it looks to me more like Amsterdam, though with wider, prettier canals, and fewer pot cafes.

Other parts of the city remind me nearly of Toronto or Vancouver – quieter and friendlier than American cities, but a real city nonetheless. A city with a feel and daily flow comfortable enough that I could even imagine escaping here on a more extended basis. No, I’m not expatriating to Stockholm any time soon. But, when I leave tomorrow, head across the Kattegat and down into Copenhagen, Denmark, I’ll be more than a bit sad to leave this little collection of islands behind.

A Fortune 500 CEO once famously quipped, “if you never miss a flight, you’re spending too much time in airports.” Clearly, I am, as I’ve never once missed a plane. This is the influence of my mother, a woman who not only always arrives two hours before any flight, but also arrives as much as a full hour before movies, just to guarantee prime seats.

Thus, after childhoods of her training, my brother and I show up to the nearly deserted American Airlines terminal slightly before midnight on Friday, stroll through check in and security, mosey past rows of closed duty free shops, and pull up to our gate an hour and forty-five minutes before departure.

My perfect plane-catching streak continues.

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Note scrawled down while waiting in boarding area:

Girls with British accents: Yes, please.

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As I’m a terrible, terrible plane sleeper, I try something I’ve never done before: I pop two sleeping pills as I board the JFK to Heathrow flight. My brother does the same, then jokes about the possibility of us passing out from their effects on the walkway just outside the plane’s door. Instead, we make it all the way to our seats before dropping into deep, uninterrupted sleep for nearly the entirety of the six hour flight.

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We wander around the concourse of Heathrow’s Terminal 1, too groggy to go through with our planned Guinness pint. We also pass on sandwiches at Pret a Manger, a stop suggested by my parents, who discovered the sandwich chain while passing through Heathrow one week prior. I don’t mind skipping it, however, as there’s a branch downstairs from my Manhattan office. Several others of the British stalwarts on the concourse – Thomas Pink, FCUK – have locations within walking distance of my apartment as well. Homogenize the world enough and one place is nearly indistinguishable from any other.

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The customs line at Sweden’s Arlanda Airport is long but exceedingly blonde and well-mannered. From there, we hop the Arlanda Express Train, and, on the twenty minute ride to the City Center, glimpse Stockholm for the first time.

Looking back through my archives, it seems there’s at least one sort of blogging I can consistently carry on while traveling: writing about the trip itself.

So, over the next week, as I explore Stockholm and Copenhagen with family in tow, I’ll be writing about it here. I’ll aim to post every day or two, and if historical precedent bears, each will likely be a collection of snippets, rather than a single long narrative account.

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The cast of characters: me; my parents, who have been in Norway for the past week already, and are now en route to Sweden; my younger brother David, who, in turn, has been here with me in NYC for the past week.

The plan of attack: David and I subway to JFK tonight, hop on a 11:30pm British Airways flight to Heathrow, drink Guinness during a three hour layover, then hop back onto a BA flight to Stockholm, arriving at 5:40pm tomorrow.

The mission: for the Sweden leg of the trip – find the Swedish Bikini Team, the Swedish Chef, or, at least, some Swedish fish.

If anything derails my best attempts at regular blogging, it’s time on the road. Away from home, my life is usually too chaotic to regularly fit a significant stretch of daily drafting time – an unfortunate necessity for a writer as painfully slow as I. Then, even once I return, the work piled up in my absence still keeps me away from the keyboard.

Which, in short, is an oblique apology for the late lack of content. But if I don’t want this already desiccating site to shrivel up and die completely, blogging-while-traveling is a skill I’d best pick up, fast. I head out of town, yet again, to Sweden and Denmark this Friday evening, then return to New York just long enough to unpack and repack for the Toronto Film Festival, which will take me away from home until mid-September.

Don’t get me wrong; I’m thrilled to head out into the world. As Seneca observed several millennia back, “travel and change of place impart new vigor to the mind.” It’s just that, these days, I never seem to have quite enough time to fully consider one completed adventure before being flung into the next. Perhaps, then, it’s William Hazlitt’s more recent (just centuries old) quote that’s more apropos: “I should like to spend the whole of my in life traveling abroad, if I could anywhere borrow another life to spend afterwards at home.”