Last week in Umea

Winter has arrived with cold wind and snow falling all day Monday.

This past weekend we managed a bit of X country skiing (G) and walking on water (H) and a lot of culturally rich socialising!

Stockholm Long weekend.

November 9
Overnight on the train to…
Stockholm: grey skies and hazy views, underground (T –for tunnel- bannan) and chilly wind and everyone dressed in dark coats, gloves and woolly hats.

Work visits to a Hospital Lab for G and Spinal Injury Recovery setup (Spinalis) for H occupied much of the 1st day with a navigational challenge finding the second!

Saturday, a boat ride around the archipelago gave us an idea of how things look and then, over two days, we visited some of the sights. Definitely one of the best was the Vasa museum – containing the only ‘intact’ 17th C war ship that sank minutes into its maiden voyage in 30m of water because it was too top heavy! It’s decorated with over 200 carved wooden figures of Greek heroes and cherubs. It lay underwater beautifully preserved (the water is not salty and therefore there are no saltwater worms to eat the oak wood) for over 300 years until raised in 1960 something. It’s a very fine museum as everything is so real – even the skeletons that were raised with the ship.
Nearby we enjoyed Lars Lerin’s water colour paintings in Prince Eugene’s former stately house– he’s a well-known Swedish artist of our age – who spent a lot of time in the north of Sweden, so we identified with the scenery. A fun visit was to Junibacken which entailed dragging G along, as it’s a kids’ museum. However, it was absolute magic. We climbed into a train carriage and were transported above large models of the book characters and scenery from the illustrations in books by Astrid Lungren, the storyteller who created Pippi Longstocking. It was so impressive that G thanked me for hauling him along!

Bears, wolves, reindeer and elk featured in a visit to the Scandinavian zoo. It was rather wet and muddy and the animals don’t seem right in a zoo, but it nevertheless gave us an opportunity to see them. We paid an interesting visit to the Museum of Architecture (Swedish architecture through the ages) and a music museum, with many Scandinavian instruments both on show and able to be played.

We also visited the huge city hall (Statshuset) which is famous for hosting the Nobel Prize banquets and dance in the Gold mosaic decorated Hall.

Then ‘home’ to Umea on Monday evening by plane.

North to and beyond the Arctic Circle in November!

A colleague from work invited us to spend the weekend with them, travelling about 400 kms north to Arjeplog, a small town in the northern region of Norrland. They had spent all of their kid raising years there and Christer, a GP, still works there one week a month, so still has ties to the area. It was a fascinating weekend, as there was also a German fellow who usually rents their house over the winter months. He is one of the over 400 workers mainly from Germany who spend a number of months in the area in winter, testing everything to do with cars – from brakes, to tyres, to who knows what else on ice roads made on the lakes. Apparently the car testing industry keeps this area going, while many other rural areas in Sweden have reduced in size and wealth with the move into the cities for work. We day tripped another 150 kms across the Arctic circle and then to the Norwegian border (where a smart Swede has realised the potential to sell all manner of groceries from a pantechnicon van on weekends to Norwegians from across the border, (his prices being cheaper than in Norge).

The countryside was covered in snow which turned colours of pink, orangey, and brown in the light of the very low sun. We say herds of reindeer and a solitary fox. It was quite beautiful and very special to be tramping the hills, and stopping for fika (coffee in a flask and smoked reindeer meat, cut up into small pieces and fried in butter over a camp stove, then eaten on flat bread) while sitting on the reindeer skin sit-upon that we carried with us as protection against sitting on the frozen ground.

En route home we visited a Sámi settlement owned by a man who used to fly floatplanes and helicopters for medical evacuations and GP visits. His wife and family (of grown up children) have found a niche market in providing meals to bus tourists from Norway, up to three tours a day, and up to 400 people for Christmas, in their series of restaurants in their settlement. They are both collectors, Mrs Sámi had masses (maybe 250) Tomtens (Father Christmas’s’) on shelves around the rooms and he had more than 15 piano accordions, which he plays regularly for the guests. Unfortunately he was recovering from a knee replacement – modern medicine reaches the most remote places!-so was rather quieter than his usual self. Sámi is the name for the indigenous Lappish people, who live in the northern regions and have the rights to ‘farm’ the reindeer. Tomten is Father Christmas who of course comes from this area and epitomises the Sámi people – he is small, white-haired, a little portly, wears a red top and in the folklore has elves that help him feed the reindeer and help him in the forest etc. So that’s where the story comes from. And they even wear shoes with turned up toecaps! The only difference we could see were the two very new and shiny snowmobiles parked next to the house, in place of the old sleigh. But hey, with a knee replacement, I guess you can’t complain about using a snowmobile to get around.

Local scenes en route to town

Daylight saving ended on the weekend. We ran along the riverbank on Sunday then came home for coffee and biscuits and suddenly realised that it was only 3.30pm and getting dark. What! It’s properly dark by 4pm now. People dread this time of the year as the days get shorter and shorter. Actually, it’s quite interesting to wonder if we will be negatively affected by the darkness, or whether it will remain as a novelty. We’re travelling inland this weekend with friends to their holiday home at a place called Arjeplog (pronounced Ur (like us but with an ‘r’)-i (as the ‘i’ in ‘in’) – ay – ploo- g (a hard ‘g’ as in ‘garden’) where there is sure to be snow and temps down to -11 degrees. Actually the cold feels good, one can dress for it and it’s not cold and miserable inside. The frost makes for interesting cycling and it’s fascinating to watch things freeze over and stay frozen despite the sunshine during the day. We have joked that we need sunglasses as the sun is so low that it’s blinding!

Swedish pride where G found the red carpet

This is surreal. We have just returned from a staff ‘teambuilding’ exercise that entailed an hour of ten-pin bowling at the local alley, followed by dinner at the alley’s restaurant. Sweden is SO far removed from the American influence, that to see the Americanised bowling score boards, instead of grating the senses, was rather sweet, being so out of place as things go here. We have remarked before how little billboard advertising there is, how little graffiti and how clean and neat everyone is, even the skateboarding youngsters in their baggy trousers. On the other hand, that kind of epitomises the Swedish culture of belonging to a whole, the ‘part of the neighbourhood’ feeling, the standing patiently in line and not rocking or bucking the system. So the surrealty comes to us from being part of this culture for now, but also being able to look at it from a distance; to be able to see both the useful bits and the keeping everyone in place bits. But before the philosophical debate about culture and new experiences, perhaps you’d like to know about the visit to the frizor mentioned in the last blog – it was worth every cent – a chair that massaged back and legs while having hair washed, a hairdresser who waxed about my ‘lovely curls’ instead of the usual ‘my you have very fine difficult hair’, candles at the entrance to welcome you in, and a whole hour of relaxed chat. And then the dinner – a cultural experience of Swedish pride (flags, ceremony, formality, and decorations like students dressed in formal wear and white hats who rotated very formally to hold the flagpoles during the conferring ceremony), Swedish food (trout and caviar entrée, pork roast pieces with mushroom dumpling and jus, and baked local apple desert), Swedish sing-song (after each speech during dinner, with the words printed on cards on the table and the last one performed with the whole audience standing on their chairs – yet still no nonsense or falling around) and Swedish music (the Reindeer band, a local very good big band dressed –sort of facetiously in red striped trousers and black waistcoats with medals hanging from them) whose best bit came at the end of the evening with a medley of Abba! Actually it was all a lot of fun, entertaining and insightful. And somehow the best bit was riding home on our bicycles at 3a.m. in the frost as it seemed a better idea to cycle to work, change there, walk across to the venue for the ceremony and dinner and reverse the sequence to get home, thereby avoiding the need to wait outside in the freezing cold for a taxi.

The coming week is very fully planned. It begins on Monday with tickets to the opera, Mozart’s Magic Flute, with the local company in co-operation with the Cape Town opera company. It’s to be sung in Swedish!

Tuesday and Wednesday will see us join the local tango group where we have made some good friends and acquaintances for the usual class and milonga. There is a tango festival, with classes by visiting professionals from Holland and Belgium on the weekend. G travels northwest on Thursday with a group from work to deliver what would be called ‘continuing education’ to staff at some of the primary health centres (read general practitioners, community nurses, and other health professionals who team up and work together) of the region. On Friday, there are presentations at the University from all of the people (about 11) who will receive honorary doctorates on Saturday. Among them are a few who will address the audience in English, including one professor from Canterbury Uni (Tourism in a post carbon world) and another from Stellenbosch Uni (Public life and moral fabric in SA), both of which could be very interesting. H and G have been invited officially to the conferring ceremony on Saturday evening, followed by THE dinner and ball of the year. For this we require what they call ‘tuxedo’ dress for G (tails, white tie, gold and diamond buttons and cufflinks) and a ball gown (blue velvet off the shoulder) for H, both of which we have had fun borrowing from various friends or acquaintances here. RP has unfortunately not been officially invited, so will peep at the proceedings from a safe distance in the handbag instead in order to be able to report later on proceedings and to try out a local taxi cab to and from the venue instead of the usual cycle transport.

H has booked to visit a Klipp Salongen Frisör on Friday for a haircut, which will set us back in the region of $100 or so. It had better be a good cut! No wonder H’s office mate’s wife does duty with the scissors in their household.

And just to end off with something for readers with sharp eyes; they call the dots on some of the letters the ‘pricks’. Nice use of that word hey?

The HIGH Coast and other happenings

October 11

Oi! Why the silence from RP? It’s been two weeks since the last blog insert. To be honest, it seems that pigs (well, a certain pig anyway) and other humans (well, two specific humans) have insufficient capacity to take care of a blog’s requirements while also working hard on ‘official’ matters ie the reason for coming to SE. We have either had or are to have work presentations and that requires preparation, even over weekends. Time must, however, not be allowed to linger, so here is the next instalment.

There is an area of coast here called the Höga Kusten (High Coast) that was covered during the ice age with up to three kilometres of ice; that’s a serious weight of ice. When the ice melted, the ground that had been forced downwards was able to rise up again and is apparently still rising, at the rate of almost 1cm per year. It’s now up to 250 metres up from where it was long ago and makes for an interesting ‘coastline’ as there are coast lines (rocky areas) evident up in the forests on the hills next to the sea. There is also an interesting split in the rock formation, presumably from the push up of the ground. RP loved that trip for its great views, walking in the forest and especially for the beaches.