Last night we were invited to a din­ner organ­ized by Vis­it­Sweden with some of our blog­ging col­leagues from Ber­lin (This Is Jane Wayne, Trave­lettes, Lilies Diary, Mit Vergnü­gen, StyleS­pion, Fre­unde von Fre­un­den, ArtSchool­Vets, Third­Wave­Ber­lin, Herms­Farm … and so many more!). The din­ner was hos­ted at the very cozy Chez Bitz, which is con­veni­ently only two houses away from where I live. That should deserve an extra men­tion because my hood is awesome.

Any­way… while it was a great even­ing in itself (the food was del­ish, but I was even more excited about the little goody bag full of Swedish sweets from Herr Nils­son), Mar­cus and I got talk­ing about Sweden in gen­eral. I’ve never been to this fant­astic little coun­try of which I’ve heard so many great things, although every year I try to find a good excuse to visit Stock­holm. The idea of trav­el­ing has a very import­ant mean­ing to our lives in Ber­lin: see­ing and feel­ing other places in the world can teach you to appre­ci­ate your own home as well as show you what you can learn from oth­ers. With what I’ve heard about Stock­holm (and, to some extent, Göte­borg) so far it seems like a great inspir­a­tion for us to take back to Ber­lin. Besides, a time-out from our “poor but sexy” hab­itat helps against that over­loaded dirty feel­ing that some­times sets in after too many nights out and too many days working.

Mar­cus, on the other hand, has been to Sweden many times before. We decided to use the occa­sion to share with you some of his pic­tures of Stock­holm, as well as a video he shot dur­ing a per­form­ance of his swedish friends Gnucci Banana and Mash Up Inter­na­tional at old Villa Club in Ber­lin . This year, a trip to Sweden is (again) very high up on my list of trav­el­ing pri­or­it­ies — from what I’ve heard, it should be worth it.