Izabela Dłużyk is an amazing woman. She roams the Białowieża Forest in Poland, recording everything. Both day and night, early mornings and late evenings, in order to obtain sounds from all parts of each day. Early in her life, she became interested in the sounds of parrots and started recording them. She has recently been to Peru, where she recorded parts of the Amazonian rain forest. All of that may not sound that amazing except that Izabela has been blind since birth.
She was originally accompanied by her mother, who would guide her down the tracks and paths but, these days, unless she’s going somewhere new, she just goes on her own.
I heard about Izabela this morning while listening to the World Service on the BBC. The presenter accompanied her on a walk through the Białowieża Forest, one of the last remaining primeval forests in Europe. It spans around 3,085.8 square kilometres and is alive with sounds. If this morning’s piece was anything to go by, anyway.
Whenever I think about my own, petty misfortunes, people like Izabela serve to remind me that I don’t have things so bad after all. That it’s important to look for the positives rather than live in wells of self-pity.
Not that I did any of that today. In fact, I was quite industrious. Ikea is delivering a load of furniture for my office on Tuesday, so I set to emptying the room. Though, before that, I headed out to climb Mount Trosa, which is a ski slope in winter and a steep walk outside of the snow days.
And we made it. I took a photo of the sign at the top in order to prove that I did. I like the fact that it’s called Trosa Everest. Apparently, if you walk up and down 221 times, it’s the same as scaling the world’s tallest mountain. Once was enough for me. Twice if you count yesterday.
I wasn’t alone at the summit. Four mountain bikers were resting and chatting. They were about to descend the other side of the hill. There were also a couple of women walking up and down a few times, maybe trying for the Everest thing.
Actually, there were a few people walking around the woods this morning. More than I normally see. One pair stopped and complimented me on the good behaviour of the dogs. She said she loved the way they both looked up to me as if to ask if it was okay to go and say hello. And she was a self-confessed cat person.
There weren’t so many people around when I walked into Trosa later for my Swedish conversation fika with Nicoline. She suggested it. It didn’t last very long. The conversation bit, I mean. The fika lasted about an hour. It was quite funny.
Mind you, something I did understand was when she told me that there maybe a transport issue on Friday in Stockholm because of an ongoing Slussen problem. Apparently, Stockholm City wants to build a footbridge alongside the t-bana, but Stockholm County doesn’t want them to. It’s the county that looks after the transport, so they have said they’ll stop all t-bana trains from running when Stockholm City is working on it.
Nicoline told me that she may not be coming to dinner on Thursday because her operation on Friday may be affected. She also suggested that Sharon and Jud might be advised to stay at a hotel near the airport on Thursday night.
According to Expressen, the subway bridge will be closed from 22 to 26 September and effect around 400,000 commuters. While this doesn’t directly effect the commuter trains or the Arlanda express, these will be much busier than usual and, possibly, not reliable. Clearly, we will have to keep an eye on the SL/SJ websites for updates.
But, as I said earlier in this post, there are plenty of people with worse problems than this. Let me finish with a photo of the view from the top of Mount Trosa.
I have to say, that blue tarp is a bit annoying.
