Shots from Apartment to Office by Bike

Stockholm and the surrounding area and most other places I've been in Sweden is riddled with bike paths (a good thing!). Many adults use bikes to run errands and commute to work. Most bikes are "urban" bikes and many are old are left outside, sometimes locked to a gutter or fence. The subway stations and train stations have bike parking areas. It's not unusual to see a 50 or more bikes at these stations.

The first time I tried to bike from Norrmalm to my Kista office, I got lost several times despite having a good bike path map. The ten mile route was easily fourteen. Coming back I made half the mistakes so it was maybe 10 miles. That was last weekend.

Today I tried again and made it in 45 minutes. I used paths not on the trail map.


Most of the route is city with large office buildings and city traffic. However, the bike path does have excursions into the stereotypical Swedish pastoral scenes: the signature earth-tone painted homes and wooded areas. This post shows some shots from my bike commute. It begins with a smart car parked outside my apartment with "Have you got a job?" in Swedish painted on it.

The second photo is one of two small communities on the way. The homes are small, probably 300 square feet and yet they all seem to have small gardens, many have small vegetable greenhouses. These are not typical of Swedish homes, however. More typical homes are in the next collage of photos.




You notice that the bike commute goes by water. In this case it's part of the Baltic sea. The Baltic close to Stockholm is calm by sea standards. It's almost like a lake and not very salty. Everything in Stockholm is close to water, either the Baltic or lake Mälaren. Lake Mälaren and the Baltic are separated by a lock (a sluice) at Slussen (I think that's Swedish for "the sluice"). Boats can use the lock to go between the two bodies of water. I think they lock desgn prevent salt water from entering the lake.

The sailboats are still mostly stored for the winter - on shore under plastic (maybe a photo later). I have noticed more and more boats showing up in the docks near Gamla Stan.


The last picture is of the largest tree mulcher I've ever seen. It was being used to clear a swath through the forest for something. Another bike trail? A power line? I don't know.

Around My block on a cold dim day, mostly pictures

My apartment is on the second floor (European count the ground floor as zero, it's the third floor by American convention) just above my bicycle in the picture on the left. The next photo (below) is of the back of the building.













The two carts are used by a mail man or maybe a junk-mail man. They were full of sales flyers - I saw no real mail address to a real person. About twice per week I get about half a dozen slipped through my mail slot.

The stroller is one of the rugged winterized types so common in Sweden. Notice the tractor tires.


Of course, there's the kiosk to buy parking tickets, and the "exit" (utfart) from a small parking lot (the bottom photo).




There are plenty of "urban" bikes (as opposed to road bike or mountain bikes or bmx bikes) outside the apartment buildings.



The tiny "Smart" cars always catch my eye. They are perfect for city living and can park anywhere. The reflective disk were in a nearby park, one of many. These are small parks, just enough to have some grass, several benches and four or five shade trees. Usually each park has some piece of outdoor sculpture or art: these disk are an example but the pieces vary tremendously.

Near this park was a pigeon feeder. Stockholmites take walks even in the cold. This day it was approximately 32 degrees Farenheith, zero Celcius. Yet folks were strolling the avenues and streets for fun and to buy stuff, like groceries. Some stopped to watch the pigeons feast.




I haven't taken photo's of the numerous small shops and restaurants around and near my block. That will come in a later post. I also plan more people shots in future posts.

Door to door

After frantically trying to tie up loose ends with house repairs, packing (especially my bicycle), redirecting mail (check out Remote Control Mail), and paying bills, J took me to the airport. I had to pay $254 for excess baggage. Hope the company picks that up!

Lufthansa has a direct flight from Denver to Frankfurt. The direct flight and the unusually short wait time in Frankfort allowed me the shortest travel time ever.

J and I left the house at 2:30 for a 6:30 flight. That put me at the airport 3 hours early, but I'm extra cautious. I wanted to make sure we could react if they disallowed some of the luggage. J purchased a whole bunch of over-the-counter drugs since they are hard to find in Sweden (and if I did find them I wouldn't recognize the Swedish label). So I feared I'd be arrested or, at least, interrogated as a drug dealer. I guess terrorist don't travel with 40 bottles of ibuprofen - a waste of money if you plan to blow up the plane. So leaving my house to the starting of the jet engines: 4 hours. That gave me time to read half a book and meet two couple from San Diego going to Italy. They planned to follow much the same itinerary D & J did two years ago.

The whole airport screening thing strikes me as un-American. First, you are assumed guilty until proven innocent. Second, there's an encroachment on our privacy rights.

Another thing bothers me, too. The terrorist no longer have to blow themselves up on the plane. They just get in line to be screened. The line folds back and forth like the line to a Disney World attraction. Once in the middle of the line, the terrorist could kill just as many as on a plane and he didn't even have to buy a ticket. I hope you don't pass this blog post to a terrorist who might be willing to wait in line.

The flight to Frankfurt in coach class is torture. In fact, speaking of terrorist, we should just put suspected terrorists in coach class on a trans-Atlantic flight. They'd be confessing like a child long before the final descent, especially if they, say, had a slightly pinched nerve that causes their leg to switch every few seconds for hours after hour. Flight time 8 hours, 20 minutes .


The wait in the Frankfort airport was unusually short: 90 minutes. Yippee. Of course the screening in Frankfurt is as slow as Denver so I began to worry that I might miss my connecting flight.

The flight from Frankfurt to Stockholm three hours (I think). Fortunately, I was able to sleep. I have perfected sleeping in my own lap, folded like a wallet. Sometimes I rest my head on the tray table but got tired of the flight attendant, heartless they can be, waking me up because "the Captain said..."

Arrival at Arlanda, I caught a taxi whose driver spoke no English. That's a definite tip that he wasn't Swedish since all Swedes speak English. There were other clues, too, like skin color and name. Anyway it was fixed price so I wasn't worried about a run-away meter. We got to the apartment office while the snow came down like confetti. Then I discovered the office was not in the apartment complex. So after unloading my 17 tons of baggage, I had to load it on a second taxi. (Actually the taxi driver's were very helpful.) Then we drove to the apartment about 15 minutes away in Norrmalm (the north part of town). It's on Kadettgatan, if you want to find it on a map. The time from exiting the plane to entering my apartment door was two hours.

So the door to door time was 17 hours and 20 minutes, a new (fastest) record for me. Usually this trip takes 21 hours, especially with the United Denver-to-Chicago-to-London-to-Stockholm coach class torture.

Here's some photo's looking out my apartment front and back window. I've managed to find a grocery store and buy my subway, train, and bus pass. I also bought what I thought was milk but it turned out to be a lactose free thing....Note to self: learn Swedish word for milk (mjölk, not låglaktos mellanmjölk).



As I write this, after my first day of work, I realize (again) that Sweden is a magical place if you look beyond the cold and semi-dark winters and the occasional gray skies. Getting to know my Swedish colleagues the first day was like mingling at a party where everyone is an interesting character. This is going to be an adventure.

More than a number: the National Id continued...

Rather than answer the oft asked question "what's in a name?" we should ask "what's in a number?"

Is there rhyme or reason in your id number (the social security number for Americans)? The Swedish National Id, mentioned in a previous post, full of structure. This post describes that structure. It is formed as follows:

Take your birth date, say March 13, 1962. Encode it as 620313. This constitutes the first 6 numbers.

Now append two digits corresponding to preassigned birthplaces. A special two digits were reserved for foreigners and for people born at home in Sweden. Obviously this means there are fewer than 99 possible birth places which is not true nowadays. Let's pretend you were born in a hospital in Stockholm that was assigned the number 37. Now our id is 63031337.

Then, you get one digit for birth number: odd number for males, even for females. Suppose you were the second male born that day, then your number would be 3. Now the ID is 630313373. Hospitals that had more than 5 males or 5 females born in a day got multiple hospital codes - the two "birth place" digits mentioned above.

We're not finished...

Now the interesting part. The last number is an error checking value (called a parity digit in the previous post). Here's how it's calculated:

So far the number in our example is 620313373. The error checking consist of several steps which are hard to describe in a blog, but here goes anyway....

Multiply the first, third, ... the odd digits by 2. Multiply the even ones (second, fourth, etc.) by 1.


6 2 0 3 1 3 3 7 3
x2 x1 x2 x1 x2 x1 x2 x1 x2
---------------------------
12 2 0 3 2 3 6 7 6


This pattern of alternating 2's and 1's prevents someone from switching two digits while typing them, a common human error. I doesn't work if the digits are identical but in that case who cares if they are switched!

We're still not done.

Now add all the digits on the last line:
1+2+2+0+3+2+3+6+7+6 = 32

I don't know what this step does but I know it has a purpose. When I find out, expect another post.

Now round up to the nearest decade. In our case, that would be 40. Subtract 32 from 40 to get 8. The last digit in the ID for this example would then be 8. The final ID is then 6203133738.

Now how are they accounting for the population boom and foreign influx. They are breaking the pattern a little: first the second pair of digits which correspond to the birth month would have only twelve values. Throw that away and allow all 100 possibilities. Similar for the day of the month. Rather than allow 01 to 31, permit all 100 possibilities.



Is there a similar structure with American social security numbers? Yes, there is some structure which is described in Wikipedia: chapter 3 under Social Security Number. If there had been more structure in our Id's, then the identity theives would know a lot more about us.

I have no idea about the re-use policy of either country. That is, when a person dies, is the number returned to the pool of available numbers?

The photo's are just in the theme of numbers. The top photo is the Nils Eriksson Bus Terminal in Göteborg (aka Gothenburg). The bottom image is from a store in Sweden. Neither picture is related to the National Id.

Långfärdskridskoåkning

Anybody up for Nordic or Swedish skating? It's called Långfärdskridskoåkning in Swedish. I am told that you can take lessons which include requiring you to escape death from falling in. Actually, there's very little danger, you just get a real jolt of cold for a minute or so before you get out. You can see the sport in a YouTube video by clicking here. You notice from the photo below that some sort of stick is carried. It's for testing the ice. The sound of hitting the ice gives the skater enough warning before it becomes dangerously thin. However, if the skater does fall through the ice into the freezing water, he carries two sharp tools which are designed specifically for clawing your way back up onto the ice. Of course, this is a sport that's done on groups so there should be someone to help you, provide some warm cloths and otherwise prevent disaster.

Size - Area and Population

The population of Sweden is 9,016,596 *estimated July 2006). For reference to states within the USA, Georgia has 9,072,576 (2005 estimate), North Carolina has 8,683,292, and New Jersey has 8,717,975.

In terms of land area, Sweden weighs in at a mighty 449,965 square kilometers (= 177,732 square miles). Again, for reference, Sweden is between California (163,707 square miles) and Texas (268,601 square miles).

In terms of population density, Sweden is 20 per square kilometer (51 per square mile) which compares to Iowa, Arkansas, and Oklahoma.

Bridges We Hope to Cross

Oil rigs might despoil the wilderness but a good bridge gets a waiver -- that's my feeling. Bridges have physical and symbolic beauty and Sweden has some nice bridges. The Oresund Bridge connects the southern Sweden city of Malmö to Copenhagen, Denmark, finished in 1999. It's the longest bridge in Europe that has both rail and automobile traffic. Wikipedia says "The bridge has one of the longest cable-stayed main spans in the world at 490 metres. The height of the highest pillar is 204 metres. The total length of the bridge is 7,845 metres, which is approximately half the distance between the Swedish and Danish landmasses, and its weight is 82 million kilograms. The rest of the distance is spanned by the artificial island Peberholm (Pepper islet) (4,055 m), named as a counterpart to the already existing Saltholm islet, followed by a tunnel on the Danish side. The tunnel is 4,050 m long, a 3,510 m long buried undersea tunnel plus two 270 m gate tunnels. The two rail-tracks are beneath the four road lanes. The bridge has a vertical clearance of 57 metres, although most boat traffic across Oresund still passes over the Drogden strait (where the tunnel lies). The bridge was designed by Arup."

A bridge in Uppsala (shown to the right) is impressive because it goes under the the water to let boats through. Usually, the bridge would go up to let boats go under or have draw bridge.

I stoll the photo of a "Sweden Bridge" from www.flickr.com. (Actaully I stole all these from flickr). It claims to be the biggest bridge in Sweden. My friend Ulf S. says: "I think the bridge is along the coast in Norrland called Vedabron. That part of the coast is called Hoga Kusten (High Coast)." Thanks Ulf, for identifying the mystery bridge.

More on Taking Pets to Sweden

According to a representative from World Care Pet Transport, to get a pet to Sweden or most other European Union countries (England is said to be tougher), you have to do the following:

Go to the vet to get a micro-chip implanted. At the same time, get a new round of rabies inoculations. Vets aren't cheap.

Wait 120 days.

Go back to the vet so he can take a blood sample, which is sent to a lab at Kansas State University. Did I mention vets aren't for free.

Three to four weeks later, the blood tests are returned to the vet from Kansas State.

Ten or fewer days from departure to Sweden, the animal must have a special inoculation for worms. Can I charge it, Mr. Vet?

24 or fewer hours from departure, the USDA must certify the paperwork. This is the hard part which pretty much dictates a stay in New York to get the certification and still ensure the "less than 24 hours before departure" rule.

Good thing I was subjected to as much. (Although the medical exam did include the infamous over 50 standard procedures. "Have you had your colonoscopy?" asked the doctor. "You bet your KY jelly, I have and write it in the file bold with font size 500." I calmly replied and continued "I still have nine years, 7 months, and 13 days before I have to do that again.")

World Care Pet Transport will take care of the whole pet transport (20 pound cat) for a little over $3000 US. It's cheaper to smuggle narcotics.