[ Västerås city center map, drawn by Q to accompany the other "area" map and offer more detail.]

Those melted blue popsicle nights will stay with me forever.....

My visit to Sweden was in midsummer, the time of the white nights / endless twilight....what this means is that their night never truly gets dark, but remains locked in a turquoise blue twilight that is both eerie and beautiful at once.  The white nights are due to being just close enough to the Arctic that in the summertime, the sun never really sets far enough from the horizon to create nightfall.  Twilight is when the sun doesn't sink more than appx. 6-12 degrees below the horizon, therefore its rays continue to illuminate the atmosphere above the earth and sustain and endless pre-dawn glow until the sunrise again.   In this part of Sweden it lasted about 4 hours before it was daybreak again.  

All of this really altered my internal clock so my perception of time was extremely dodgey yet fascinating.  The red markers follow a few of the places that Q and I perused around, from the historical old town and its traditional red Swedish cottages, to the most beautiful nightclub I've ever beheld; the nebulous translucent-white world of "å2" situated alongside the Black River; diffuse melted blue light drifting inside its windowpanes and mingling with sheer white curtainfolds.... Also a small mountain we walked through with a small hidden door fit for a half-elf to call its homestead and the final goodbye to Västerås at the train station....

However, those saturated blue nights are still with me tho for a limited time, every time that I start to notice dusk settling in at my present latitude in Chicago, its a deja-vu that transports me back to that glowy blue world....it may only last for 15 minutes here, but takes place as a fleeting guest, passing though to remind me of all that represents beauty, mystery and the amazingness of light.   In fact, as I write this at 6:32 pm, this special guest is gradually making itself apparent and encapsulating the world in its eerie glow.....