Sweden Road Trip #5: The Road To Höga Kusten

A map, courtesy of Lonely Planet, with drawings on it courtesy of me. This stretch of drive was from Stockholm up to Höga Kusten. The key on the map is, oddly, quite wrong – this part of the road trip looks to be 300km according to the key but I can tell you for a fact it’s more like 500km – we had to split it up into two days. Also they’ve misspelled Gävle. Anyway, on with the blog post.

After a few days hanging in and around Stockholm (kind of), we finally headed up north to Gävle and then Höga Kusten (The High Coast), over the course of a couple of days. The High Coast may not look high compared to a lot of Scandinavia – it’s only halfway up the country, after all – but I should remind you that the top part of Sweden (and Finland and Norway) is actually in the Arctic Circle – even Southern Sweden is quite north. So if you see any maps telling you Norrland (Northern Sweden) is only the top quarter of the country, ignore those maps – Norrland begins at around Sundsvall, a bit south of The High Coast. Also, I think The High Coast may have its name due to certain geological features that I shall discuss in the next blog post (yes, it’s to do with land rising).

Anyway, enough geography (that’s a lie, I just couldn’t think of a good transition to a new paragraph, for which I deeply apologise). The drive to Gävle was only a few hours but it was already getting late, so we decided to rest up and shoot off early the next day instead. We stopped at a place called Rullsands Camping nearby and set up tent, before running off to the beach which was mostly deserted as it had already become fairly cold as the sun began to set. But this didn’t bother us. Well actually I lie, I whinged and moaned about the water not being warm enough, but that’s what happens when you get an Aussie in Swedish ocean, regardless of the time of year. What does continue to amaze me with Swedish beaches though is the total lack of waves. I have barely seen a wave since I moved here, and I’ve been to at least half a dozen beaches now. Not that I’m much of a surfer, but it’s just something I’ve noticed I guess. What fascinated me with this particular beach was the really quite large stones sticking out of the water, noticeable quite a long way into the water as it remains shallow a long way out too. I can’t help but think that at winter, when this would be frozen over, you could make some sort of sports game on the ice using the rocks as goals or something. Or not. I don’t know.

That night, as we failed to go to bed early to rest like we intended, I came across a small frog or two hopping around the place. It was cool to see them, but I did sort of freak out that I would step on one because my eyesight in the darkness is pretty terrible. But I don’t think I did and in the end the bigger concern of the night was, sadly, some noisy drunken campers nearby who eventually got yelled at by everybody to shut up and finally did a little while before the sun came back up (I hate sounding like the fun police, but there were a lot of families and young kids around, and you can literally and legally camp ANYWHERE in Sweden if you want, meaning there’s a lot of other places you can go if you want to have a big party and not annoy a couple of hundred other campers. End rant). Before leaving we went back to the beach one last time. The others swam again but I just sunbathed for a little while, as the sun was out and shining in full which led to a surprisingly busier beach (I didn’t think that many people were actually staying near here but there you go). Eventually we packed up and got back on the road.

As we found ourselves ever further north, Sweden showed its true natural face – lots of trees, lots of lakes, some more trees and even more lakes. Sweden has just under 100 000 lakes, and just under 9% of the landmass is covered in lakes which is quite staggering (although Finland next door, despite much debate, has nearly double this many lakes (and Canada has several million but then Canada is just enormous so that goes without saying)). Still, it makes for stunning scenery, especially on blue sky Summer days like almost every day we drove (the car had no air conditioning so we kept sweltering in the heat while driving and then catching up to the rain at each new campsite…typical). I would love to go back to this area during Winter and see everything frozen over and covered in ice – many of the lakes up this high you can drive on safely for a couple of months each year. Eventually, at around the same point as Sundsvall, we crossed Högakustenbron (The High Coast Bridge – the “The” is in this word too, as it’s the “en” in the middle. But don’t get me started on Swedish language, at least not until I feel more confident with it) which really is quite a huge and magnificent bridge. At the other end of this was…ta-da, Höga Kusten!

We were greeted with a beautiful afternoon and evening, and the last clear-sky day on which we would set up the tent for the rest of the road trip as the weather was finally about to wreak a bit of havoc. Finally, the main part of our holiday had begun! But I’ll cover the details of the few days we spent in this beautiful part of the world next time!

Sweden Road Trip #4: Stockholm Part 2 – Djurgården, and The Swedish Sin

We ended up spending a lot of our day in Stockholm in an area called Djurgården. It has a strong naval history in the area, which means there are ships and galleys everywhere still, but nowadays a lot of it has been turned into museums – the model to the right shows roughly how it looked back in the 1940s. There is an old ice breaker docked which is a museum and also a restaurant. There is the Vasa Museum, which has a ship in it sticking out of the top (left – yes that ship is real and old). And there is the Spirit Museum, which we entered into because the exhibitions looked too interesting to pass up. The whole area of Djurgården was quite clearly a tourist destination, as there were people everywhere and plenty to do – I think you could spend a day here alone just to get everything done, because we sure didn’t have the time to.

The Spirit Museum (I think that’s what it was called anyway) had three exhibitions going on – one on spirits and drinks of Sweden, one on Artpop and Record Sleeves, and one on The Swedish Sin. There weren’t too many fascinating photos from the Spirits exhibition but alcohol is an important factor in The Swedish Sin exhibition, which looks at Sweden’s relationships with alcohol and sex over the last half a century or so.

Starting off, however, with the Artpop exhibition, for a music fanatic like me this was a lot of fun. There were a lot of classic album covers on display from the age of vinyl, and lots of information about particular artists behind some of these covers, as well as the styles and similarities between some. It was nothing life changing, but it was a nice reminder that once upon a time a lot of work went into designing an album cover and at times the liner notes inside too – something which gets lost as music becomes increasingly digital around the world. There were also some bits of information that were just funny, like the fact that inside an album by Frankie Goes To Hollywood was a quote about how he was excited to know that Andy Warhol had heard of him because Picasso had heard of Andy Warhol. Anyway, this was a good exhibition to ease us into the museum before the more serious stuff!

The Swedish Sin was by far the most interesting of the exhibitions. While in the mid 20th century the world was looking at Sweden in shock at their sexual values, as sex became less and less of a taboo topic and the society as a whole encouraged sexual freedom and rights in ways much ahead of their time, alcohol restrictions in the country were some of the most severe in the developed world. It’s interesting because this was the reverse of America and much of the western world of the time, which had an easier relationship with alcohol but still saw sex as a fairly taboo subject. I can’t show pictures from the sexual side of all this because, well, you can figure it out I’m sure, but the alcohol aspect was quite a spectacle back then. For a long time there has been a total alcohol monopoly in Sweden – you can only buy it (to take home, I mean) from Systembolaget, a government owned chain of shops. This is still the case now, and even now the Systembolaget sells no cold drinks (meaning you need to “plan” to buy them in advance so you can cool them down), they shut early and don’t open at all on Sundays. Still, back in the 1950s you had rationing of alcohol where they wrote down how much you had bought and could refuse you if you tried to go over your rations. In the late 1950s they dropped the rationing, trying to encourage responsible drinking through campaigns like Operation Wine in which they encouraged people to drink wine instead of vodka so they wouldn’t get so drunk. For someone like me who comes from a country like Australia where the attitude to alcohol is quite liberal, it is fascinating to see that the current restrictive system on buying alcohol stems from something much more complex and culturally embedded.

So what turned out to be a spur of the moment decision to enter perhaps the least majestic museum we had come across in Stockholm turned into a really interesting and enlightening afternoon for us. We soon headed back towards the main part of town, walking past the Stockholm Royal Theatre (somewhere else to see on a later visit) and chilling on a jetty for a while by the water as we considered dinner. Oddly enough, all the waterfront restaurants had really boring menus which is something I found quite frustrating – plenty of other cities by the water that I have visited have great restaurants on the water. But all of these had not only dull menus but the same menu, and I was almost at the point of giving up when we found a really nice Lebanese restaurant further in town which ended the night perfectly. According to my Fitbit we had walked some 20 000 steps and nearly 20km, and I definitely felt it.

Coming up next, we head up a lot more north finally to the High Coast, a place of beauty and, oddly enough, significant geological interest. Stay tuned for more!

Sweden Road Trip #3: Stockholm Part 1

It’s a little sad that it took me almost six months of living here to finally make it to the capital city of Sweden, but a couple of days into our road trip in July I finally got there. I actually had to go there anyway to visit the Australian Embassy about something (it was hiding upstairs in some totally random building that we could have so easily missed, too, but the people there were nice at least). After half an hour, we were done and headed off for a day around Stockholm.

The city itself is like a lot of the other bigger cities of Sweden – not all that big. There is about a million people living in Stockholm altogether, which compared to many cities of the world is tiny, and the effect on the overall scenery is that there is a distinct lack of high-rises which in turn makes the place kind of cosy. Like a lot of the main cities of Sweden, water is the key natural feature of the whole place, and added to the usual modes of transport here are ferries (which we boarded on our way to a place I’ll cover in Part 2 of this post).

The architecture here is amazing, as you would expect, with churches and cathedrals littered everywhere. I could go on and on about the architecture, but I’ll just include a bunch of pictures towards the end of the post to show you what I mean. As we didn’t have much time in Stockholm we didn’t go into most of these buildings, which is kind of a shame but I plan on spending a lot more time exploring the city later, and when I do I’ll probably be able to say something more profound about these places other than “oh look, dey so purdy!” (But they are.)

After some sight seeing, we dodged the crowds through the main part of the city and found ourselves on the back streets. After a little bit of wandering we came across an amazing little cafe called Under Kastenjen, which translates as Under The Chestnut Tree, called this because…well I’m pretty sure you can work it out. We had a surprisingly cheap lunch while relaxing here, and halfway through our meal a keyboard player appeared in the middle of the courtyard and started performing for us (I say appeared, but he did walk into the courtyard – I don’t want you to think that not only do Swedish people just materialise places but that it’s accepted as nothing unusual (although that would be cool)). Naturally, we didn’t find ourselves in a rush to leave and decided a dessert would also be a good idea.

We eventually left our little lunch spot and roamed some more of the back streets, going into a few different shops along the way while we looked for a pharmacy. What we weren’t expecting to find, however, was a pharmacy from the 1600s that was still in use! A lot of the historic feel to the place has been kept, which I thought was fantastic (I’m sure most people who live there think it’s no big deal, but then again I am a big nerd). There was an extension out the back that looked a lot newer, but the original pharmacy was definitely still in use, and I believe that computer monitor also dates back a few centuries (I made that same bad joke on Instagram with this particular photo…extra sorry for those poor souls who had to see the bad excuse for humour twice). There was also an old mortar and pestle and a plaque with all the owners of the place since 1674 – interestingly the only female owner was not in the last century at all, but back in the 1700s.

There were plenty of other interesting finds along some of those streets. We walked past some awesome antique shops, many of which weren’t open frustratingly. We heard a lot of different accents on our way, including a lot of different English speakers too (it was the middle of Summer so the peak of the tourist season). We also walked past some darker aspects of history, such as a street named Svartmangatan – translated as Black man’s street. For all the wonderful ways that Sweden has been progressive socially, racism has long been an issue throughout the history of the country and, judging from the election results here last night, it still is an issue (to cut a long story short, an incredibly racist party has somehow become the third biggest party, which has left a lot of the country devastated, embarrassed, and a little bit scared).

As I said before, this was a rushed tour of the city, and so there were a lot of places we just didn’t have time to visit. One place which I regret not going into, and yet I feel I probably needed to dedicate a full day to anyway, was the rather majestic looking Nordic Museum. It was so huge that taking a picture of the longer side required me to stand back. Several hundred metres back, actually. I adore the architecture with this place – I think all good museums should put the effort into looking nice from the outside (because I have visited plenty in my life that look drab and awful until you go in). Anyway, I have heard a lot of good things about this place, so this is definitely deserving of a return trip one day. It was also surrounded by some nice gardens and place to eat and drink.

After this, we went and rested in a park for a little while while we decided what to do next. The rest of the day would be spent in a part of Stockholm called Djurgården, which I will cover in the second part of this post. There we did go into a museum, looking at a couple of different exhibitions from Artpop music covers to Sweden’s cultural history with alcohol and sex. In the meantime, I’ll finish off this post with a few more pictures of the architecture around Stockholm. Enjoy!

What I love with this is just the sheer amount of detail that has gone into it! Beautiful!

This was a door. I want this door.

Suddenly this statue doesn’t look so tough with a bird on its head. For some reason this made me laugh a lot.

 

Sweden Road Trip #2: From West To East At Around Midnight

A badly drawn line represents roughly this leg of the road trip.

Okay, so we finally begin the actual main road trip itself. Our first leg of the trip involved going from Halmstad on the West Coast of Sweden (where we live) to a place called Nynäshamn, about an hour south of Stockholm on the East Coast. The intention was to leave mid Monday afternoon and get there at night. But in reality, we overestimated our ability to be ready on time by a good eight hours, and left at about midnight.

I guess it was to be expected. Four of us sharing a car, a caravan and a tent attached to the side of the cabin – there was a lot of stuff to organise, put away securely, things that needed checking they still functioned. But eventually at midnight we took off, deciding it was still worth making a start on the trip so that we wouldn’t wake up with the whole thing still left to do.

At about 3 in the morning, exhausted and a little over half way there, we decided to make a pit stop for the rest of the night in the luxury accommodation of some random car park we found. One thing about Sweden is their very loose laws about where you can stop for the night in a caravan. Almost the entire country is in fact legally available, within reason (obviously you can’t go blocking the driveways of people or businesses, or stop in the middle of the road or somewhere fenced off entirely, but you get the gist). There were quite a few other caravans who had stopped here overnight, too, so it seems to be quite common. A few hours later, the sun well and truly up, we went to the supermarket to get some food, had a quick breakfast, and took back off for the rest of the journey.

By lunch time we finally got to our destination, which turned out to be this really cute little seaside camping site. We got one of the last spots and set ourselves up nicely towards the top of the hill sloping down to the beach, which was useful in that we were a tiny bit closer to the shops and the train station, both of which we would need to use. The camping site wasn’t too bad – we had electricity (something we really needed, camping there for 3 days and for 2 weeks in total around the country), there was a little restaurant/bar which we never used, and on the beach there was water slides and diving boards which we never got around to using sadly. Next time.

The second day of our stay there, we shot off to Stockholm for the day and I took so many pictures there and saw so much that it needs probably two full blog posts just to cover it, so the third and fourth posts of this series will be on that before we head up north. But, as I said, we stayed in Nynäshamn for 3 days, so back to Nynäshamn! On the Thursday, we wandered into town with the dogs and even took them to a dog cafe, which was quite a cute idea even if one of them went a little bit loopy and knocked over the water bowl put down for her everywhere. Luckily, I suspect the owner of the place was fairly used to that sort of thing. The rest of the town was sweet but tiny, and for some reason I didn’t take any photos of it – oops! Oh well, you’ll see plenty of other towns in the later blog posts so I’m sure you’ll get by. Or you could image search it if you’re really curious.

On the Friday, we had to leave by midday and that morning decided just to go on a walk around the coastline for an hour or so. Two hours later, we were completely lost. Nynäshamn is connected to a lot of other little islands, and somehow when we decided to return home we ended up on a path that was going to take us the really really long way back, around several other islands. The scenery was gorgeous, to be fair, and we got plenty of exercise in the whole process. But there was definitely a moment where we seriously worried whether or not we would find our way back to the camping site at all, especially as one person we asked for directions sort of pointed us in the wrong direction too. But we got there in the end…or did we? No, we did. It was fine. Honest.

Coming up next on my road trip blog, our day in Stockholm will be covered in a ridiculous amount of detail before we move on to the High Coast of Sweden, which perhaps in a lot of ways was the most memorable experience of the entire trip.

Sweden Road Trip #1: Malmö

The Turning Torso has become an iconic building in Malmö. Unfortunately, it’s residential and you can’t go inside. It overlooks the sea between Sweden and Denmark.

Finally, here it is – the first part of many based on my recent road trip around Sweden. This first post is about my visit to Malmö, which was actually two days before I left on the official road trip but I’m going to include it anyway because the city was pretty amazing. All the pictures are much bigger than they’ll be on here so click on them if you want to see them full size.

Malmö is Sweden’s third biggest city and is famous for many things: incredible architecture such as The Turning Torso, the epic bridge to Copenhagen over in Denmark (which actually goes underwater at one point), and of course the lovely Skåne accent (Skåne County covers a lot of the south of Sweden and people from other parts of the country mock their accent. Frankly I’m just happy to be in a country with such noticeable differences between accents).

The sight of a changing city.

The first thing I saw, however, was cranes everywhere. Followed immediately by the construction areas those cranes were situated in. The thing is, it seems to me as a total outsider that the city of Malmö is undergoing some dramatic changes all over. There seem to be a lot of areas that I suspect will be apartments, particularly close to the water, so presumably they plan on attracting a lot more people to live there. In particular, I suspect its aiming at young people who would help grow the city in the long term and who would find the proximity to Denmark (and, through that, a lot of the rest of Europe) rather attractive. It will be interesting to see how the city looks in a few years time.

After proceeding to become lost in a city that at first seemed eerily empty, I eventually found my way towards Malmöhus Fortress. Before going to the castle itself, though, I made my way to the huge gardens attached to it – it seems every fairly big city here in Scandinavia with a castle also has some sort of royal garden, which I personally think is really nice. All around people were lazing on the grass reading, or just hanging out under the shade of some of the huge trees. There is something about being surrounded by so much nature which induces an inescapable calmness and serenity, I think. Or maybe I’m just a hippie born in the wrong era, who knows. But even though I sped around the gardens (I only had a couple of hours to explore the whole city), the place left a mark on me and I definitely want to return with a good book one day and enjoy it more.

Eventually, I found my way to the castle. After a disappointing lunch at a cafe nearby, with a bonus fly for added flavour, I wandered inside Malmöhus Fortress, curious as to what I would find inside. I had my hopes up – I mean come on, the place has a moat and dates back to the 1400s. It has been turned into a museum and gallery of sorts inside, and at first I was a bit disappointed to say the least (the first room I walked into was a slightly random exhibition on frogs…I mean, I like frogs, but really? Frogs?). But I pushed on, determined to get deeper into the castle and to discover some history about the place. Eventually I found what I was looking for – an awesome museum on the history, the battles the fortress had seen, and frankly a total information overload on it all. When this place was built, it was in fact part of Denmark along with a lot of the southwest of current Sweden (including my home up in Halmstad). But in 1658, the Swedish successfully captured a lot of this land and then spent the next few decades fending off repeated Danish attacks as the Danes attempted to recapture their lost land. The fighting stretched up the West Coast of Sweden all the way past where I live now (a couple of major battles were in Halmstad), but the bulk of the fighting seems to have been in Malmö, in which this fortress was hugely important. I couldn’t help but think about how many stories there are in all of this, waiting to be written down in one way or another.

After the relief of finding some fascinating history in the walls of the castle, I decided to head towards the waterfront of the city that stares out at Denmark and the bridge that now connects the two countries. I walked past the Turning Torso (the picture at the start of this post), past a bunch of restaurants I wish I had have known about an hour or so earlier when I ate lunch, and found myself drawn immediately to a growing crowd on the water’s edge. As I approached, I saw a man float up into the air. As I got even closer I realised he had one of those awesome water jet-packs on and he was quickly joined by another one as the two of them floated around much to the delight of the crowd. I have no idea if this is a regular occurrence or just a couple of show offs, but it was fun all the same and extra nice with the bridge in the background. I then walked along the waterfront and watched as a party of boats in a small enclosed dock suddenly all shot off across the water – I can only assume heading to Denmark.

On my way back to the main town of Malmö (which oddly I had avoided until the end), I accidentally went the right way and discovered all the things I didn’t see when I first got there. I saw a mini lighthouse by a small bridge that appeared to be a replica of the big bridge to Denmark. Actually, on the same note, I saw a lot of bridges in general – there’s canals all over the city and literally dozens of small bridges, many of them just pedestrian bridges but still with awesome architecture. The main part of town here definitely seems to be the old part of town, with many of the buildings looking quite gothic in architecture as well as other features like a cool looking water fountain in the centre. It is interesting though – the fact that the bigger buildings are so old suggests that this city has always been big (which history also suggests). In other Swedish cities and towns the old part of town is full of much smaller, less dramatic buildings and often more nature. Still beautiful in their own way, but you can see how some places have grown extensively from much smaller towns but other cities have always been bigger.

To finish off my day in Malmö I found the pub scene in Lilla Torg (which translates as Little Square I’m pretty sure) and had a beer or two on my own before meeting up with a bunch of friends and family for dinner out. The beers were great, the dinner was…well, the food was nice when it eventually came out. So I guess overall I didn’t have the best experiences with eating in the city, but otherwise it swept me off my feet a little actually. I can’t wait to go back and explore all the hidden corners of it that I am yet to discover. If you’re ever in Sweden don’t limit yourself to Stockholm and the eastern coast as so many travellers do – come to the West Coast and explore places like Malmö as well. You won’t regret it!

I’m back from a road trip and ready to rock!

I disappeared for a few weeks to go on a road trip around Sweden. I meant to tell you before that I would be off for a while, and I also meant to schedule some blog posts to go up. But the blog posts remain unfinished (mostly finished though, so expect them soon), and I never told you all I was going anywhere until it was too late. So sorry about that.

Anyway, I’ve taken a lot of photos and anybody who follows me on Instagram or Twitter will have noticed me attempting to weave some sort of narrative of my journey to Stockholm, up to the High Coast, across Norrland and back down to my home in Halmstad. Truth be told though, I only put up a tiny snippet of my journey, and a lot of the places I visited have a lot more stories and pictures that I decided to cover in more detail on my blog. So basically what I’m saying is I have probably between eight and ten blog posts to write purely on my roadtrip, all of which will be equal parts words and pictures. Even if you follow me on Instagram, I’ll be sharing different pictures and some places I didn’t even show on there at all. I promise.

I also have a blog hop post coming up very soon, as well as some book reviews and music reviews, so watch this space because the next month or two there will be a lot happening.

Oh, and also despite being most of the month behind schedule, yes I am still trying to beat Camp NaNoWriMo. Because why not?

Anyway, for now, here’s a nice picture I took (from my Insta, I’ll admit) which sums up Sweden pretty well – trees and lakes!

Teaching myself Swedish – my toughest student is myself

As many of you know, I moved to Sweden earlier this year. As a lot of you also know, the last three years I spent in Australia I was a high school teacher, teaching English, History, and a little bit of Maths from time to time. But despite teaching probably over a thousand students, I don’t think I have ever faced one as challenging as myself.

The bureaucracy behind me migrating to Sweden from Australia as a British (and therefore European) Citizen is complicated – I am allowed to be here, but to get access to all parts of Swedish society I need the person number. In my unusual situation, the only real way to get this number is by having a job (there are other ways but they involve obtaining papers that would be too hard and take too long to get). But to get a job at most places I need to know Swedish, and to do any of the proper Swedish courses, I need the person number, and to get the…well you can see this goes round and round to no avail.

Here comes the part where I teach myself. I’ve spent a few months looking online at difference websites to help learn Swedish. There’s a lot of, well, very average ones, to be honest. I can’t afford anything I need to pay for, as I need my money to live on until I have a job. But then my girlfriend came across a playlist on Spotify (normally a music streaming service, if you’re not familiar – it’s the main way people listen to music here in Sweden) that featured various Swedish lessons. We listened to the first one together, on the pronunciations of vowels, found it was pretty useful, and have decided to use these alongside a couple of resources I have to try and teach myself the language as best as possible.

There are some drawbacks. The first one is that it seems some of these lessons are conducted by people from Stockholm. The capital city of Sweden has a quite unique accent that is very different from the Halland accent (where I’m currently living), or any of the Northern and Southern accents of the country really. As a result, the lessons could almost be teaching me things wrong because the accent disguises what I’m supposed to be hearing, especially when it comes to vowels. It’s not that the Stockholm accent is wrong, but it sounds different and only someone well versed in the Swedish language could see how the correct word is just accented, if I’m making any sense at all.

The vowels themselves are another issue. There’s nine of them, for a start. The five in English, plus y is a vowel, and also all three letters unique to Swedish are vowels –  å, ä and ö, pronounced roughly as orr, ehh and err (there’s a bit more to it than that though). But whether or not the pronunciation of the vowel is long or short completely changes the meaning of the vowel, and in the case of two of them the following consonant also can affect the word and pronunciation. So, in total, 9 vowels and 22 pronunciations of those vowels, each of which can and do dramatically change the word you are saying. For example, tack and tak could be pronounced similarly, but one of these words is thanks and one is ceiling. So the different sounding a is what varies the word in speech.

It’s one thing to know these rules, but another challenge entirely to follow them when talking in Swedish. Apparently I’m doing okay, though, despite my serious issues rolling my r’s which often distorts the entire word I’m trying to say. I also need to slow myself down – I like to talk a lot and fast, and right now I just can’t do that while learning Swedish. I also have to be patient – I can be very impatient when learning new things, but I must ensure I don’t become frustrated with this whole process as I need to keep it up.

I’m going to invest a lot of time over the next couple of months pushing myself through the language as fast as I can, to increase my chances of getting a job so I can finally sort everything out and get on with living in my new home. I suspect as I learn more there’ll be funny things for me to tell back here, and I will try and blog as much as possible (although I am going travelling around the country next month so I may go quiet for a week or two).

If you’ve ever gone through anything like this, whether moving to a new country with a new language or just learning a language for the fun of it, I’d love to hear from you and hear about your experiences! Or you can just laugh at me about mine. It’s all good.

Swedish National Park in Spring

On the weekend I visited a local National Park. It’s the first time I’ve ventured properly into Swedish forest since Winter, when everything was blanketed in snow and was beautiful in a completely different way. Now, the forest glows with green and has come back to life in a spectacular way, so I thought I’d share just a few of my favourite photos from the day.

The forest is so green now, and the leaves are often a brighter green in Spring than they are in Summer.

There was a small creek running through the forest that we kept crossing at different points. The quiet sound was amplified in the fairly silent forest, which was lovely.

I love this picture (one of two which I loaded up to my Instagram). It’s such a strange display of the power of nature, I think. I wonder how long it has been like this, though?

I liked that the tree seems to have pulled up a huge rock when it was ripped from the ground.

There were a couple of small walls of these rocks running through the forest – I wonder what their purpose was, and how old they are? I suspect maybe to keep certain animals out of certain areas, but I really don’t know.

As we reached the end of the trail, we realised we were quite high up and had a view of the countryside down below (off to the side of this picture). Here were a few tables and benches, and a small barbeque for people to use. Barbeques here in Sweden are quite different to what I’m used to back in Australia, but it’s fun to experience it differently.

That’s it for now! Stay tuned for my Top Ten Tuesday post that goes live tomorrow (I’m ahead of schedule for once…how strange).

Göteborg Trip, Round One

Last Saturday I visited the city of Göteborg (Gothenburg), the second biggest city in Sweden and fifth biggest in Scandinavia apparently. It was just a bit over an hour’s train ride up north and despite the trains being severely delayed due to an accident the wait was indeed worth it.

So I thought I would share some photos of my day. There is still a lot left to explore, and some things such as the amazing Turkish restaurant I visited that night, and the archipelago, I could not take photos of due to the lack of light. I will definitely return to the archipelago next time I visit though. In the meantime, here is what I did photograph:

I thought I’d start with this picture, a close up (well, kind of…considering how far away I was when I took it anyway) of a church. I love the architecture of some of the buildings in this shot, even if it isn’t the best photography ever.

I just loved how this house looked. We think somebody lives there but we couldn’t quite tell.

This climb is steeper than it looks – that tiny crown you can see in the distance is our end destination (also it’s not actually tiny). This is the climb towards the Skansen Kronan, a several century old fort.

This is the Skansen Kronan, which meets us at the top of the stairs in the last picture. There is a second building like this, only that one has a lion on top where the crown is. We passed it on the train into the city but I was too slow with my camera.

Here is an information board on the Skansen Kronan along with a map. The English section is photographed closer on the next picture.

The English translation of this information. Quite interesting bits of history here. Click on the picture if this is too small to read.

This is the view from the top of Skansen Kronan, overlooking the city. We had to climb a rickety old staircase up the building but the view was worth it.

Back in town, we found this cool little house turned into a restaurant with a seemingly out of place spruce next to it.

More of the city’s streets. It definitely felt a lot bigger than my current home town.

Lots of cafés and restaurants in this area.

Café Kringlan, a new favourite I think. Earlier in the day they had a lot of their baked goods out on this table being sold on the street.

Inside Café Kringlan. It was nice and cosy and we stayed there quite a while.

Last but not least, while briefly inside a shopping centre we discovered a volleyball game being conducted, sand and everything. Different, but it certainly drew a crowd.

Well, that’s it for now. But at long last I have started exploring this part of the world outside of my new home town! Have any of you ever been here? If so, what were your thoughts?

Life in Sweden (in words), Part 1

I thought I’d mention that this will be a bit of a wordier post in the title as I have promised to do more than just post pictures of my new life. Also, let’s face it, I’m much better with words than I am with a camera (half of those photos last time had a mark on the picture near the top – yep, I’m special). There will be a few pics to break up the writing but not much. Hope you enjoy my story so far…

In plane view of a new life

The trip over here was actually a little more dramatic than I had hoped for. I don’t mean the plane crashed into the sea and I had to swim to shore kind of dramatic, just more incidents of a frustrating variety. The trip was 4 flights in total – from Sydney, Australia to Melbourne, Australia, then on to Dubai, then to London, and lastly to Gothenburg in Sweden where I would then be picked up and driven a couple of hours south to Halmstad, my new home. Each stopover at each airport was approximately 2 hours long, so it felt like it should have been a smooth process and relatively short with a total flying time (including stopovers) of about 32 hours if my memory serves me correct.

Of course, this didn’t go to plan.

Sydney to Melbourne was fine, but Melbourne decided it was feeling pretty hot that day, and so we all melted while it reached the low to mid 40s in temperature (Celsius – in Fahrenheit we’re talking the realms of about 105-115). As my departure time came and went and there was no sign of us getting on the plane, they finally informed us that the plane was too hot to board (I’d later find out it was 38 degrees Celsius inside the plane), and they were trying to cool it down – they would only be half an hour late. I didn’t panic. Half an hour was fine.

2 hours later we boarded the plane, but were told to hurry because they had brought the temperature down to 28 but had to turn off the air conditioning while we boarded so it would rise again. Then once on board, they informed us they had serious problems with the electrics of the plane. Another hour or so went by, and they very nearly cancelled the flight before bringing back power at the last moment (they literally turned it off and on again and it worked…I chuckled to myself about this later, not so much at the time). Then two people decided to leave, even though the pilot assured us we wouldn’t have left unless the plane was 100% safe. There was much booing aimed at the people who left (even though I think they were snuck out before the announcement).

Reunited at last!

4 hours late, we finally left. I missed my connection in London to Sweden and I knew it, and the next one was going to be 8 hours later, but the wonderful staff at Heathrow airport helped me reschedule to a Copenhagen flight (as Halmstad is a similar distance from Copenhagen in Denmark – about 2 hours at the most). Eventually, not too much later than I should have been originally, I was reunited with Linnéa, the very person who I have moved over to Sweden for in the first place!

Snow, wonderful snow!

As I landed in Copenhagen I was excited to see snow – I hadn’t seen falling snow with my own eyes for over 16 years. Linnéa laughed at me, telling me that wasn’t real snow, but for an Australian it was amazing all the same (we do have some snow in Australia, in a place cleverly called the Snowy Mountains). By the time we reached Halmstad though, I could see what it really looked like to have decent snow. I slept a good sleep that night, and amazingly was over my jet lag almost instantly upon awaking (which is kind of strange but I could hardly complain). I ventured out into the forest that next day to have a barbeque in the snow with Linnéa and her family, which I showed you guys photos of here in this post, so I won’t mention too much more on that.

The next day was fairly relaxed, although I did learn quite how slippery the ice could be when I fell whilst out walking the dogs – I fell backwards onto my right elbow and smacked my head hard against a rock. I spent the next few hours with an enormous headache, feeling slightly dizzy and disoriented but I knew I was okay. My elbow, however, still hurts over 2 weeks later, which is a lesson in itself for me. I am slowly becoming more confident walking on the snow and the ice, but it’s a skill which Swedish people are born with and which Australians simply do not possess most of the time, I suspect.

It didn’t snow much for that first week I was here, but the second week it snowed every couple of days. The first couple of times it was just a few centimetres, but then last Friday I finally saw what I think I can call proper snow – about 10cm, maybe more, fell in the space of a couple of hours. I sat in my apartment watching the roads slowly turn white again, watching the ground rise higher and higher with the snow. I sort of just sat here stunned as I watched it for a lot of that afternoon, not really doing much else. It made me wonder what it must feel like for those kids who grow up in remote and dry parts of the world when they see rain for the first time at the age of, say, 10.

Yep, that’s the river. Actually this is the day before the big snow so it was whiter the next day.

Anyway, by the end of this, everything was white. The frozen river had become so white it looked more like an extension of the park next to it. So it was a bit sad when on the weekend it began to rain, and then warm up to 2 or 3 degrees each day for several days in a row. Looking out now it looks like spring – bright blue skies again. Beautiful, but the snow is mostly gone and each night what’s left refreezes and leaves sheets of ice in places I don’t see so I nearly go flying every time I walk at night. But even if this were all the snow we got this winter I’d be happy with what I’d seen!

Getting on with life

The past 2 and a half weeks haven’t just been sitting around watching snow fall, I promise. The obvious thing that has been taking up a lot of my hours is spending time with Linnéa, and she has been amazing in helping me settle in. We’ve spent a lot of time with her family and also meeting her friends – I have never entertained so many people in such a short space of time, but it is nice to be cooking so much again. We’ve also spent a lot of time exploring town, eating out at places I can’t really afford – we even went to the movies last weekend (to watch The Hobbit – I was stunned they were still showing the second movie). It’s just nice to be with Linnéa after spending 2 years doing the long distance relationship thing (and 16000 kms is serious long distance).

Aside from all this leisurely stuff, I have had some issues with more bureaucratic matters. In Sweden everything, and I mean everything, uses your personnummer – basically your personal identity number. Swedes are born with this, of course. For me though, I have to go through a long process to get this key to society. I have obtained a sort of temporary version of this number which gives me access to some, but only a few, things. Now I need to get a job, so that I can get a bank account and process my Right of Residence (thank goodness I am a British citizen as well as Aussie, and therefore an EU citizen, or else this would have been a lot harder), and then once I’ve done all of that they’ll give me a personnummer and I will be a proper resident of Sweden, with access to everything. Of course, without knowing the language getting a job isn’t super easy either, so while I apply for the few jobs I can try my hand at, I now need to learn the language and quickly so as to broaden my work possibilities. I’m not overly worried (yet), and money isn’t too much of an issue (yet), but it would be nice to have a lot of this stuff done and taken care of so I can relax more.

I am second hand renting (where you rent from another renter – it’s a thing in Sweden) from someone who has moved to Stockholm for work for a while, so I have a nice little apartment that’s all furnished and is only a few minutes walk from the centre of town, across the road from the train and bus stations, and close to two different supermarkets. So my living arrangements almost seem too good to be true, which is nice, and the person I’m renting from is friendly and relaxed which is a nice bonus.

This was really quite tasty, although eating the berries with the meat seemed a bit wrong. Photo taken from cannolisblogg.se because I forgot to take a photo of the meal at the time I ate it.

Lastly, there’s the food. People are asking me if I’ve eaten much Swedish food. I have eaten lots of nice breads and chocolates and so on and so forth, but the only “traditional” Swedish meal I’ve eaten is called wallenbergare, and is a sort of veal patty (like a burger patty I guess) with peas, mashed potato and…berries? There’s a side of lingonberries, a type of berry that is very common across Scandinavia and very sweet and tasty, and the idea is that you eat the berries with the meat, in the same mouthful. I tried it and it was surprisingly nice, but my tastebuds were wondering what on earth was going on. But aside from this, I am yet to try a lot of traditional cuisine from the area. No doubt in the future I’ll devote a whole post to the topic.

Anyway, that’s it for now. This post is more than long enough, but hopefully it gives you some ideas as to what I have actually been doing these past couple of weeks. I will do more of these posts in the future, but I will also start to write posts focusing on specific aspects of life over here, like the culture, the food, the history, and my mishaps with the language as I start to learn it. Feel free to ask any questions or comment as always!