Answering the Call of the Fjords

Sweden was fun but first, a PSA:

Kids, don’t ever fly standby to a foreign country. Hell, just don’t ever fly standby. If you really want to go somewhere, do yourself a favor, before you take the ride, buy the ticket. otherwise, expect to spend eight hours in Newark Liberty Airport, running form one gate to another trying to find a seat (or two) in the hopes that you might get where you want to go.

After twenty hours of flying, not flying, gate running and sitting and waiting, you’ll end up in a hotel, having to get a 3:30 AM wakeup call in the hopes that maybe you’ll get on a plane the next morning that is within driving distance of where you want to be. That’s no way to start or end a vacation, let alone both.

Now, a few loosely associated thoughts concerning Sweden:

Malmo may not be at the top of your list of European cities to visit, but if you have the opportunity it’s really quite pleasant, especially in the summer. The week we were there the highs were in the upper seventies, there was little to no humidity and it was bright and clear.

Since Sweden is in the Arctic Circle, the daylight comes in and leaves at what we here in the Deciduous South refer to as odd hours.

This is the backyard of our friend’s house. At 9:00 PM. The sun is just setting. It’s up again, at full glow, by 4 AM.

The Swedes and the Danes (we went in to Copenhagen one day) love their pastry. Fresh pastry can be found everywhere, even at 7/11 stores. They are also rather fond of chocolate and are one of the milk drinkingest people I’ve ever met. But they don’t put up with that hormonal swill that Americans call milk, it’ll all organic over there. The friends we visited have wo small children and they drink a fair amount of milk themselves. They noticed that they all dropped weight after a few months of organic Swedish milk. Why do we put hormone sin our milk? Probably for the same bean counting reason we use High Fructose Corn Syrup as a sweetener rather then regular old cane sugar.

Swedes are extremely polite. A waitress at a restaurant apologized profusely because she didn’t know we didn’t speak Swedish. Why should she? She was just being Polite. Danes however, are rude as hell. They look at you funny for not speaking their Muppet language and cutting in front of you while walking in a straight line down an airport terminal is apparently a Danish hobby. the weird part is, for most of the last thousand years, they were the same frickin country and they’re only separated by about two miles of Baltic Sea. It’s a fifteen minute train ride from Malmo to Copenhagan but you’d swear, in that span, you went from Germany to Rudelandia.

This is Turning Torso, the brand new multi gazillion Krona apartment building in Malmo. It’s also the tallest structure in Sweden. Coming across the bridge from Copenhagen, you can see this thing sticking up off the coast. it’s impressive. imagine the New York City Skyline but the only building is the Empire State.

Lingenberries are really good with Traditional Swedish meatballs. But what they call a pork cutlet is really just a slab of bacon. Expect there to be some sort of brownish sauce on everything. And Lingenberries.

Like tiny Stonehenges, Viking Burial Stones dot the Swedish landscape. Imagine an entire country run by Ikea but with a cultural heritage based on a Spinal Tap song.

This is Ale’s Stone. It sits on a hill about three hundred feet up a sheer drop into the Baltic Sea.

And this is the Baltic sea. That slight hazy dark shape that spreads all the way across the horizon? That’s Poland.

One of the most interesting things I noticed was just how well thought out Swedish Society is. There are hundreds of little things they have thought of, like cantilevered windows and fountains that double as torches in the winter, to casually and well placed live preservers along castle moats that Americans simply would not take the time to think about. When not drinking milk by the gallon, they ride bikes everywhere, which explains why they aren’t fat, despite their fondness for chocolate and pastry. Bike lanes are seamlessly integrated into the road plans. There is next to no graffiti and I saw no beggars. Our friend Dave assured us there was a section of town where there were some beggars and vagrants but they were still rather scarce. Unlike in Savannah where they camp out all over the place, and practicality own several of the squares on main streets.

After the first day, I said to myself, “So this is how a functioning democracy works!” Brilliant!” We really should try one of those someday.