Karlstad

I am in Karlstad, Sweden for a couple of days, giving a talk at Karlstad University and visiting a couple of former students, UT PhD graduates Miya and Christian Christensen, who teach there.

It is a small city, but quite pretty, as this scene along a riverbank shows. It is also refreshing to see a small city with a very full and prosperous downtown. Here the mall, small at that, is in the middle of downtown, so everything around it does well, too. It would be nice if American towns would get the hang of that, instead of building all the new stores on the edge of town so the downtown hollows out and dies.
It is getting into the middle of fall and this is pretty far north, so mornings tend to be foggy, as you can see here, and cold. But it is kind of bracing and enlivening to go out for a walk in it anyway.