Tuesday, July 12, 2011

Scandi Kickoff

Stockholm! I know I've already been there, but my family hasn't, and the two days we spent there count as our first stop on this tour. I won't repost what I've already shown. Just some new things, like:

The Ericsson Globe:


This is the national indoor arena of Sweden. Currently the world's largest hemispherical building with a diameter of 110 meters. It has a seating capacity for 16,000 spectators.
The sphere is not just an arena, but it represents the sun in the "Sweden Solar System", which is the world's largest scale model of the Solar System.
Other globes representing the planets and various other small bodies, relative to the size of the globe "sun" are spread out in Sweden in a relational distance from it as well.
The Earth model (65cm in diameter) can be found at the Swedish Museum of Natural History, 7.6km from the Globe. I will try to get a couple of pictures of the inner planets during my next visit to Stockholm.

As you can see, if you are crazy enough, you can take a ride in a glass dome elevator to the top. We were not.

The following are photos of some new, strange or old things from Stockholm that I haven't shared yet.

Saluhall with all it's very fresh produce, meat and fish.
St James' Church.
A female castle guard.
Entrance hall of the Castle.
Sergels Torg, which doesn't look that impressive by day, but the night photo I found on the internet does.

The Summer House in Djurgården, where the King used to stay for hunting.
The Parlement, Riksdagen.
Very weird statue. Thought it was a street performer at first!
A random tree.

From Stockholm, we boarded the Viking Line Ferry and travelled over night to our next destination: Helsinki, Finland.
The view from the ferry berthed. The amusement park is Gröna Lund, on Djurgården island.
Stockholm city itself is built on 14 islands. 30% of the city consists of waterways and another 30% is made up of parks. The Stockholm archipelago consists of over 30,000 islands and islets! We spent several hours passing them all to and from Stockholm. This is a shot of us just leaving the last of the biggest islands behind.
Suomenlinna Sea Fortress just outside of Helsinki. It was built while Finland was still a part of Sweden, before the Finnish war in which Sweden and Russia fought and the eastern third of then Sweden became the Grand Duchy of Finland within the Russian Empire. During World War I, Finland fought and achieved independence from Russia and Suomenlinna once again changed ownership.
Helsinki.
Sunset on the Baltic.

Helsinki itself was a really nice city. It's "tourist" area isn't very big and the Russian history and influence can easily be seen and heard all over. Here are some of the highlights of our visit.
A great street market, where every stall is set up every morning and dismantled each night, but each of them accepts credit cards or even foreign currency! Made for tourists.
Helsinki Train station.
The House of Estates.
Helsinki Cathedral.
One of the few cathedrals I've come across that allows photography inside.
Uspenski Cathedral. Very Russian.
And very close to the South African embassy!
A guard that I at first thought was a strange statue. He didn't move a hair, which is probably more Russian than Swedish, since the Swedish guards smile and nod at people.
Temppeliaukio Church. This church is built into rock and lit by natural light. The dome cap is made of spun copper wire. The rough, almost unworked surfaces of the rock apparently gives great acoustics and the church is a popular concert venue.
Suomenlinna Fort. Pretty in Pink.
Suomenlinna Fort Church.
View of the fort's old walls.
View from the fort to the Baltic Ocean.

No European/Scandinavian city will be complete without some weird, funky statues. So here they are:
Turtles at Market Square.
Aleksis Kivi close by the Train Station, looking a bit depressed.
A carved tree stump.
It is very difficult to get a picture of some of the statues without a bird on the head.
A woman raising her hands in the air like she just don't care.
Even the dog is wondering why he's holding the sword by the blade.
The three smiths. John, Jack and Peter Smith. Kidding.
And lastly, Havis Amanda. This statue of a mermaid leaving her element is suppose to symbolize Helsinki's rebirth.

Trip to and from Helsinki: around 1200km (1000 via ferry) and four days.
Trip still left to show: 4980km (reasonably accurate reading from the Motorhome) and 15 days.

Stay tuned.
Njoy!

Saturday, June 25, 2011

Murphy was on holiday as well it seems....mostly.

Wow.

What a crazy, great month it has been.
I'll start off with some of the perfect timing events that happened and one irritating one before I get to a show and tell of our Nordic Tour.

Since I've been in Sweden, I stayed in a one-bedroom apartment which was perfect for me, but I had some doubts about how crowded it might get when my family arrives for our trip. Fortunately, we would only spend about 2 nights there with all 5 people, so I didn't worry too much.
As luck would have it, mid May I was told that one of the company's other apartments (one that is in the same town as my work and has two bedrooms and bathrooms) opened up and I was asked if I wanted to move. Naturally I agreed, but was told it would only be ready when I got back from our trip.
Bummer.

A week later, on the Monday before my vacation, I received a horrible sms from the bank.
"You're credit card has been stopped due to suspicions of fraud."
FRAUD?!
I took an early lunch and hastened to the bank, only to hear that due to "suspicious activities" they decided to cancel my current card and send me a replacement.
Yes. They regarded the use of my credit card in Spain, Hungary, Czech Republic, Poland, Sweden and some online orders I made (kindle from USA, cards from China, etc), all within +-5 months as suspicious.

Being used to South African service, I thought that I would not receive my new card before my vacation, which starts that weekend. Luckily I still have my S.A. card, so it wasn't a major problem, just a major hassle.
Great was my surprise when I got home Tuesday afternoon. My shiny new card was already there. Great stuff! Took it in on Wednesday to activate it and asked about my new pin code and the friendly lady told me I would receive that via post as well within 2 or 3 days. Which didn't happen.

On Friday, I was told that the other apartment is actually ready and I can move in whenever I want. My parents were due to arrive the next day at Arlanda airport, Stockholm, about 110km from here. I had decided to rent a car to pick them up and then we can drive around on Sunday and I can show them around easily etc. My initial idea was to book a car at the airport, drive down and around and then return it on the Monday, when we went to see Stockholm etc.
When I tried to book the car, I found to my surprise that all of the car rental places are CLOSED over the weekend. Which turned out to be another lucky break, even though at that moment it felt really silly and irritating to me..
I was "forced" to rent a car from the Friday afternoon and the typical Swedish car is a Volvo station wagon. This worked perfect for me, since I now had a vehicle that was big enough to move all my stuff the Saturday morning to the new place (I needed Friday night to pack up), which actually has 5 beds as well!
Which led to another very fortunate decision. Not needing to buy an air mattress, I used the money earmarked for that to buy a GPS, without which we'd probably still be driving around somewhere.
It was just a bit weird, after 6+ months without driving a car, to drive one on the "wrong" side of the road, with manual transmission and almost double the length (or so it felt) than I was used to! As it turned out, it wasn't that bad, and compared to driving the RV, a 6.99m long, 2.27m wide and 2.93m high monster, it was a small clown car.

The weekend and first week went great, except that I was still a bit disappointed that I had to use my S.A. card.
On the Thursday, I received a message from the company that asked if it was possible for me to drop the keys to the old apartment off so that they can clean it and get it ready for whatever.
We got back into town Friday at 12:00.
We grabbed a taxi to drop my parents off at the new apartment and grab the keys to the old apartment. I then took the taxi to the old apartment to just check if everything was okay, nothing forgotten and whether my pin had finally arrived (it hadn't).
Next I hastened to get to the bank before they closed at 15:00.
Luckily I made it (yes, I'm using "luckily" and "fortunately" a lot in this post) and was finally helped by a different friendly lady who looked at me in confusion.
"This is a replacement card, not a new card. You should be able to use your OLD PIN..."

My old pin worked perfectly. I dropped off the old keys at work and made my way to the apartment feeling a lot better.
Close to midnight my brother and his wife arrived at the local airport and the next day our 2 week RV / Motorhome trip through Sweden, Denmark and Norway began.

The trip was fantastic, except for one thing. Even though my card was now working perfectly, they hadn't told me that it only works perfectly IN SWEDEN.
That has also been rectified this week. I don't know what I would have done if this had happened during one of my solo trips and I hadn't had my S.A. card as well!
Fortunately (hehe), the timing of this hindrance was also...perfect.

Thus ends the "bad" experience of the past month. The next couple of posts will only be filled with some of the great stuff we saw and experienced during our tour.

If you're up on the north side of the planet, hope you have a great midsummer weekend.
If not, I hope you spend a great weekend warm under blankets watching movies.

Njoy

Thursday, May 26, 2011

EE Finale

This is my last post on my eastern Europe travels. Unfortunately, my trip ended with a rather depressing stop, but one that I'm glad I made.
I learnt a lot that I didn't know, I saw things that can't be described and I had a lot to think about on the ride and flight back.

The town Oświęcim in Poland, about 50km from Krakow, is known all over the world. Mostly by the name given to it by the Germans during the second world war: Auschwitz.

I'm not going to comment a lot, as most of the pictures speak for themselves.
I just want to say that it was much bigger than I expected.
Hearing that between 1.1 and 1.5 million people were killed is just a "big number".
Seeing the large camps, the cramped spaced shared by the prisoners, the rooms filled with hair and shoes of victims make a lasting impression.
Unfortunately, photo's aren't allowed inside most buildings, but it won't be the same anyway.




































The past can't be changed, but it can help us shape the future. By remembering what was done wrong, we can keep from going down that same path again.