Days 331 and 332 — “Don’t drink the water!”

That is sound advice when visiting Mexico and apparently also here in Halmstad. Don’t drink the water. Yesterday there was a screw up in the water supply here. They put some chemical in the water to balance the pH and somebody or something dumped in way more than usual and the pH went up to around 10. The water supply was contaminated for half the day and there was a run on bottled water, milk and soft drinks in the stores. About half the city was affected and those who drank the bad water unknowingly got stomach aches and sore throats, which happened to a couple of the students in class. They held a press conference at midnight to advise on the situation and by this morning things were back to normal. A couple weeks ago there was a mishap with sewage treatment and a bunch of crud was dumped into the river that bisects the city which caused advisories to be issued about swimming in certain parts of the city. Maybe socialism doesn’t work after all.

Ordinarily, the water here is superb. It actually tastes like water, i.e., no taste at all. Compared to Halmstad, or even lakes in the northern part of the country that you can drink out of, the water in LA is literally undrinkable. A Los Angelino coming to Halmstad would not recognize what was coming out of the tap here. It really tastes good.

While on the subject of water, the new water slides at the amusement park that I have been riding past twice a day for the past several months are now up and running. I haven’t seen anybody actually going down the slides but the weather has been fairly crummy compared to two weeks ago so I can understand the lack of visitors to the place. But here is what everyone has to look forward to when it warms up. (It was  a cooler than normal May, which augers well for the summer I am told. If May is cool, then late June and July are usually very nice. If May is warm, like it was last year, then the summer is not so hot, literally.)

But here are some shots of the new eyesore in Halmstad.

We will definitely be trying this soon.

Something of interest that happened this afternoon: I was walking the dog and we ran into a woman cutting flowers for her summer house. We got to chatting (Bianca is a sure fire conversation starter) and it turns out this woman is from San Francisco, moved from Sweden 40 years ago, lives near Grace Catherdral and worked for Chevron for more than 30 years, is a writer and a painter like me. Incredible coincidence. She comes “home” for three months every summer and divides her time between a summer house here  in our neighborhood (about 300 yards from our house) and her hometown of Stockholm. Who could have dreamed that one up!