Category: Sweden

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Summer’s Gone

“Now I’m standing in a doorway, thinking of Summers gone by.
It ought to make me happy, but it just makes me want to cry.
I was riding in the car with my mum and dad,
He was drivin’ the car, the kids were drivin’ him mad.
Dad looked at us, then he looked at his wife,
He must have wondered where we all came from.
And then mum said, ‘Dad, you know it won’t last for long, before you know it, Summer’s gone.'”

-The Kinks: “Summer’s Gone”

Wow, was that the Summer that just whizzed past? I guess so, I barely noticed. I didn’t travel too much, nor did I do much of interest locally. But I did take pictures, although not as many as I usually do when the air gets warm, and the sun stays out so very long.

Interspersed with these pictures from the Uppsala/Stockholm area are some from my trip to Malmo. That also encompassed a quick trip to Lund and Copenhagen. It adds a little bit of variety.

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Valborg

In the U.S., my homeland, the holidays are not often connected to harvest seasons or other things dictated by nature. I mean, Memorial Day and Labor Day were just plopped down on a certain date and then massaged even more to always provide a Monday off work. The old, weird European holidays I now have gotten used to seem always tied to some ancient time that people were sacrificed to the gods of harvest, fertility, ill-fitting burlap garments, or something.

Walpurgis night, known as Valborg in Sweden, has something to do with lighting bonfires and drinking. Looking it up it has got some folksy background: “Valborg is a very old tradition and used to be all about scaring away witches and bad spirits by lighting big fires for protection and making a lot of sounds to scare off evil forces.” So, what better purpose to have a celebration well into our age of reason? It’s got big fires!

Anyway, Uppsala is a university town, and it can’t claim to be that without some weird student stuff going on. So, on Valborg students build little boats that barely float, mostly due to the buoyancy of fear, and race down the murky Fyris river. The water is too green and too cold this time of year, but they do it. I don’t know the reason, really.

I took some of these pictures when I first started living in Sweden and the rest this spring, almost 10 years late. Like any good tradition, little changes. Here they are.

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Farms, Flowers, Fish, and Frogs

I do love Sweden, even if I favor dry, desert landscapes the most. This is a green, wooded, and insanely natural country. So, 1 point to Sweden. But, my god, Spring creeps from miserable damp cling to sunny cool wonderful at an incredibly slow pace. This year to cheer myself during this transition I once again visited the Uppsala Botanical Gardens as soon as things started getting warm. Later, when the world outside the hothouse showed some soft new growth I started walking in parks. These pictures are from that period.

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Winter, Damn It

If you know me, which you most likely don’t, you would know I’m not a fan of Winter. Actually, the few people who visit my blog might know me so I take that back. It’s damn pretty, I’ll give it that. However, I’d rather be in the shade at a beach with a tropical cocktail in my hand. Anyway, took a walk along lake Ekoln the other week to see the very pretty Winter scenery. I just googled the lake and saw that Ikea named a toilet brush after it. Well, I think that’s kind of a comment on life in general.

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Time Flies

I like the meme that is going around which says the last year proves that time flies when you aren’t having fun. Certainly I’m lucky to be in a country that has had less Covid impact on our everyday lives. Well, those who have not gotten Covid, at least. But it’s been a long haul with an underlying fear of infection and no ability to get away with travel (for us safety conscious people). Certainly, this is nothing that everyone doesn’t know.

Here’s some Fall pictures I took. Walking outdoors is always an option and helps with the mental blues.

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The September of Augusts

The landscape of our Covid world stretches out to the horizon with no end in sight. It’s certainly been a roller-coaster with hope being beaten back by new waves of infection. Right now the world is dealing with Delta and so is Sweden. However, maybe due to the high level of inoculations, it’s not hit us as hard as many places. But, it is truly a wait and see thing, isn’t it?

The new normal here is less abnormal then many places. But August was unusually cold, like we lost a month and September took its place. In fact the weather has been nicer in September than the previous month, but that won’t last. Even with the rain and cold I did take a few trips to Bergianska trädgården, that’s Stockholm’s botanical gardens. It means more pictures of flowers. Sorry, I just love the intricacies and colors of them so I can’t quite stop myself. Enjoy the plant pictures, they can’t run away from my camera like most people do.

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Crawling to Normal

Well, I’m fully vaccinated and an increasing amount of people in Sweden have joined me. There’s the specter of the Delta variant in the world now and it’s tweaked infections up a bit here, but we’re lucky that it’s not so much. So far this Spring and Summer I’ve been able to venture out and here’s a range of pictures. I guess the theme is transport, but there’s also some sunny scenes of other things as well. Pictures here include those taken at the Vasa and Ship history museums in Stockholm as well as our local historic railway called Lennakatten.

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Precious Light

Winter here in Sweden has short days as you find in Northerly countries. This year there has been little snow and the sky has been usually an overcast slate grey. However, if the clouds dissipate and the ice blue shows through you find the low sun can supply an astonishing warmth to the landscape. One such day I caught some examples of the long, lingering fire tinged illumination.

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Summer of Covid

It takes a long time for me to put a new post up, this time it seems a century. Last post I said we were looking into a pandemic but at the time of this writing we’ve been living in it for quite a period. I needn’t say it has changed so much about life, even in Sweden where we’ve had “mild” response to the virus. Most of all it limited travel so when my vacation came up we took a drive to areas of Sweden I’ve never seen. I’m rather happy about this since the country of my residence is still a bit of a mystery to me and has many surprises to impart.

The first surprise I had on the trip was that my camera succumbed, not to a virus but a rather small fall onto a carpet. The last image it took is the header to this post. After that I had to use a backup camera which didn’t allow me as much latitude in capturing images. Such is life.

I’ll not make comments right now about where these photos were taken, but most were in Skåne , Hallands, and Blekinge. A few were on the Göta Canal which is most lovely.

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Chilly

Winter should have been cold but it was only chilly with little snow. It’s now Spring but there is still a strong chill in the air. Chilling it is as we stare into a pandemic. I guess the seasons were warning us.