Utsikt över Luleå (Views of Lulea)

** Note that you can click on any image to enlarge it **

Here is a map of central Luleå. The arrow points to my apartment (I made the map for people coming to a lunchtime party I had). I have mispelled my address (it is Kallkällan, not Källkällan). LTU is the uni (Luleå Tekniska Universitet), the hill that I ride past (on the LHS of the photos in my first entry) is just north of where my flat is, and the grey area with 2 roads running through it is an industrial park with lots of car repairers and so on. And the Saab mountain from earlier posts. The town centrum is the bit below, sticking out into the mouth of the river. Rumour has it that an Italian architect helped with the layout of the new town center (the old town center established in the early 17th century is now 8km inland due to the land mass rising about 1cm a year), and he wanted refreshing Mediterreanean style breezes to blow through the town in summer. With a bit more thought he would have realised that means that arctic winds blow straight through the streets off the bay in the winter. Not good.




Apparently Luleå has one of the highest levels of boat ownership in Sweden. The two yellow ships in the background are the ice-breakers, that are needed to keep the shipping route in the bay clear, mostly for the ships carrying logs from the forests in the north, and for the steel mill.


Something tells me this neither the car nor the boat are in a position to be useful for transporting anything anytime soon.

There is an archipelago in the bay, where folk keep their summer houses and small beach resorts open up. In the winter when the bay freezes over we'll be able to ski / skate / snowmobile / drive a car to these islands. Just after I arrived I got a free ticket on a cruise around the archipelago. Here are some pics.



This red is a tradional colour used widely throughout Sweden, especially for summer houses. I guess it is from iron based pigment generated by the steel industry. It looks great against the green trees (the Christmas colours), but can be overdone, as per the example:



Some of the heavy industry



Another postdoc researcher from overseas is Mangel, which is short for something much longer in Indian. Origninally from Madras, he spent a year in Japan at the Nagoya lab that I visited on my trip. It is good to have another person around who is new to life up here. He seems to be dreading the coming cold though - recent experiments seem to suggest he wants to keep generating heat, either deliberately in the lab during work hours, or accidentally on weekends. Remembers what happens when you put sodium metal into water? "Boom!"