This week...Like a Rolling Stone

Is it wrong to enhance?, originally uploaded by Let Ideas Compete.

This week J and I joined the American Women's Club (spouses were invited) to see the new movie "I'm Not There." It's the new movie about Bob Dylan, my all time favorite music person, with Kate Blanchett playing Dylan in much of the movie. The showing was at a small theater in Östermalm - a funky little place that oddly did not sell pop corn (so I ate a bag of chocolate balls like it was pop corn).

The movie was bizarre. I know a lot about Bob Dylan and know a lot of his songs (not just the hits). The movie pulled from events in his life and the dialog wove in phrases from his songs, interviews, etc. If you don't know much about Dylan the movie will be very weird. Many people in the theater walked out. If you do know a fair amount about Dylan, the movie will still be bizarre and weird but you'll see the creativeness of the director and want to watch it again: there is so much symbolism you miss a lot.

J and I met at the movie since I was coming from work. While waiting on me, she saw a man enter the theater with a large trench coat and two electrical wires coming up out of his collar into his hair. The wires were scotched taped to his neck. She called me wondering if she'd just seen a terrorist. Hmmmm. She saw the guard and told him. He basically reacted with a roll of the eyes and a hmmm. I suspect he thought "you Americans think everybody is a terrorist." Must have been some sort of medical device....




This week also provided a few cracks in the pewter sky so we could see some blue sky and white clouds. The photo above was taken from the Tranebergsbron (bron means bridge in Swedish) on one of those nice days. These boats are interesting to me and you can find multiple shots of them on my Flickr account.

Tall Ships in Stockholm

The Tall ships race came to Stockholm this year. I went a little wild with the camera: I managed to pick 70-something photos from over 200. Click here to see them and notice how the weather changed.

The last time the race stopped in Stockholm was in 2000 (and I happened to be in Stockholm at the time). They race in the Baltic every four years.

This year there are 119 ships moored at the Stockholm quays. The Tall Ships races have been going on since 1956. Part of the mission is to engage youth in cultural exchange, teach seamanship and pass on maritime traditions. Half the crew must be between the ages of 15 and 25. The fleet will be moored for four days during which almost a million visitors are expected.

What is a tall ship? Well from what I can tell the signature of a tall ship is tall masts with horizontally secured sails (square-rigged). Wikipedia tells more plus it gives a complete list of all the world's tall ships and pictures and facts about most of them. I was on the Norwegian Statsraad Lehmkuhl, for example. Although these ships can sail into the wind, they cannot do it as well as the newer sailboats with the sails secured vertically. The reason is that most of the propulsion of the sail is from the wing-effect. It's easier to get the wing effect with vertically mounted sails.



One of the brochures at the exhibition indicated seven types of tall ships: the full-rigged ship identified by at least three masts and is square rigged, the barque recognized by three or more masts and square rigging except for the fore-and-aft rigging, the brig which has two square rigged masts, the barquentine which has three or more masts all fore-and-aft rigged except the foremast which is entirely square rigged, the brigantine sporting a square rigged foremast and fore-and-aft rigged main mast, the topsail schooner having two or more masts with a square rigged foremast, and a schooner which has two or more fore-and-aft rigged masts.

I think Pirates of the Caribbean was a full-rigged or barque.

What's a Cutty Sark? What's a clipper ship? How to they fit in? From what I glean from Wikipedia, the Cutty Sark is a clipper ship. Clipper ships are tall ships mostly made in Britain and the US in the 19'th century. Clipper ships are a category of tall ships.



Sailing boats get even more complicated. There are sloops (like the John B the Beach Boys sing about), cutters, and many more. This web site has a short summary.

Hard Job, missing vowels, colors and a Fokker

Last Thursday J and I went to the Zagreb, Croatia office. I had several business meetings (and is now dreaming up some more for the future). J got a few hours to walk around the center of Zagreb. Later that evening we got to experience a very fine Croatian meal which included some Croatian fig brandy, Croatian fish, Croatian squid salad, Croatian wine, and Croatian desserts. At 5:30 AM the next morning, one of my colleagues allowed us to ride with him on the four hour drive to Split, on the Dalmatian coast. Along the way we paused at a rest stop to look out over the canyon into the blue waters of the KrKa National Park. By the way, some of you haven't been waiting long enough for the images to load with maximum sharpness. These should be really nice images so if it's blurry, you have a slow connection and need to wait.

Later, he dropped us off at a hotel and came back later to pick me up for the meetings. After the meetings, we had a short guided tour of Diocletian's palace: he's the Roman emperor that killed a few Christians. In the beginning of his reign, he tolerated Christians but later decided not to keep them around. Read all about Diocletian on wikipedia.

Diocletian is also the first, if not the last, Roman emperor to voluntarily retire. He is also sometimes cited as the emperor that accelerated the demise of the empire by breaking it into four parts, so that there were four envious, suspicious, power hungry leaders. He was a Croatian and, therefore, thought it fitting to build his retirement home in Split, not far from where he grew up. It was a four star palace until he died and the Christians decided to vent some anger. They demolished all the statues and busts of Diocletian and completely ransacked his sarcophagus. They turned his chapel to the Roman god Jupiter into a baptismal room with Jupiter replaced with John the Baptist. They had other decorating ideas, too, but to avoid boring you too much I'll move on....


Split was just excellent (and cheap). Apparently lots of other tourists discovered that before me. In fact, I think if Croatia didn't have tourists, they'd be in dire straights. Check out my 50 or so Split pictures here.

We took a day trip to the island of Hvar. It's got some history behind it, too, which (don't click away yet), I won't bore you with. My pictures from the ferry ride from Split to Hvar are here. My photos on Hvar itself are here.

One thing you will not find in Croatia is an abundance of vowels. In fact, sometimes they just do without for the whole word. How about the Island of Krk? These folks would have been good programmers back in the long forgotten day when programmers had to use mnemonics of six characters or less. So we'd abbreviate "Next Value" with "NxtVal." Seems like Croatian to me.

Croatian is one of the Slavic languages. English is a Germanic language (and I always thought it was romantic! Uh, I mean a romance language.). Both languages are Indo-European.

Both Split and Hvar are on the Adriatic sea. The water is so clear you wouldn't believe it. Those tourist photos I used to suspect were photographically doctored are probably not.

We came to Croatia on a jet from Stockholm to Vienna and then took a small prop plane, a Fokker, to Zagreb. We left on a Fokker 100 from Split back to Vienna. I thought Fokker was long gone and Airbus and Boeing were the last two contestants. Guess not.

Descending down to Stockholm as the sun was low (as it is just about all day long) we saw the amazing number of islands and waterways. The water was granite grey, the island flush with green but dotted with the typical Swedish burnt red, custard yellow or white buildings. The green pastures were littered with the giant hay bails covered in the white plastic. The skies were blue with the white fluffy clouds. Contrast those colors with the colors in Croatia. Deep blue water with some greens mixed in, white rocks, white or grey buildings with the red Mediterranean tile roofs, and blue cloudless skies.

That's when I began to think how people correlate with the colors, or maybe it's the temperature. Hmmm. Guns, Germs, and Steel and Colors? I guess I have to factor in the Swedish winter's too where the colors change. In fact, most summer days have not had blue skies and white clouds: they had grey clouds and not much sun. No wonder Swedes worship the sun.

A few notes on the paint: The red paint so popular in Sweden uses a residue from copper mines, the most famous, which was in operation before the year 1000 is near Dalarna. This paint, although it tends to look old quickly is an excellent protector of wood. The wood can last hundreds of years in harsh weather with a fresh coat every 15 years. The yellow paint is sometimes associated with wealth because long ago the wealthy folks painted their palaces this color, I'm not sure why.

Utö and Ålö - a perfect day trip

B is visiting so we decided to take a long day trip from Stockholm to the island of Utö (pronounced ew-ter). We left the apartment at around 7 AM, took the pendeltåg from Karlberg to Västerhaninge, a bus to Årsta brygga, and finally a ferry to Gruvbyn pier on Utö. Each leg was about 40 minutes.


Right off the boat is the quaint center of Gruvbyn. It's mostly tourist and Swedes visiting their archipelago cabins. The permanent residents of Utö number around 400, IIRC. We then rented "urban" bike. It was still misting rain and the skies were the color of faded asphalt. We rode the bikes south from Gruvbyn on the primary dirt road toward a fish restaurant we'd been told about on another island called Ålö (pronounced oh-ler). There is a small bridge connecting Utö with Ålö. The ride passed through plush green forest and meadows loaded with ferns. "This is the Sweden I love," said J. It looked like the movie set from Jurassic Park. There were some houses and farms, too. The whole bike ride one way was about 10 kilometers (6 miles). Once at Ålö, we had to wait on the restaurant to open so we explored around the small bay and sat on the dock watching the sea gulls, a few boats passing, and talking.
The restaurant served mostly smoked seafood from the nearby waters. J had smoked salmon. B and I had a combo plate with smoke salmon, raw salmon thinly sliced, and smoked prawns. All served in a wooden box. The prawns still had eggs in them. We ate the big black eyes, some red organs, the meat and the eggs. Not bad. The cost of this lunch was high, IMHO. One beer, two waters, and the three meals was 495 SEK, $71.
The ride back was much nicer because the sun came out, the clouds parted and became the white billowy cumulus clouds. It seed the grays all became blues. You can see how the colors changed by viewing the Flickr slide show (66 photos) from start to finish.

Saltsjöbaden

J and I took a small outing today. After several gray rainy days, today was finally sunny so we took the green line to Slussen station. From Slussen we walked along Katarinavägan and Fjällgatan to get some views of Gamla Stan, Skeppholmen and the boats in the harbor. I stored 24 of the photo's here. Upon returning to Slussen we got on the train east to Saltsjöbaden, a place I remembered as picturesque from my visit in 2000. It had changed quite a bit. Half a dozen new apartment buildings we built right next to the train station - it used to look much more quaint.

It's still a beautiful place, though. It's a favorite place for boats because they are closer to the "big water." We had a light lunch, wandered around taking photos and admiring what "big money" can buy. There's 15 or so photo's here.

We also stumbled upon the coolest thing I've seen in a long time. We first saw 5 or 6 small wooden boats on the shore. There were people gathering around them. Every 5 or 10 minutes another car would drive up with one secured to it's roof. After awhile there were probably 10 to 15 of these boats. I asked a woman what all the bustle was about and learned it is a "society" that allows it's members (young people from 11 to 20-something) to build these boats.The organizer and founder of the society has an old Swedish Navy boat that is full of machine tools for steel and wood. The "members" build their boats on the Navy boat. Now when I say build a boat, I mean everything except a few fasteners and the sail fabric. They make the metal parts, build the boat, mast, the sail, everything.....It takes from 1000 to 2500 hours. These young people have been working weekends for at least a year. Now, today, they were taking their finished masterpieces out on a three week archipelago trip. The instructor and some others will escort the armada with cargo carrying boats and some other boats in case of emergencies. Check out my 44 pictures here.

This has to be an amazing experience for the young men and women. I know the parents were beaming with pride. In the US there are a thousand reasons this would never work and all of the thousand reasons boil down to lawyers. If a minor were to get hurt using one of the many tools needed to build a boat, or have a problem on the camping trip, or whatever, the parents, at the urging of a lawyer, would want somebody to pay and insurance companies wouldn't touch this....and so we don't have things like this and it is most unfortunate. Our young people that don't choose sports or heavy academics will be playing video games, since we've essentially outlawed work for minors, too......

Kayaking Brunnsviken

What A beautiful day to Kayak. Last weekend I kayaked for 3 hours (resulting in 3 ibuprofen every four hours for 2 days). I rented from Point 65 North kayaks at the Pampas Marina. The weekend before that both J and I rented from Svima Sports, not far from Point 65 North. Both of those trips were on Lake Mälaren. So today we thought we'd try kayaking in the Baltic. (You really can't tell much difference.)

Last weekend, I saw several topless gals out sunning. Today, I suppose because my wife was present, we saw two completely naked old guys. It reinforces my feeling that nobody over 40 should ever be seen naked.

The real memory of this little 2 hour jaunt was us coming back through a little channel. Going through the first time we followed several other motor boats. Coming back we waited for it to be clear and we just started paddling through. Then two large boats started approaching - coming at us head on. The channel was narrow and J scraped one of the boats which caused her to veer into the path of the second boat. The second boat, although only going maybe 5 kph, slowed even more and the driver said something rather loudly to us in Swedish. We apologized in English and he said, we were supposed to wait on a green light. "Where's the light?" I said. "Over the sign." he said. Then we saw it: traffic lights, just like at an intersection.



After the kayaking we rested in the sun and people watched. Two young guys rented kayaks and it was obvious they'd never kayaked before. They took their boats to the dock and set them in the water. One of them took a phone call on the dock. The other, apparently remembering his phone upon seeing his buddy with his, got his phone out of the waterproof kayak compartment and put it in his jeans pocket. Then he stepped into his boat. In an instant he was in the water and the bottom of the boat was getting some sun. There was some thrashing around for a few seconds before he was able to pull himself up and get back on the dock.

Once out, he pulls out his cell phone and is trying to sling the water off. We left maybe 45 minutes later and he was still trying to dry it out. My guess is it won't be receiving any calls for a long time.

The rental guy switched the two kayaks for a single wide canoe.

The walk to the kayak club, Brunnsviken Kanotklubb, was about 2 miles (3.3 kilometers). So we decided to take the T-Bana back. To do that we walked to the Stockholm University campus where there was a music festival going on. It was free so we sat in the grass and listened to music for a little while.

A good day. You can see some photos on flickr by clicking here.

Some Boats and Bridges

I want a boat and a house on the water. In fact, I want two boats, a kayak for physical explorations, a sail boat because they are just so elegant and somehow I can use the elements. Of course, I need two kayaks: one for me and one for J. We'd have to learn to sail but that's easy: just spend a little time in the Stockholm archipelago at sailing school. Lyle Lovett wanted a pony and a boat and to put his pony on his boat.

"If I had a boat
I'd go out on the ocean
And if I had a pony
I'd ride him on my boat
And we could all together
Go out on the ocean
Me upon my pony on my boat."

I'd replace the pony with a two bikes! My sail boat would be big enough for my bike and my sea kayak. Oh, and I want to be rich enough to not have to work.
J and I would have coffee in the early morning, kayak a little while, sail in the afternoon, bike around, sail back, watch the news, and read a book. Pardon my little fantasy.

The photos in this post are mostly in and around the island of Stora Essingen, where one of my American colleagues and his family live. They had us over for a nice dinner and tour of the island. The island has four thousand residents and is only a couple of kilometers in circumference. There's a French school there so all the French expatriates prefer to live there.



As the date for us to move from the furnished apartment to an unfurnished one approaches, we need to make many decisions and purchases. We'll have some furnishings shipped from Colorado (We're allowed 20 cubic meters) or about the volume of a regular sized bathroom. So let's see....gotta have the hobby stuff first. More bicycles, J's crafts, more warm clothes, more books (including my collections of Rick Steves and Lonely Planets), a couple of chairs, and a tv. Not much else will fit in the 20 cubic meters. So then it's off to IKEA.



The last photo in this post is of the spectacular Tranebergsbron Bridge. The photo is taken on a perfect day from right outside the light rail station.

Helenelund and Ulriksdal

There are subcultures with every hobby whether it be bicycling, bass fishing, woodworking, orienteering, traveling, chess, wine tasting, or socializing. One of the favorite Swedish hobbies is sailing on the many waterways in the Stockholm archipelago. I visited a small communuty marina in Helenelund (or very nearby in Sollentuna) and saw people making a social event out of sailboating and they were on land! Now that I think about it, sailing combines the exercise and fresh air of a casual bike ride, the joy of woodworking, the intellectual challenge of chess, travel opportunities, and offers a perfect place to sip wine and to socalize. One could even fish. What a sport!

I also discovered something the Swedes call colonies, one shown in the photo here. They are a group of tiny houses with a small garden. Up close they look like quaint one room houses. I'm told they are just little getaways. People, apparently those that don't go sailing and those without a cabin in the archipelago, go to the colony for some summer weekend variety. I saw people, mostly older folks out in their garden and tinkering around there house. It seemed like a peaceful place.


The other thing I discovered just off the bike path between my apartment and work is the Ulriksdal castle. (There are plenty of Flickr folks that have nicer pictres than mine of the castle and grounds. Just do a search.) It's not a giant stone castle like you find in Germany but it is a large well kept estate - now a park. It always surprises me how taking a slightly different path can produce rewards.

You'll see a few of these shots on my flickr.com collection called April 15, Spring Sunday. Remember you can view as a slide show or individually if you want to see the a short description of each shot.

Swedes, especially Stockholmites, Love to Sail

There's water all around Stockholm. There the Baltic with it's archipelago of more than 15,000 islands. There's also Lake Malerin which is huge. Many sailors prefer the vintage wood sailboats, while other prefer newer models.

Marinas are a common site in and around Stockholm. Some of the marinas are non-profit, run by communities of volunteers. Volunteers are expected to help in the Spring putting boats into the water and the Fall taking them out. They are sometimes expected to stay up all night long a day or two out of the year as a security guard.