Today I went for a hike in the forest outside Uppsala. It was really spectacular. I'd show you pics but I had an Ellen Feiss moment with my camera so I hardly have any pics at all. Kind of...a bummer. Anyway, the way there was also amazing, in the morning there was this mist that covered the town and made everything crisp and cool. The houses all have green lawns and big sheltering trees, the way I imagine a neighborhood should look. I dunno if it's an old memory of living in a place like that or just the fact that it's so different from Tucson, but found the whole thing to be very enchanting.
Getting to the forest was less exciting than I originally hoped, what I thought was a forest is really just a large wooded area surrounded by highways. Once you get into the middle of it it looks great but it kind of ruins the effect when you hear cars in the background. I went around exploring other wooded areas nearby and ended up stumbling into a nice quiet mini forest. I found wild blueberries and raspberries, which was really awesome, I had never seen wild blueberries before.
Then I found this walled garden looking thing, I went inside and looked around, really peaceful, grassy open areas and a place in the middle surrounded by big trees. On my way out I saw some tombstones and a sign that said "kyrkogård", apparently this was a brand new cemetery that didn't have many 'residents' yet. There's got to be some greater meaning to that: the more humans die, the more nature gets destroyed to make room for our dead.
As if to further the oddness, I found an abandoned playground not too far away with a cluster of mushrooms best described as anti-flowers. These I did manage to get pics of; tar black, curled up, crawling with bugs and since it released all its spores the area around it was covered in a greasy black substance. It looked as if these mushrooms were radiating death. That's not quite right, these clearly did not look like dead things, they looked like...anti-living. Like something from a parallel dimension that countered life around it.
The rest of my trek had more classic beauty; I found the river that runs through Uppsala some ways downstream with ducks, fish and water reeds. It was nice to see that the river still looks like a river, especially compared to how artificial it looks downtown.

I think I'll do this more often, and next time have some pics to bring back.

Word of the Day: pulchritudinous-Characterized by or having great physical beauty and appeal. (also the word that sounds the least like what it actually means)