Midsummers

One of my friend asked me the big deal about midsummer since I was talking about is for quite a while. Well technically speaking – nothing, since its nothing but the sun shining for 24 hrs. But it’s the biggest celebration here in Sweden, with people talking about their midsummer plans much in advance, not that it proves anything, since the Swedes talk about all their weekends and specially long weekends a lot, anyways point being Midsummer is big here.

The Indians (as we are called here) decided to go to Happaranda and Storforsen to celebrate midsummer and do some sight seeing ourselves. Happaranda is about a 3 hr drive north of Skelleftea on the Finland border. It’s a beautiful town no doubt just that everything was shut due to midsummer, and everything basically means everything, from restaurants to supermarkets to shops – everything! When we walked around in the town hunting for food it was almost like a ghost town, with just us five Indians walking on the street, something that we don’t see even during a curfew in India. We finally dashed our hopes of finding food, and managed to find a shop which sold chips etc. That was breakfast, the only plus being that we had the chips and ice-cream beside a really beautiful river. But being here now for 6 months, have started taking clean rivers, the greenery and nature beauty for granted!!

One of the major motivating factors to make the trip to Happaranda was the IKEA store there. The IKEA store in Happaranda is one of the largest IKEA stores in Sweden, and we were quite looking forward to seeing it. But Alas, I guess they were celebrating Midsummer too, and hence will need to look for some other time and place to finally get a chance to visit the famed Swedish furniture store.

From there we left early for Storforsen so that we could make it on time for lunch. The combination of antakshri and deers on the roads made it a nice drive to Storforsen. Storforsen is a place where the river Pite forms rapids which is one of the largest in Europe. Pite is also one of the only four unharnessed rivers in Sweden. For a country which is famous for its large number of lakes and rivers, 4 unharnessed rivers is quite a small number. We decided to refuel ourselves on some food before checking out the rapids, the noise of which we could hear far away in the restaurant. After waiting for a really long time the food thankfully arrived before some of us fainted with hunger!! The patience level that the Swedes have dumbfounds me everytime. They wait patiently while driving for their turn to overtake, almost never honk, never follow up on anything, and wonder of wonders they wait in queues for a waiting ticket in shops!!

Anyways back to my trip, the disappointment of Happaranda was compensated completely by just seeing the rapids. The sheer power of the river was amazing, just felt like getting into the water and go flowing away with the river (for how long I would be alive, is a different matter altogether). The river almost has three different colors in a short span of length - the absolute white where water crashed against the rocks and formed the rapids, the green some places where it took the color of some rocks, and the sky blue when the rocks got over and the river became silent in the delta – a true haven for a nature photography lover like me.

Since it was a holiday in Sweden, the place was crowded with around 200 to 250 people there, but unlike any tourist place in India, you almost felt you were alone there, thanks to the absence of the numerous amounts of roadside shops, very large and noisy groups of people and the presence of the quiet “in my own world” Swedes. Silence – its something that takes a little getting used to in Sweden, and when you do get used to it, you wonder why people talk as much - I haven’t reached that stage yet!!!

The trip back was uneventful with all of us, just absorbing the scenic beauty, got back to Skelleftea on time for dinner and to make the day perfect, had some really yummy Indian food. Or maybe I found it yummy (since I usually hate the place I went to that day) because I was really hungry and it was the first real food for the day.

With the Midsummer gone, its time for the Skelleftea festival on the weekend. Amazes me to see a country designed only around having fun!!... more about it soon

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Cravings

I crave for the sun to set and then to rise,
I crave for colours other than black, grey and white,
I crave for my morning paper and chai,
I crave to go out and eat dinner at nine,
I crave to see people just everywhere,
I crave to see more than five cars at one time,
I crave for what people here call noise,
I crave for the time when weekends were fun,
I crave for the time when days were spent with movies and friends,
I crave for when life was more than just being online,
Its funny I crave for things I never thought I'd think of anytime...

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Of cycles and carnivals

When I imagined Copenhagen, I imagined it to be a fun place, warm and sunny since it was on the coast. I visited it this weekend, and found out that for once, I was right.

Copenhagen in itself is a very beautiful city. One can almost imagine how Hans Christian Andersen was inspired to write such beautiful fairytales, The city in itself is out of the fairytales, with the sea on one side and the various lakes and the beautiful architecture on the other. The statue of the little mermaid is small as compared to what I thought it would be, but surely worth seeing for anyone who has read and loved the story as a child.

I spent the weekend roaming around Copenhagen and seeing most of what was famous. My favourite of course was the Nyhavn, Copenhagen’s old harbor where you can almost sense the old world charm. I liked it more since there was more of a festival going on there due to the soccer match between Sweden and Denmark. There were a lot of Swedes in Copenhagen on the weekend for the match, and there was quite a bit of friendly and sometimes not so friendly banter between the Swedes and the Danish fans. Sweden won with quite a bit of drama (one of the Danish fan’s hit the referee resulting in the match being suspended, and Sweden winning). The scenes after that quite reminded me of the cricket matches in India. It was a pleasant surprise to see emotion that strong from the usually reserved guys…

I also liked Tivoli a lot too, though I for the life of me cannot understand why people pay money to be on risky and completely crazy joy rides. But the whole concept of amusement parks in the 19th century left me wonder struck. It’s a little cramped, but I am guessing that since it was built long back, no one really imagined it to be as crowded coupled with the fact that’s its in the center of the city, which leaves the option of expansion out of question. It is however, really pretty and like a continuous carnival. For me , what set it apart from other amusement parks, was a sense of character that it had.

Apart from the beauty of the place, there were a few things that caught my attention. The first thing that struck me when I reached Copenhagen, was how cycles were a very normal method of commuting for people. The most amusing sight I saw was a person on the railway station, waiting for a train along with his cycle (couldn’t get a snap of that one though). I then found out that they renovated the central station at Copenhagen and made a two-storey parking place just for cycles! I tried to get a snap of some people taking their babies in the prams on cycles, didn’t manage to do that, but I did see quite a few of them. – Eco friendly and an extremely healthy way of living, You bet!

The one another thing I noticed in Copenhagen, which was different from the rest of Scandinavia was their carnival culture. The atmosphere at the city square was almost like that of a carnival with music, songs and a whole lot of people just having a really good time. The city seemed much more relaxed and less reserved as compared to the other places I have been in Scandinavia; I guess it’s the coast that’s playing its part there.

Well I surely had a great weekend, marred by the fact that my luggage along with my laptop are stuck somewhere in the middle of Copenhagen and Skelleftea (had to check in my lappy, due to the EU rules of not carrying a lot of liquids as cabin baggage and my aversion to carrying more than one bag). I need to mention this one last bit though – the conveyor belt at the airport wasn’t working and we had to go behind the airport to deposit our luggage in, along with heap of bags, almost making it certain that the bags would never reach Stockholm on the right flight. Now this has never happened to me in India, but am sure if it did, everyone including myself would crib about it being a third world country , nothing ever works here etc etc… Here no one so much so as murmured and people didn’t even complain when as predicted the bags didn’t reach Stockholm. To top it, the airport authorities took in our baggage, without any screening or anything. Am just wondering, with such amazing security, why the need to fuss about liquids!!

PS:

Got to know once I got back to Office, that Skelleftea was the warmest city/town in the whole of Europe yesterday! Cannot get over it, since have seen it being -30 degrees in the winter and sometimes colder... Yippee!! looks like the summers are finally here... more about it later

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