{"id":30963,"date":"2025-02-15T00:31:00","date_gmt":"2025-02-15T07:31:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/traveljapanblog.com\/wordpress\/?p=30963"},"modified":"2025-02-09T20:46:00","modified_gmt":"2025-02-10T03:46:00","slug":"swedish-torp","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/traveljapanblog.com\/wordpress\/2025\/02\/swedish-torp\/","title":{"rendered":"Swedish Torp"},"content":{"rendered":"<div id=\"attachment_30964\" style=\"width: 1034px\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\"><a href=\"https:\/\/traveljapanblog.com\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/02\/197_2557-RAW-swedish-torp-gefle-sweden-standard.jpg\"><img aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-30964\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/traveljapanblog.com\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/02\/197_2557-RAW-swedish-torp-gefle-sweden-standard.jpg\" alt=\"swedish torp gefle sweden\" width=\"1024\" \/><\/a><p id=\"caption-attachment-30964\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">G\u00e4vle, Sweden (July 2019)<\/p><\/div>\n<p>The older I become, the more I feel like odd connections happen in my life. It&#8217;s not that I&#8217;ve become superstitious or believe in cosmic connections (at least not while sober); I think it&#8217;s just that when you are older you have experienced more so there are more connections to be made.<\/p>\n<p>Anyway, back in the summer of 2019 I arrived in G\u00e4vle before my Airbnb&#8217;s check-in time. So I wandered around the neighboring tiny farms and took photos of the curious buildings. I had the full intent of researching the buildings later (as they have similar counterparts in Denmark and Germany), but I didn&#8217;t. Instead, they found me with the release of Age of Empires III: Definitive Edition in the following year. The newly introduced Swedish Civilization features these Swedish torps, which are key elements to successfully competing as the Swedes. What are the odds that I encounter Swedish torps for the first time (in my 50+ years of existence) in the year before a game I have spent far too many hours on reacquaint me with them less than a year later?<\/p>\n<div id=\"attachment_30968\" style=\"width: 235px\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\"><a href=\"https:\/\/traveljapanblog.com\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/02\/download.jpg\"><img aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-30968\" decoding=\"async\" loading=\"lazy\" src=\"https:\/\/traveljapanblog.com\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/02\/download.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"225\" height=\"225\" class=\"size-full wp-image-30968\" \/><\/a><p id=\"caption-attachment-30968\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">Swedish torp icon in AOEIII: Definitive Edition<\/p><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The older I become, the more I feel like odd connections happen in my life. It&#8217;s not that I&#8217;ve become superstitious or believe in cosmic connections (at least not while sober); I think it&#8217;s just that when you are older you have experienced more so there are more connections to be made. Anyway, back in [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[4],"tags":[845,175,364,594,108],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/traveljapanblog.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30963"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/traveljapanblog.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/traveljapanblog.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/traveljapanblog.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/traveljapanblog.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=30963"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/traveljapanblog.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30963\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":30970,"href":"https:\/\/traveljapanblog.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30963\/revisions\/30970"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/traveljapanblog.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=30963"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/traveljapanblog.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=30963"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/traveljapanblog.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=30963"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}