Borgarsandr, day 1

(Gothenburg)

Day 19, 15 july.

Awoken by the morning light and theres movement, light and sounds from outside. It was late so we spent the night on the ship, but I'm just happy to finally be here and to leave this ship. I have to adapt, because the future will most likely include more sailing.

Its clear that Borgarsandr is the same type of lively trading town as Skiringsalr is, and my small group packs everything we have and goes ashore. I thank Merchant Danr for everything, wish Toke good luck in the future, and Hagan promises to show his life preserver to people as they travel around which I can only smile and thank him for, and we wish each other good luck in life. Danr gives tips on where there is a good and more luxurious tavern where we can stay.

Its funny to see how surprised Alith and Bodil are over my backpack, but they havn't seen it before, and it attracts surprised looks from many. Its a big difference to have a bag with a strap over the shoulder, or carried a wooden chest etc, compared to a modern large green backpack with side pockets and things attached to the outside. Not to mention its buckles, the material itself and more. Iselin and Ciara just walk happily by my side carrying the food chest and enjoy the attention a bit, while we all take in the visual impressions, the sound and the smell of the big city. Its probably the biggest any of them have seen, possibly Ciara has seen bigger, but for me is more picturesque.

Its only a couple of hundred meters to that tavern that Danr suggested and to start with, we take board for three days. A larger room with two beds, table and chairs and a view of the harbor, as well as a smaller room with a bunk bed located a door away for Alith and Bodil. Don't take the most expensive room, but also not the cheapest.

It feels so nice to be back in Sweden again, even if it isn't Sweden, and everything's completely wrong. It's actually a little easier to understand people and make myself understood, but that can also be that I've had a couple of weeks to learn. I've become quite acceptable at the norse that my company speaks and their dialects that I now hear a difference in. Always had it easy with language, only rarely been motivated, and its no something I can control - to the entertainment of family and friends. I can choose a language, not which dialect it comes out with or way of speaking. After living in Northern part of Sweden for a few years, I spoke their dialect and use their way of talking when I talked to northerners, and my home dialect with people at home and could switch between sentences depending on who I spoke to. I didn't notice I did it and couldn't choose one or the other, but for everyone else it was obvious and entertaining. It just became so, depending on whom I spoke to. Linguists call it code switching, and its quite common. Apparently starting to be the same here, according to Iselin who giggled at bit about it. I talk in one way to her, Alith and Bodil, but have started talking differently to Ciara. I'm starting to speak some of her weird dialect and stilted way when I talk to Ciara, and it's only been 2 weeks.

We put down the packs etc in our rooms. Its possible to bathe at the Tavern, they have a couple of washrooms down the side, and we quickly decide to use them instead of finding a bathhouse. We bathe in shifts, first Ciara and Alith, then me and Iselin, and finally Bodil. I enjoy sitting in the bath and Iselin insisted that she should bathe me, and I don't complain even if it feel unusual and uncomfortable. I just lean back and try to enjoy that she carefully make sure I'm clean, and then spend time trimming my beard growth. She keeps the circle beard shape, but suggest that I should let the beard grow even more impressive, and preferably also on the cheeks.

After the bath, its so nice to just lie and rest in a bed thats not rocking or swaying, happy to reached the first goal for my future, and that the bed is bigger. I really just want to take it easy and relax, because there have been a lot of changes in the last three weeks.

After brainstorming ideas with my company, the plan is to try to talk to and persuade the King to sell me land to build an Academy somewhere and that it becomes neutral land, protected by the kingdom, but follows its own laws and where the kingdom has no influence. Preferably no duty on things, but the place will be too small and it must not be a pure free trade haven. Lofty goals that will be hard to reach, but best to set high goals and just not be disappointed when they arn't met. Room for negotiation. Limited space, maybe a couple of square kilometers max, but with limited occupancy?

If I can't convince the King, I just have to try another place, or way. Do I want to try Denmark or the continent? Or should I just realize I will be under someone's power and travel back to Skiringsalr and take Jarl Skiringe's offer? Which ruler I'm under will then become important, and the higher, the better, but also the rulers personality and behaviour. Jarl Skiringe is a really powerful ruler, and she might be persuaded to keep it more buisness like, but I just have to be careful with her agendas.

I also need to check what books are available here, how much information is already available in different areas. I'll have to write and make so many books for it to be worth of a library. I need to visit someone who writes and makes books. There should be book printers here. If there are no printed books, its an important thing to start doing. It might be a way to get the King interested as a patron, but instead of funds and influence, I 'just' want a bit of land and freedom.

But whats best to sell, here and now? I can try to find someone who wants to buy my last North Arrow. Its just a matter of what I sell them for, and I could certainly get Iselin to walk around and demonstrate, while Ciara and I wait here, but that just feel bad. Need to find some secluded place where I can just relax for at least a week and start jotting down all the information I have in my tablet while making plans and checking options. I need to be able to use the solar panel, and its solar charge per day determines how much technology I can use. I need to buy some blank books or blank pages to tie together into books.

It will probably be a day where we just look around, see what's here, talk to people, etc. Would really should have thought more about the details during the trip. How the next step would be taken, not just what the step is meant to be. Hindsights easy. Accept reality, learn and move on. I might have done that if the last three days hadn't been miserable. And the days before was mostly sex. I probably needed those few days to recuperate.

Wonder if Liv is making any progress with IUDs. I gave her as much information and sketches as I could before we parted, including a full-scale model on paper and a redesign based on how two of those fishbones might work, and I hope it doesn't lead to a lot of deaths and problems. No matter what she said about that, it will hurt in my soul. Iselin and Alith want to have IUDs, so I plan to melt down and cast some IUDs in bodysafe plastic I brought with me. It takes so little plastic, and as a modern person I have a lot of plastic with me. Hell, the backpack is cordura and nylon, which is forms of plastic and will melt.

I hope to be able to make eight or ten pieces without any problems. Then comes the problem of trying to get them in place. I need to get in touch with a good woman who knows what she's doing. Its perhaps honestly better, that when I've made my own plastic IUDs, to take a boat trip back to Skiringsalr, visit Liv and see her progress as well, and let her do it. It wouldn't whined if it became something more intimate from that visit as well, as it was a hell of an experience. I just feel a bit conflicted about it. Happy it was sex with a sexy and enthusiastic mature woman, instead of Iselin, and bad that it wasn't with Iselin.

I can only laugh at how my thoughts go. Lying and thinking about how to impress a king and make more money, move on to book making and end ut being conflicted about sex and Iselin.

Huh. Its actually been 3 days without sex. Since the first hand job and more of Lova up in Eidfjord, this is probably the longest time without sex since I came to this world. But of the other hand, the last day with first a long intense evening, night and wakeup with Liv, followed by a pleasant afternoon with Jarl Skiring and then a quickie with Alith in the end.

That day will stand supreme for a long time.

The morning goes fast when we walk around and look, ask and buy things. There is a bookbinder that makes paper and ink. It is quite expensive but writing with a goose feather pen, a quill, isn't advanced, just very unfamiliar and cumbersome. Carving it just right with a knife on the other hand, that requires practice, which I get shown and explained to me, and also important to keep the quill as horizontal as possible for the inks flow is driven by gravity so the angle determines the flow. But worked well enough to be used for many centuries, and goose feathers are cheap. In any case, Iron gall ink is durable, even if I have to remember that it corrodes the paper after a few hundred years, so it can be a problem.

Well, it's not exactly the thinnest papers here anyway, and maybe try soot and linseed oil in the future for making books. The ink is also usually not black, but more dark brown. There are other inks here, such as red and green, but they are unnecessary to buy right now, because it will require their own quills and a good place to use them.

Large sheets of paper are made, and I would estimate them to be 65x50cm, and its common to fold the paper 2 or 3 times and then get something similar to A4 and A5 after trimming. If its to end up as a book, several folded papers are usually collected and placed in a bundle and then sewn and tied together to form a few pages. A book consists of many such bundles sewn together. The books honestly look much better than I expected. I thought it would be thick tomes with wooden boards on the sides held together by buckles or straps, seen many in several museums. Trinity college in Dublin has a nice collection of old books. As in many places they just don't like you taking photos, even with the flash of.

But they apparently went away from this a couple of generations ago, when paper became more common, and the paper now contains pulp, not just old fabric. It feels good that paper is made here, as a Swede from Småland, where paper production and glassblowing is a tradition. Although that tradition has never existed here, and may not exist because it is a completely different world. Its so weird feeling at bit like home, and expecting a lot of history, when its a complete different and that is the future.

I'm so happy and grateful that I won't be fucking up my own worlds history. Talk about butterfly effect and ripples thru time. Here I won't have any of that huge burden on my shoulders.

But yay! Several large sheets I roll up, three finished small blank notebooks, as well as four goose feather quills and both black and red ink. I have to practice writing and to carve new tips, and I need a separate quill for red and for black ink.

To get used to writing and drawing with a quill, I just sit and dabble a little on one of the papers. Writes some thoughts, sketches the view out of the window, tries to make a sketch of Alith where she stands as a guard. The others really impressed and think its a good picture, but myself? No. Argh. Faces is hard, so I keep it simple and just get the dimensions decently right and the clothes look okay. So much easier with hard physical objects than soft people and animals. I got an 'A' in my picture class in primary school and have made a lot of sketches and drawings since then. So many. Usually walked around with two double folded A4 in my pocket at work, as a small notepad to have for sketches and notes as my thoughts churned while I worked. Some of it was work related, most of it wasn't. Some days I fill all the pages in one day. But not much on people or bodyparts.

Never been interested in drawing people as art. It's always been drawings or sketches of something I needed or wanted to describe, and sometimes nature. Sit and plan out and sketch a city with surroundings, simple sketches of boats, carriages, castles, houses and farms with shadows and dimensions right before the role-playing adventure where I'm the GM? No problem. A monster, horse or cow? Its possible to identify what it is. I have always googled and tried to find pictures of people and show them instead of drawing them myself. It doesn't get easier that I'm using a quill and there is no corrections and it makes blobs, and it has to dry, etc. I miss my Uni-Ball pens. Yes, I have 4 UB-150s in different colors in my backpack, but the purpose is to get used to quills, and the Uni-ball pens are going to run out way too fast. Worth saving them for when I do the final drawing that's meant to last, where nice details and colors are important.

Then again, I'm generally very self-critical, especially according to the now four women in my everyday life, because all of a sudden everyone wants to be portrayed. No pressure. I'm just happy that they one by one they sit a little relaxed at the table or stand as a guard, instead of posing naked or something. Many had probably looked forward to having a beautiful elf woman posing naked in front of them to draw, but I had been anxious to get all the proportions, body shape and shadows right. More skin and shapes - more problems. But I had certainly managed the erotic tones without much problems once I got in to the craft, because when I focus on something, I tend to miss obvious things. Something that's been entertained my friends, so many times.

Driving around a city in France to find a parking space one evening to see an old castle? Completely misses that there's prostitutes, including a couple who apparently were on their way to the car. I was annoyed about idiots who stopped cars in stupid places and got in the way and people everywhere. Only afterwards when my friend told me, did I understand why he was so bad at seeing traffic and cars. As long as the women didn't try to go out in front of the car or had a direction that intercepted infront of the car's route etc, the brain just blurred away them as uninteresting people in motion I could ignore, including what they are wearing. Or not wearing.

Most are used to this nowadays, and my company here is learning it. Been focused on drawing Bodil standing inside the door, but there have been people walking infront and disturbing and its only when I take a short break for hand cramps that I see the other three eating at the table. When did the food arrive? They've apparently been eating for a while, and told me that the food is served. I had just replied: 'Soon, I just...'

Bodil and I join them. Bodil is happy with the sketch, and Ciara has started embroidering something on a piece of fabric, looks like she has been doing it for a couple of days.

Decided to create a map of the region on large paper. It will be useful. Ask Alith or Bodil to guard outside, and the other one join Iselin and Ciara when they go for a walk while I use my mobile phone to take out measurements and sketch coastlines etc. I only draw the places I visited, because I don't know where there are any more. Draws larger water features that hopefully is there, and simpler hill and mountain markings and peaks. The work takes up a large part of the afternoon.

The biggest problem is again trying to flatten a curved surface. Should I care about coordinates, directions or distances? Considering how the map may be used and most of it is sea and coast, I decide that compass directions are most important, and vertical distances are correct, while horizontal are divided into three areas and the two dividing lines each have a separate scale that can be used along them. Not optimal but no one will be able to measure much more accurately in a long time. Interesting work and I use a thin pencil to sketch it out, thank goodness for a small ruler and thin 2m measuring tape. The slate is very useful as scrap paper and for calculating scale. When I sit at the table and fill in with ink, the others knock and return.

While we talk about life in their regions, whats harvested and when, and how things are stored and other things I need to know before the creation of my own farm, the afternoon becomes evening, which becomes night.