sweden bloginess

Istanbul (not Constantiinople)

2009-07-23T01:34:00.000-07:00

Years ago at film school in Orlando Florida I made a friend from Turkey. We have kept in touch ever since then by email every few months or so with random updates, which is great if you can do it. Facebook huge time waster that it is makes it easy to stay in touch with people but for it truly to be effective you have to talk to them too. So I've promised Mine that I would come and visit her for years now but I never had enough money for the plane ticket to Turkey. Now that I was in Europe it wasn't such a big deal so I had no more excuses. Istanbul is a breathtakingly beautiful city, as you enter you pass through series of ruins of 1500 year old walls that used to guard the city. The place itself is teeming with life, unlike any other place I have been it is as if the inhabitants live in complete symbiosis with the buildings and the streets. People live in every city, otherwise they wouldnt be cities but in Istanbul the people are the city ad the buildings and the streets and the trams and the boats have just as much character and allure as the people. The Bosphorus is the most alluring part, a huge waterway that connects the Mediterranean sea to the Black sea. Wide rippling and blue it is hypnotizing to look at. Ships pass all day and night, ferries and cargo ships sailboats and sometimes destroyers. Staring at the Bosporus and counting ships is a favorite pasttime of locals. The city is ancient and alive and eastern as well as western. There are many many beautiful mosques the most famous one being the Hagia Sofia which sits right next to a nearly as impressive blue mosque. The call to prayer is heard a few times a day and as each time I heard it I tried to quiet my mind and just take in the beauty around me.

Ice Hotel

2009-05-11T08:45:00.000-07:00

Like just about every student in Sweden, some international friends and I decided to make a pilgrimage to the Ice hotel in Kiruna, Sweden's most visited tourist destination. We rented a pair of volkswagen golf station wagons and hit the open road. Luckily I can drive a manual transmission because no one else was interested in driving other than a German friend who was behind the wheel of the second car. After getting around by bike for so long its nice to get behind the wheel but after many hours of snowy swedish roads the novelty does wear off a bit. I've never been so far north and things are definitely colder up there. -2o celcius is actually quite numbing to the extremities even with all sorts of layering. Once we finally got to the ice hotel I was worried that it would end up just being some sort of tourist trap. Something that everyone goes to see but is never quite as cool as you imagined. They definitely make a lot of money off the place, and if you want to part with your cash they will gladly take it from you with all sorts of excursions offered in the bitter cold. The coolest one will be virgin galactic space flights starting at the very reasonable $200000. The ice hotel was really cool, there were a bunch of different rooms made by different designers all with different themes, it was much warmer there than outside, -5c instead of -20 and we walked around for a few hours. I decided that the place could only be considered a tourist trap if you actually stayed there overnight. While unique and beautiful I cant imagine wanting to spend the night in -5 with no in room bathroom or closet or even a working door, all they had were reindeer skins covering the entrances. Its supposed to be a honeymoon destination, can you imagine trying to get anything done in those conditions?

2009-03-01T09:39:00.001-08:00

Umeå was a good choice. People keep asking me, why Sweden? Why not someplace warm or just why here versus somewhere else? There are a couple of different reasons but basically because I could, it seemed as good maybe better than any other place and my lack of foreign language experience wouldn't be a problem. Almost everyone speaks English here in fact if I only spoke Swedish I would be at a major disadvantage. English has made it easy to get around and so far everyone has been extremely friendly and accommodating. Originally I was worried that because of Americas fantastic foreign policy that people would associate that with me and thus not like me as a result. This has not been the case. I think that people understand that a government does not necessarily directly represent their people, it happens all over the world. Sweden seems to be an exception but that's a different story. Actually Swedes like our culture, most of the music at clubs is in English, sometimes songs that I haven't heard in years. Michael Jackson and early Greenday, do you have the time to listen to me whine? Not a particulary xenophobic country at least as far as Americans are concerned...

Royale with Cheese

2009-02-26T07:22:00.000-08:00

For starters, if you've never been to Europe do it. Don't wait any longer, it's not as hard as you think and its amazing. I haven't been everywhere yet but so far things aren't dramatically different from what you might expect. People are still people, that doesn't change but its the little things that make it special. I'll assume for the moment that royale is actually the preferred nomenclature in France but I was disappointed to see QP cheese listed on the menu at McDonalds here in Umeå. The difference here is that QP doesn't necessarily mean quarter pounder because Swedes have no point of reference. I didn't bother to buy one and weigh it so I'll probably never know where the real difference lies. Still little things, a detailed list that is far too long to ever compile but comforting every time I notice one; phones sound different when they ring, thats something I never would have even thought of, why did they even decide to change it? As an aside, the metric system is so much better than the imperial system. No one uses it except the US and Scotland and there they still measure each other in stone weight 1 stone =14 pounds (I'm guessing thats so that they can round down). I can't even tell people how tall I am because they have no idea what I'm talking about unless I use CM or almost 2 meters. Finally baking in metric is fun too, I had never even considered a Deciliter until I tried to baking some scones, luckily everything came out ok. The picture is Umeå city hall.