shoes, ships, sealing wax, cabbages and kings

It's really too difficult to blog about even a day trip to a capital city and to incorporate more than a scratch of what one has seen and learned. I've taken photographs and a short video as a way to help jog my own mind about this, but for anyone trying to get more than a glint of the coverage it would be a challenge.

Take shoes: alongside the usual trainers and athletic walking boots storming the pavements, there's a preponderance of clog like shoes too. I looked in a shoe shop and they are actually called - clogs. Different from the dutch wooden clogs sold as souvenirs, these are a hybrid between flip-flops and a clog like appearance - multi coloured and sometimes decorated.

And ships: there's the Tall Ship event in Stockholm this coming weekend and the city is in preparation. There are already people walking around with 'Tall Ships 2007' lanyards around their necks - I assume they must be organizers. I've been out on the water today, along to the home of the King at Drottningholm - which is a few kilometres through the archipelagos and the site of a rather splendid palace and grounds.

The Kings and Queens of Sweden have had a tumultuous past, with a kind of partial acceptance of the role by the government and people in what is technically a constitutional monarchy. In the past, there have been times when govenment forged the assent of the royals to the legislation of the day.

SInce despotic King Gustav the Third built a superb theatre in the grounds of the palace but was finally assasinated for wasting money back in the 18th Century, through to the assassination of Prime Minister Olof Palme in 1986, there has been a sometimes bumpy ride for leaders in Sweden.

All seems to be in balance now, although we mustn't forget the murder of the Swedish foreign minister - Anna Lindh - once tipped to be the next prime minister, back in 2003, but stabbed to death in a famous department store in central Stockholm.

Stockholm

Stockholm feels as a city that it should have a larger population than the estimated 750,000. It is spread over about 14 islands and has a series of interconnecting bridges between areas which can look distinctly different from the old town of preserved buildings, to the relative modernity of a large mainly glass culture centre in another area. There's also a lot of below street level walk-ways which are a way to provide protection in the cold of Winter. Parts of the sea and rivers freeze at that time.

But right now, Sweden is out in force, shopping and wandering through the lanes and alleys of the town, enjoying coffee, waffles and ice cream and planning day trips to the country side. All of Sweden stops for a few weeks in July- the main vacation season, taking advantage of the short Swedish summer.

My wanderings today included several of the islands, some of the stores (Harry Potter everywhere!), a few smaller shops, some museums (which are free) and the inevitable coffee shop along the way. Sweden loves its coffee and remains a Starbuck free zone.

Stockholm evening

Stockholm arrival during early evening.

Time enough to locate a hotel in the Gamla Stan (old town) and then after dropping some bags in the room to fall out into the mid evening and find a restaurant.

Tonight, it was a Russian place called Tsarskij Sad, just behind the hotel. I'd already done a short stroll to check for other nearby interesting places - and there were quite a few - but the Russian stood out as both inviting and interesting. So I tried Russian bread, cucumbers, pickles and a kind of pie called Kurnik. Yum.

Amused to see a lone diner in the nearby Italian reading the new Harry Potter; yes its reached Sweden too.

meander

Changing plans for today meant re-jigging hotels too. The first challenge was to back out of the one in the current town without a large penalty. I reckoned that charging last evening's meal to the hotel bill would help and sure enough they were gracious about letting us leave a day early.

So then it was off across Sweden with no particular place to go. We opted for a diagonal route on a meaningful but minor road and I lazily tapped a destination into the Sat-Nav in the general direction, so that I could have some verbal assistance from the car if needed.

We aimed for the large lakes in the middle of Goteland adjacent to the Goteland Canal which links the east and west coasts of Sweden between Goteberg and Stockholm. It turned out to be a good decision, with pretty scenery and some attractive stopping points, including a lovely hotel on the canal, but alas the only room at the inn was one a tiny one with bunk-beds, so we decided to keep moving.

Indeed, we also tried a large ex-monastery on the shores of Lake Vattern, but the spook factor from the previous evening was a little too powerful- together with the promise of evening bats, so we kept moving instead and took a late afternoon decision to push on to Stockholm, which at this point was a mere 250 kilometres away.

spooky castle town with mud

Kalmar in Sweden is on the eastern coast around 300 kilometres south of Stockholm. It was supposed to be the venue for a two day pause in the travelling, in what was expected to be a delightful hotel set in grounds overlooking a tranquil view of the sea.

Not quite.

The hotel was in grounds which were were being converted into an area to contain a new cultural centre. Most of the surroundings were a building site. There was no real view and the room was really too small to house occupants and baggage at the same time.

Nothing for it, after a stroll around the town, it was easy to make a decision to pull the plugs and move on a day early. Late afternoon meant an overnight stop here was inevitable and so evening saw me pulling a heavy case or two up some steep stair into a poet's garret.

By the second drink everything seemed better accompanied by a plan for an early morning departure.

Its reassuring to know that a whole trip would have some moments of texture and this was one of those episodes. So after a walk through the 'muddy' parkland adjoining the castle (a great test for some recently acquired flip-flops), it became an evening watching Swedish subtitled television and then preparation for an early departure towards the Gotecanal and onward towards Stockholm.

making it all fit together

One of the interesting features of this type of vacation is the road trip nature of it. Sometimes I take vacation all in one place, or maybe two, and other times keep on movin'.

This is one of the latter and already just a few days in, there has been considerable change of scene and different locations. At the moment, its been a combination of sea, lakes and hills with small towns mainly with mediaeval times in their backgrounds. As the journey progresses there will be mountains and cities as well, but even after few days, it starts to become difficult to remember the exact sequence of travel. I can see why people keep journals.

And the journal I've cracked into whilst travelling is the Alistair Campbell extracts related to the Tony Blair years. I'd decided to dislike this almost before I started it, but have actually found it quite interesting and strangely human in the way it describes things. Campbell has a reputation as a spin meister and presumably ther has been some fairly careful editing of the content of the diaries, not least to stay legal in what is said.

Nonetheless, the amount of minor detail, dealt with in a clipped journalistic style, suggests that large chunks of the text must be fairly accurate renderings of what actually happened. Being a day by day account, it would be quite difficult to retrospectively doctor the entire storyline, particulalrly where so many different events overlap.

I'm only on about page 100 at present-just past the Blair visit to Clinton at the White House, but admit, to my slight surprise, that I'm enjoying this story of the yet to be elected Tony Blair and his band of politicos as they try to make a plausible bid for power.

I'm not sure whether there are lessons being learned, but I do expect that Campbell's journal will become one of the defining descriptions of the Blair years.

faaborg

Moving through Denmark today, past a few of the Kros, that stand by the roadside. "What's a Kro?" I hear you ask.

Its a kind of Danish 'Bed and Breakfast' location - very unique and family owned and somewhere I've stopped at in past visits to Denmark.

Today we stopped at one on the way to Faaborg and enjoyed a lunchtime Smorgasbord of herring, cheese and ham, before moving on to Faaborg for our overnight stop.

We had not realized that Faaborg was having a special evening party in the town, complete with a rock band and stopped a while to listen before, tonight, dropping in to a local Fotex supermarket to pick up a light snack to take with us for the evening.

nightwatchman and triple XXX

There's a great old progressive rock track called the Nightwatchman. I don't know who its by, but its someone like ELP, King Crimson or Brian Eno and has some haunting electric guitar chords which wail into the sky.

I was in the town of Ribe tonight and wandered out from the Hotel Dagmar at 22:00 (in the daylight) to take the tour of the town with the Nightwatchman. There were about 30 of us that had decided to join him as he sang his verses to us, the town and the sky and patrolled to the edges of Ribe, which is a small mediaeval town in southern Denmark.

It did progressively get darker, but the photo I took of the Hotel at the end of the tour was somewhat later, when the hotel was shutting off the lights to leave just candles burning for the short night.

The town of Ribe was once a major centre in Denmark; the largest trading port and did well until around 1580 when there was a bad town fire and then 1635, when there was terrible flood, followed by plague from which Ribe didn't ever really recover its trading position.

"Dronning Dagmar ligger i Ribe syg - Queen Dagmar lies in Ribe, sick", as the old Danish folk tune goes,

In some towns in Europe you see the three XXX on signs and as a symbol. Amsterdam has it as the town symbol, for example. They mean, if you see them, no Fire, no Flood, no Plague.

XXX

préjudice

A slightly out of sequence post, because I actually saw the Die Hard 4.0 movie on Sunday. I did originally post a link to the trailer, but had to delete it because it was one of those fancy film studio links to a version that insisted on autostarting, which I felt was kinda rude. So here's the trailer with the option fo you to click to start it.

My main gripe though, was the cinema's other trailers for films before the one with Bruce started. There were three different "lets be rude to the French" situations. If it had been about, say, a social minority, there would have been an outrage, but it stuck me that the American studios are using France as a new place to kick.

Humour is fine, and I know the Anglo Saxons don't always see eye to eye with the French (if you take my 1066 Norman meaning) but this seemed to be that the studios have decided that French bashing was okay. Not cool. Très répréhensible.

The film? Does what it says on the label - my summary:"Computer psycho steals password to US infrastructure involving unwitting cop Bruce. More determination to resolve after daughter kidnapped. Car, helicopter, plane chases and explosions as Bruce resolves in oily vest with final fix-up ambulance scenes. Fade to 5.0"

sun

I consider the sun to be a powerful symbol and rashbre central uses it in the main blog logo (stonehenge at summer solstice). So imagine the delight of visiting the land of the midnight sun. Admittedly, the trip is first via the delightful Denmark (of which I am sure there will be more), but then on to a place which manages to keep the sun in the sky throughout July even if it does have to pay it back in December.

So on the way, it was a great pleasure to see what were effectively two sun-sets, one behind some clouds and then a short time later one against the horizon of the sea.

harwich to esbjerg

Next stop, Esbjerg. That's after travelling to Harwich to catch a ship across the North Sea. I'll be in Scandinavia for the next few days and probably have limited access to internet and so forth. The bags are packed and I'm ready for a 'port out starboard home' crossing and then some unstructured time in Denmark and Sweden.

tiger tattva

Now that I've found that streamclip thingy, its so quick to recut some old videos onto iMovie. This was something from 8mm video, which I originally edited ages ago on a PC with Adobe Premiere and now I've just dropped it back into iMovie, rebalanced the colour and added some quick titles.

Five minutes and a mini tiger epic.

I was editing it at DV quality but have squished it down to 3Mb on disk so that it loads quickly. That's smaller than the original mp3 soundtrack for the whole movie.