The Capital of Scandinavia

When we moved here, I thought… "it will be so awesome living in Europe, we can travel every weekend" and we made a huge list of all the places we wanted to see in Europe.

(Barcelona, Rome, Athens, Geneva, Brussels, Amsterdam, Monaco, Prague, Berlin)

It’s 3 months in now, and we are finally making our first trip, just one hour away by plane from Umeå, to Stockholm- “the capital of Scandinavia”.

Or at least that is what to tourism website says.

I, personally, didn’t know that Scandinavia had a capital, and I’m pretty sure that title really pisses off people in Copenhagen, Helsinki, and Oslo.

(Helsinki and Oslo are also on the list)

It is the most populous of all the Scandinavian capitals, so maybe that gives them the right to claim the title for themselves.

Stockholm consists of something like 14 different islands, and so is also called the “Venice of the North”. North? Yes. Venice? I’ll let you know.

(Add Venice to the list.)

I am so excited for this trip, we are going to relax, sight-see, eat delicious food (I’ll have to write another post soon about how I am falling madly in love with Swedish food -potatismjöl aside), sleep in a comfortable bed, and best of all – we are going to the Ikea in Stockholm to order some furniture for our apartment. Finally!!!

So, Stockholm here we come. May it be the first of many wonderful travels…

(Add Reykjavik, Lofoten, Bergen, Stavanger, Sognefjord, Oulu, Rovaniemi, Kiruna, Riga, Tallinn, St. Petersburg, Gdansk …)

Gotta go pack.

Sally and Vera

Finally! It took almost three months, but we finally have our own set of wheels!

I hadn’t really been missing having a car at all. Umeå is quite small, and as such everything you could possibly need is within walking distance: my work, groceries, H&M, kebabs, systembolaget (state-run liquor store), picnic grill sites (they are freaking EVERYWHERE here, I’m sure we live within walking distance of 500 of them and I am NOT exaggerating), beach volley (the fact that they have dropped the ‘ball’ out of the title does not indicate that there is any lost love for the sport: there are at least 4 outdoor, and 6 indoor beach volley courts within 10 minutes of where we live). So you might be wondering: what more could you possibly ask for?

Although everything is so nearby, we were still getting pretty burnt out from having to walk everywhere.

We would jealously watch as cyclists flew past us on their bikes, baskets full of groceries, moving places with an ease and rapidity we could only dream of. I would enviously check out bicycles as they passed me, critiquing whether or not it would pass my high standards for bicycle use (two wheels…a basket…air in the tires…chain attached). Having a bike started to symbolize freedom. Imagine getting places so much faster… being less tired… not having to carry

groceries…venturing further than our small little world consisting of Ålidhem, the river and the downtown.

So obsessed I became, that anytime we passed a parked bike, I would check whether the bicycle was locked or not. Not that I was going to steal one, but -much like the garbage room (see previous post)- I had heard that the national obsession with recycling also extended to bicycles. People, when moving away from Umeå, just ride their bike to the bus station and abandon it there, knowing that someone else will take and use it. Reduce, reuse, recycle..or at least that is what I had been told.

After trying with no avail to find second hand bikes (yes, I know everyone says use ‘blocket.se’ but it was hit and miss, and our search of three different second hand stores was fruitless as well) and not really willing to get the bad karma of actually stealing or ‘recycling’ a bicycle, a co-worker suggested that the ICA Maxi (Sweden’s equivalent of the Great Canadian Superstore) sells new bikes for only a couple hundred kroner more than a used bike.

So now we’ve got our matching mustangs… Scott named his ‘Sally’ and I named mine ‘Vera’ (I was catching up on Coronation Street episodes at the time).

So we’ve got freedom now. We have cycled around Nydala lake, and cycled down the river, and out of town in both directions. We are working ourselves up to take the 40km Umeleden trail along the river valley in Umeå, or else 40 km in the other direction to Täfteå to see the Gulf of Bothnia on the Baltic Sea.

We’ve got to get moving though, the days are getting noticeably shorter already.

Not yet sure though how well we will fare as winter cyclists.

I try not to think about it.

I saved the lamp.

I had a truly special moment here in Sweden. I was able to rescue “the lamp” that was, so many years ago, tossed aside like …well, a used lamp.

I’ll keep this short… in Sweden garbage-picking is just another form of recycling. At the end of the school term, people just dump stuff they don’t want anymore in the garbage room of our apartment block. Lots of people at my work were mentioning how they have found some of their current furniture in the garbage. (I’m not joking). So Scott and I took out the trash one day to scope out the garbage room. We found a lamp. We felt bad for the lamp. That is because we’re crazy.

We’ve given it a good home.