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!
Monday, 24 November 2008
Saturday, 15 November 2008
Stockholm Long weekend.
November 9Overnight 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.
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.
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