Dear A,

I'll keep adding to this as I go along. Maybe by the time I finish it, I'll have an address for you (B. says he's working on it; but can I trust him? Were you exaggerating the pass you claimed he made at you the day I left, as he drove you home from the airport?). In any case, I'll be back in Berlin in less than two weeks. This detour through Stockholm is my way of giving you a head-start; I'll shout 'Olly Olly oxen free!' when I arrive at the Zoo Station, okay?

The air outside this cafe, which is a handful of stair steps down from street level (it's like taking tea in a womb), is gray-green with the imminent force of a steaming summer deluge. The thunder is ready to bang (city-sized trash lids); cars are rushing by in the twinkling air. Swedes are darting for doorways.

I had been zipping briskly along Kungsholmstrand, meaning to have a long walk today; little boats were bobbing and knocking together like hollow skulls in the greenish water. I was thinking how lovely it all was. Those quaint old red-brick buildings with black roofs and piping, lining the opposite bank, and the relatively sweet air (Stockholm isn't yet as car-choked as San Diego or London or Berlin), and the innocently dour Swedes crunching along the gravel bank in a trickle of pilgrimage towards me. But I saw the blackness rising out of the east like a magician's cape and I knew rain would come exploding from under it and scurried back up towards a main thoroughfare and found this cafe.

A girl is singing along to the radio music coming over the cafe speakers. With her frail, shaky, stubbornly confident voice. The song is in English, and she's glancing intermittently at me, having pegged me as American, and I have to smile at the horrible, silly, unmusical song. Sweet girl, though.

I'm sitting out the storm...and to my horror, the café has just been invaded by three Americans. Students. I'm not in the tourist part of the town, so it's an irritating surprise to see them here. It's a little cafe, with only ten tables, and they're sitting directly across from me, distracting me with their English. As awkward as it is to be in a country where I can't speak the language, one of my greatest pleasures happens to be the immunity to small talk I enjoy when I can't understand a word I'm hearing. So this sudden attack of English is a drag. Overhearing this bonehead chatter (in trans-Midwestern dipthongs, no less) is as bad as sitting next to a guy who's smoking a cigar, or playing a loud radio… you can't escape the pollution.

So I'm trying to sit here writing you, but I can't help listening to them complain about the airports in France, or the exchange rate in Prague, or brag about the wild time they had at some party last night. They're wearing the uniform...the expensive sportswear (orange nylon shorts and pocket tee shirts and trendy sandals) that you'll see on MTV if you watch it long enough to start talking like them.