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.

Norge

Only another 100kms (or 10 Swedish milles), over the mountains and through a tunnel lies Norgè where we arrived in Mo I Rana, a somewhat industrial town at the top of a fiord on the day they were experiencing their first winter storm. Not being ‘the season’ the information place was shut, but a friendly young lady in the bookshop helped us with an itinerary for the day. The drive in the car all along the fiord to where the ferries depart to other islands or different parts of the mainland was spectacular and afforded us a look at a small part of Norway, including their interesting letterboxes. The fiords are much more like the Marlborough Sounds than the West coast fiords, except that with the storm there were numerous waterfalls also.

Autumn or is it Winter?

Red Pig was most excited about the proposed trip by hired car north west to Hemavan, the Swedish equivalent of Queenstown, NZ. This meant the opportunity to explore the countryside, see the high mountains (around 1200m so not enormous but nice enough and still with some snow patches), and most of all, delight in the autumn colours, which are really magnificent. The landscape is beautiful; forest, farms, lakes, rivers and streams and then of course the mountains, just waiting for some intrepid hiking. Wearing our own or borrowed gear we hiked up a mountain and along the top to a place called Laisaliden and up a huge roaring river that has sculpted out holes and what were called ‘canals’ instead of ‘channels’ due to a slip in translation. Overnight it snowed

Baltic Sea

In the afternoon, G and H joined Charlotte and their Italian truffle dog (Red Pig was too nervous to accompany them) to see her family’s summer house at the beach on the Baltic sea, which incidentally is hardly salty and has no tide. It must be lovely in summer as the beach is sandy and the sea very calm-more like a lake than the sea. However, this day was very cold with a strong wind blowing, so thank goodness for the house-warmed to keep the indoor plants alive over winter!

Cycle upriver

On a 20km bike ride along the cycle path next to the wide Ume river (which has its headwaters all the way into Norway more than 500 kms away and from which the town Umeå gets its name – pronounced like oo-me-oh) on Sunday morning, we found a lovely church. Bikes and pigs were not however allowed in the picturesque cemetery!

Excercise and eating habits

Golf! Saturday saw the three of us on the golf course accompanying new friends on their usual nine holes (or 18 holes in summer, including the summer version of the 19th hole pictured here). Their day had began with a swim session – the Swedish people generally seem to be very active; no wonder they can and do eat a lot without the consequences that other western eating habits have. Mind you, we haven’t found any energy bars or muesli bars in the shops and far less a selection of chips. However, we have found whole shops devoted to lollies and the chocolate from Finland is very yummy. No-one eats on the trot, all school children receive (free) cooked lunch at school and most people eat a very healthy cooked meal at lunch time, bought from one of the many and various restaurants around the campus.

Soccer

Last night Red Pig had an outing when we were given a ‘biljtett’ (ticket) to the womens’ soccer game in town. Umea’s team has won the Swedish champs for a few years. We went out of interest to see what the crowd was like, but ended up being as excited as anyone there when the local team scored to make it 3-2 in the last two minutes of the game. Then off back home on our bicycles, through the forest tracks en route-what could be nicer?

The Dongers

We have both been lent bicycles by respective colleagues and so have a new freedom to explore more quickly. Cycling is the dominant form of transport here, supported and made safe by the network of cycle/walking tracks, and we have found it very pleasant to be out and about by bicycle. We go to work by bicycle also; it takes 15 minutes instead of the 35 minute walk. It’s easy to wear work clothes and cycle at a gentle pace, instead of the necessary lycra and speed that seems to be the norm in NZ. H's cycle is a classic-at least 40 years old, no gears, huge pedal circumference that makes pedalling (even uphill) relatively easy, although one gets to the stage where one simply cant pedal if the hill is too steep and then everyone simply walks that section. We have been finding new ways of getting to work, to the shops etc and now don’t even require a map unless we are trying to get to a specific address. Pretty good feeling. The only drawback is that it takes at least five minutes to dress up in all the required warm gear for cycling; jacket, gloves, headgear and scarf. Temperatures have certainly dropped since our arrival; it’s regularly 4 or 5 degrees in the morning en route to work and again in the evenings.

Trip out of town.

Last weekend, we were invited on a trip by car towards the northwest along the large river called the Vindeln to a place on the river with an impressive series of rapids. We walked along the river track and into the forest, and again, couldn’t resist the mushrooms and berries that are SO prominent in the forest here. The small town had a very old church (Lutheran is the religion in Sweden) and a newer more impressive version close by. The lovely old church is apparently used mostly for weddings or funerals and was surrounded (as usual) with the cemetery, but in this case, much of it was family plots, each with a tidy hedge around it. Local farmers apparently make a bit of ‘pocket money’ tidying the cemeteries in the summer months.

Customs

People have been extremely invitative, so we have experienced a whole raft of new and exciting cultural norms in the past week or so. We spent much of an afternoon out in the forest to collect mushrooms while on a ‘team building’ exercise for staff. Actually, the truth is that each semester (six months) everyone in the university is expected to participate in some sort of outdoor activity for the day; hence the mushroom collecting expedition with two staff members. We have also been invited to two dinners with friends; one dinner was to celebrate the custom of eating of a type of freshwater crayfish at this time of the year (no matter that the crayfish now have to be imported from China seeing as they are hard to come by locally), accompanied by schnapps and Swedish drinking songs and funny bibs. Seeing the Red Pig cant sing, it was up to Guy and Hilda to do the necessary, but they failed miserably in the pronunciation of the Swedish renderings and couldn’t remember any English versions as those days are too long gone. In retrospect, we could have managed ‘you are my sunshine’ but now aren’t sure that that would be counted as a drinking song.

The other dinner was a much more sedate affair in the most beautiful apartment five floors up and overlooking the lake. Now I know what is raved about Swedish architecture and design – it’s clean simple lines, light, bright and cheery. Maybe it needs to be to fend off the darkness that is already threatening to overtake the world here.

First impressions modified

Well, we’ll have to apologise that first impressions aren’t always the most suitable; there is much nicer architecture, the bread is very yummy if you can find the right stuff, and lingon berry is not an ‘acquired’ taste, it’s actually very good. And Red Pig has learnt which mushrooms are not marked ‘deadly nightcap’. Actually, that word belongs more to the schnapps that accompanies many (or is it most) dinners out – you’ll need to ask Guy about the after effects of too much schnapps and the use of a pillow in the morning when the sun gets up.

Sunday

Sunday morning was spent walking/jogging around the local lake-a 10 km trip which H intends to be able to do without stopping or walking by the time we leave here. Then off to the shops for supplies for the week, lugged back to our upstairs apartment in the rucksack by G. Meat and chicken (krychling) is very expensive (from $20-$26 per kilogram respectively), yet other items such as dried fruit (blandfrukt) is cheap. We bought the most awful bread last shopping spree (sweet cardboard) so are being pickier from now on. There was a nice farmers’ market in a park on Saturday with lovely bread, but that market is only once a week and only till the end of September when it appears that veges will more or less come to an end with the colder weather. Oh dear…

Architecture is interesting; rather plain and a bit like what we have seen in the Czech Republic (sort of Russianly utilitarian). Even the museum (Bilt museet) looked more like a factory, although it housed a most beautiful exhibition of aerial photographs of different parts of Sweden by Lars Bygdemark-well worth finding his work if you can A and A as you will love the patterns in it.