Sweden, baby!

Captions, finally

2006-10-21T10:02:00.000-04:00

I've finally added captions to the second big load of photographs (110 of them; they were already uploaded a couple of days ago). There may be one or two pictures left (from winding things down in Stockholm and flying back to the US), but that's pretty much it.

So, to see any of the (~213) pictures from our trip to Sweden, just double-click on the "Flickr photo badge" thing, which is the animated thing on the right-hand side of the page, just under where it says "ALL PHOTOS" (after that, you might want to click on "mlibby's photostream" in the upper righthand corner, and then "View as slideshow", also in the upper righthand corner). Sorry, the photos seem to be coming up in reverse chronological order. Prepare to be confused.

We're back

2006-10-13T12:16:00.000-04:00

We're back at home, and all is well. Ella's back from the kennel (I have her here at work with me). I still haven't uploaded the last large batch of pictures from the trip (most of them are already picked out), so I'll try to take care of that tonight.

Road trip to Lund

2006-10-09T17:13:00.000-04:00

We made good time on the way to Kalmar. Since we had some extra time, we drove up and down the nearby island of Öland, which was pretty rural and rustic (windy, narrow roads through farmland, etc.). Kalmar itself was pretty good, with a nice balance of really old stuff and fairly new stuff. We spent the night there at a "Masonic hotel" (basically an independent hotel located in a building owned by the Masons). There was a Boston-style sports bar/restaurant next door; they had a scad of Boston-area memorabilia up on the walls, and I was considering sending them an MIT thing or two (to offset some of the Harvard stuff I saw there) until I realized that they're actually a big chain and they probably have someone in Boston buying them stuff by the box-full.

We spent the next morning driving westward to Lund (which is nearly on the opposite coast, just a stone's throw from Denmark). After getting situtated in our hotel (which was basically a dorm room), we spent a couple of hours walking down and around the main part of town, figuring out what was where.

The Real Group concert was that evening, and it was very good. Jenn, I'll give you all the details and the songs they sang and so forth, probably on a phone call once we get back to the states. We didn't get the chance for autographs and so forth (the Swedish audience was certainly nuts about The Real Group, but they didn't seem to be terribly autograph-oriented), so maybe I'll see what happens if I mail a request for autographs to the group. I didn't get to take a whole lot of good concert pictures because our camera has some pretty bright lights on it, which would have been distracting to the other attendees.

The next day (Friday) was our day to make some shorter road trips around the local area (Skåne). We headed eastward a bit to see Ales stenar and a reconstructed viking fortress at Trelleborg. After an abortive attempt to see the Oresund Bridge and a semi-frustrating drive to get out of Malmö, we returned to our dorm room in Lund, bought a bunch of junk food at the grocery store next door, and watched a bunch of Swedish television (with a little bit of Danish stuff thrown in in).

The next day being our last full day in Lund, we went to look at a couple of the touristy things in town (the culture museum and the cathedral). Then we went to a concert by the EVA Quartet (sorry, no good link available). They were phenomenally good, and getting to hear them in a live performance was amazing. The rather dissonant Bulgarian musical style was different enough that the audience didn't really know when to clap until the vocalists would eventually stand up a little straighter and smile.

As soon as that concert was done, we zipped northward to "Sjung gung" (literally "Sing swing"), a large-scale concert for a big children's choir (the choir was apparently assembled solely for the choral festival under which all these concerts were organized). The formula was basically that a featured group would come out to sing a couple of songs, and the massive children's choir (300-400 kids?) standing in the onstage bleachers behind them would sing along at certain points (on a few of the songs, anyway). We were really only there to catch a couple more songs by The Real Group, and the rest of the concert wasn't exactly up our alley; there were even a few numbers and associated antics from another a cappella group (not TRG; I won't bother linking to them here) that were pretty inappropriate for what was billed as a children's choir performance (yeah, nothing is more uplifting than hearing hundreds of Swedish kids sing about the wonders of Las Vegas showgirls). We also got to behold a song or two by a 14-year old Swedish pop singer, and we were duly troubled. But at least we can say that we finally got to see some back-up dancers doing their thing. And we got to hear The Real Group sing their rendition of Bach's "Air on a G string" (even if it was subsequently booed by the row full of eleven-year old girls sitting behind us). We left early, once we figured most of the TRG goodness had been sucked from the event's otherwise dry bones.

The next day was for packing up and heading back to Stockholm. We got a late start (after mistakenly thinking I had lost my wallet; we even went so far as to fill out a police report with a nice lady who had lived in Michigan for twelve years), but things went well all the same. We stopped by the lake Vättern, got into Stockholm around 9pm, returned our rental car, and stopped by a local (Danish-owned?) steakhouse for some "bøf".

Coming to Stockholm actually felt kind of like coming home (since we were already familiar with the surroundings), and we're taking it easy for these last two days in Stockholm. We wandered back down to the old town to see a couple parts we missed, and we browsed through a store or two for giggles. We'll do the same sort of thing tomorrow, and then we'll catch our flight out early on Wednesday morning.

There are a passle of photographs to upload, but I'll probably do that tomorrow night (because it'll take a good hour to pick them out and to write some quick captions). It looks like we've taken about 400 pictures since I uploaded the last batch.

So, pictures tomorrow, but this is probably the last update from Sweden. I'll post a "we're back safe at home" message at some point on Wednesday or Thursday, and you can always call us.

Back in Stockholm

2006-10-09T05:00:00.000-04:00

We're back in Stockholm now, after about five days of driving around the southern parts of Sweden. Since we didn't have a good network connection during that time (or, rather, we didn't have a free network connection during that time), we've got a lot of material (pictures and so forth) to upload. I'll probably get to that this evening.

So, two more days in Stockholm, and then we'll fly home ~early on Wednesday morning. We've got a couple odds & ends to go see in the next two days, but mostly we're just going to relax and enjoy each other's company.

Days 1-3

2006-10-02T14:06:00.000-04:00

We're just wrapping up our third day in Sweden. There's probably too much ground cover here, so I'll try keep it quick. Also, you can catch some tidbits from the captions on the pictures that I'm uploading to our Flickr account (accessible through that picture thumbnails "badge" thing under the "all photos" caption, on the right-hand side of the page).

[ed. It appears that Flickr wants to index the pictures in reverse order of age. Sorry if that gets confusing, especially if you're using the "slide show" feature.]

Day 1
We landed some time after noon on Saturday at Arlanda Airport, northwest of Stockholm. Our main goal for that day was to just get to Stockholm, get oriented a bit, and stay up late enough that our jetlag was minimized (we actually had reverse jetlag, since we flew on a redeye flight and since we hadn't gotten much sleep for a few nights beforehand).

So we took the "Arlanda Express" ~high-speed train to the Central Train Station in Stockholm, and from there we took a cab (over-priced!) to the Södermalm district, to our hotel for the first night (our intended hotel didn't have a vacancy for that night).

To get oriented and stay awake (we were pretty much running on fumes), we took a short walk around part of Södermalm, including a stop at the Katarina kyrka, a little bit of store browsing, and a few scenic overlooks of the rest of the city.

We made it to about 5pm local time before we sacked out. And then we slept for something like fourteen hours.

Day 2
Step one after getting up and getting ready for the day was to go downstairs and partake of the hotel's breakfast buffet thing, which is basically like a bigger, better continental breakfast (hmm, now I know where that came from). As far as I know, all the hotels here serve this sort of breakfast, and then that's pretty much it as far as there food service offerings go.

Step two was to get to our main hotel, which is up in the city proper (or at least somewhere in between there and Vasastan). After getting there and dropping off our luggage, we walked back down to Gamla stan (literally "old town"), which is basically a small island where all of the buildings look like Mozart's birthplace, more or less. It was reasonably neat, although it's certainly touristy (lunch cost $50 at a restaurant where they re-used the butter).

We happened across a changing of the guard at the Royal Palace. I don't think it was the official, snazzy changing of the guard, though, because that was supposed to happen at noon (= one hour earlier) and because this particular ceremony was a little bit sloppy (although the marching band was very good). I think the official changing of the guard involves a bunch of horse-mounted dudes in shiny silver helmets, whereas these guys were basically national guardsmen or something.

We wandered around a bit more, almost accidentally walked to Riddarholmen (the nobles' section of the old town; "riddar" can mean "knight"), and then went to the Middle Ages Museum. Then we walked back to the hotel and got fully settled.

We then set out to find a restaurant for dinner, heading north and wandering around Vasastan a bit. We finally settled on "Tranan", which was billed as authentic Swedish stuff. Sarah had the deer, and it was okay.

Day 3
Since we're going to be coming back to Stockholm (for a day or two) after our excursion to Lund, our goal for this first part of the trip is to go see most of the big, obvious stuff, so that we'll have a better idea of what less-obvious stuff we might want to do on our return.

So day 3 was Djurården day. Djurgåden literally means "animal garden"; it used to be a royal hunting ground in the seventeenth century. The 1897 World Exhibition was held there, so the western end of the island is still in that sort of in that mode. We started out going to the Vasa Museum, which is all about a ship that sank on its maiden voyage in 1628 and then was raised in the early 1960s and restored for about thirty years. It's pretty neat, and it doesn't smell like barbecue quite as much as one of our acquaintances led us to believe.

Then we went to Skansen, which reconstracts bits of Scandinavian life by tranplanting actual buildings (and, in the summer season, there's presumably a bunch of folks walking around in period costumes or something). They have various animals from Scandinavia, too (including the majestic møøse).

After a quick snort of coffee, we walked back to our hotel by way Östermalm (it's like this whole other malm). We are doing a lot of walking (maybe about eight miles today).

On the way back home, we stopped in a Christian bookstore that happens to be right near our hotel. I wanted to pick up a book in Swedish so I could be working on using something interesting and worthwhile for future translation practice. I ended up buying this book which appears to be about how Sweden can face its current philosophical and political issues by turning to the Bible as a basis for Truth (with a capital T); I'm hoping that's what it's about, anyway, but either way it will be interesting to have to tease out where the author is coming from.

Sarah hit the hay early. I stepped out to a local coffee shop to get some caffeination by which to write all this, but the coffee shop was closing up at 8pm. I was amazed (what kind of coffee shop closes at 8?). So I went across the street to the local 7-Eleven (they're everywhere here).

Mañana
Tuesday will be our last full day in Stockholm for a while. We're not sure what we'll do yet. On Wednesday, we'll rent a car, load up, and drive down the east coast, probably spending the night in Kalmar. Then it's on to Lund and The Real Group splendor.

We're alive

2006-10-01T04:00:00.000-04:00

We made it, and we're still alive and everything. The hotel that we're staying in right now doesn't have much of an internet connection, apparently, so it'll be a day or two until we post a bunch of pictures.

If you want to get in touch with us, call my cell phone number. Remember that we're six hour ahead of you, timezone-wise.

Random stuff

2006-09-28T08:21:00.000-04:00

About twenty-seven more hours until we head out. I'll go in to work super-early tomorrow morning, to get a few more things done and to start adjusting to the new time zone (6 hours ahead). I'll head home early and we'll leave for the airport (by way of the kennel) around noon, for a ~5:30 flight.

We got about 80% of everything packed last night. Sarah is taking tomorrow morning off from work, so we're doing good as far as packing and stuff goes.

You probably won't see any more updates here until we're sitting pretty in Stockholm with our mouths full of herring (ooh, note to self: take a "Sarah with mouth full of herring" picture). That'll be later in the day on Saturday, probably.

Wrapping up & packing up

2006-09-27T09:32:00.000-04:00

We're heading for the airport around noon on Friday, so we have roughly two more business days to wrap things up at work. It's not too bad. Sarah's on top of all her stuff, so no sweat there. I need set up just a couple more things to keep working without me (so as to avoid the much-dreaded "emergency phone call while on vacation"). Almost there.

Also, we'll probably take our first crack at packing things tonight. We have some decent packing lists set up, so it's not really a "what should we take" question (we've tackled that issue already). The challenge now is just to see how conveniently we can pack it, especially taking the latest luggage restrictions into account. It shouldn't be much of a challenge: Sarah is a seasoned traveler, and I love to pack things (a purely genetic thing inherited from my Dad; Mom calls him the "master packer" or something like that).

Field research

2006-09-24T18:31:00.000-04:00

In our never-ending quest to be 100% integrated into Swedish culture before actually setting foot there, we conducted a little field research today by visiting our local Swedish embassy, IKEA. Mostly we were there just to eat some pseudo-Swedish food, to start getting ourselves used to it. We also took the opportunity to look for some sort of dining room cabinet / kitchen appliance storage solution.

I got the chance to try some cloudberries, in the form of some preserves that IKEA sells in their "Swede Shop" thing. Apparently it's an acquired taste; it's a bit funky-smelling, and there are these gargantuan seeds that threaten to stick between your teeth. Oh well. I'm guessing that all the sugar and stuff in the preserves threw things off a bit, too.

For "fluff books" with which to fill the shelves of their bookshelf floor models, IKEA uses gobs of old Swedish-language books (children's books, atlases, novels, and textbooks) that they must have purchased on discount, by the thousands (around twenty identical copies of any one title were sitting together on any one shelf). We weren't there long enough for me to actually plop in a sofa and try to fumble through one of them (and I don't really read Swedish that well yet anyway), but it was an interesting idea.

Study materials

2006-09-21T09:51:00.000-04:00

Before they let you into Sweden, they make you answer some test questions, such as "What's the best place to buy socks in Jönköping?" and "Count to seventy-two in Swedish." So we're studying pretty hard.

What this is

2006-09-15T11:16:00.000-04:00

Sarah and I are planning a trip to Sweden, departing on September 29 and returning on October 11.

Among other things, we're going to try to take a fair number of photographs. Since I've just about had it trying to get my old photo site to work (okay, I haven't been trying that hard), I figured I'd follow in the footsteps of my big sister and give this Blogger thing a shot (especially because it apparently makes photo-sharing pretty easy).

Note that this doesn't replace my regular updates thing (yet).

More about the trip
This trip to Sweden is Sarah's idea, originally. About a month ago, I was messing around with the Wikipedia article for The Real Group (a really good a cappella quintet from Sweden), and Sarah got a flash of inspiration and, sneak-like, spent about two hours planning out a surprise trip to go see them in concert in Sweden (because the group hardly every tours in the U.S.).

Aside from being an outlet for our modest Real Group fandom, this is also a chance for us to have a real vacation, and in Europe even (Sarah has really enjoyed previous travels in Europe, but I've never been there). And, as an added bonus, this will definitely be the furthest north that either of us have been (Sweden's latitudes are roughly comparable to Alaska's). We're going to skip the whole "day trip to the Arctic Circle" thing, though.

We have at least a passing interest in Sweden itself. I've been learning some Swedish (just a very little bit), so it'll be interesting to get some firsthand exposure (even though most everyone there is fluent in English). And, as we read more about the people of Sweden, they sound like our kind of folks (minus the whole socialist welfare state thing and the "play it safe / entrepeneurism = bad" attitude). Reality will certainly be somewhat different, but we're anticipating good things.

I've even harbored a couple of wild thoughts in the back of my head that maybe we're being called to be missionaries to Sweden or something, but that's purely imaginary at this point. Another "wait and see" sort of thing.

So, yep, we'll see how things go, and hopefully we'll share some nice photographs with you along the way (we may even upload them during our trip). While we're over there, I may still be contactable by cell phone, so feel free to give that a shot.

Travel plans
Without giving too many specifics, we'll fly into Stockholm (via Frankfurt, Germany), spend a few days there, drive a rented car down to Lund (possibly taking a day or two along the southeastern coast), catch some concerts, drive back up to Stockholm (possibly stopping along lake Vättern), spend a couple more days in the city, and then fly back. All of this will be interspersed with plenty of sleeping in late, wandering around trying to read street signs, and general gadding about.