(Used to be) Living in Luleåland: July 2006

Southern Sweden: Kalmar - Öland - Glasriket

- Part 2 -

Sorry about the pause in postings, but occasionally work does get in the way of holidays and beign able to write about them.

PS: I seem to have some html errors with this post though it looks fine on my machine - so if you can't read this properly let me know.

So, we are still in Småland [3], hanging around Kalmar, from where we crossed the 6km bridge to the long, narrow island of Öland, a very popular summer holiday resort that reminded me a lot of the Rosebud / Sorrento area along the peninsula - little towns with shops along the one main road and lots of caravans, tents, beaches… and windmills, about 400 now out of 2000. Another remarkable thing was the lack of pine trees – the landscape was totally different to what we'd been driving through previously.

Kalmar slott

The main attraction on the west coast is the old castle Borgholm, which is claimed to be one of the largest ruined castles in northern Europe. Now it has a museum and gets used for summer concerts.The main attraction on the west coast is the old castle Borgholm, which is claimed to be one of the largest ruined castles in northern Europe. Now it has a museum and gets used for summer concerts.

Borgholm

Should have rotated this one...

The Vida art gallery is housed in a cool modern building and focuses on local glassmakers. This was our first taste of Småland's glass. Exhibitions featured Bertil Vallien and his wife Ulrika H-Vallien, who happen to be summer-stuga neighbours of Kattis' parents. These 'snakeflowers' were pretty much the only thing of Ulrikas that I liked, as she does a lot of painted glass in a simplistic style that I just find annoying (examples are under 'shop and gallery' from (http://www.vidamuseum.com/).

Bertil Vallien

A funky painting called "In the Free". If I had 900 bucks to throw around on art...

Kjell Engman

The warm waters of the coast at Sandvik were a pleasant change to the cold lake at the stuga, and the water was surprisingly unsalty. The rivers run from the Swedish/Norwegian mountains into the Baltic, bringing fresh water, but the narrow Baltic mouth doesn't allow much seawater in. This is killing the Baltic, because the river water brings alot of farming runoff.

Pebbly Sandvik beach

For the next two days it was impossible to escape aesthetic of Ulrika as we traversed the Kingdom of Glass (Glasriket) in inland Småland [4], which contains at least 14 major glassworks/towns. We visited: Kosta, Boda, the fors'es Åfors, Johansfors, and Orrefors, Sea, and Strömbergshyttan. We saw glassblowing demonstrations of various items including glassware and bowls which all still start by hand. We also had a go at making wonky bowls, though they weren't meant to be wonky.

Glass blowing at Kosta - shaping the glass bulb with just wet newspaper

Adding two colour rods as stripes to the outside. The bulb is constantly hand-rolled to counteract gravity and prevent the molten blob from falling off the pipe.

Wooden bowls are also used for shaping the bulb

Opening up the bulb (a different one to those above) to creat a flat platter

DIY wonky bowl. Preferably without the wonky. After an air bubble is blown down the tube to form the initial hollow form, the bulb can be placed in a wooden mould and more air blown to allow it to expand and get the right shape. Sand moulds are hardly ever used here.

My bowl was wonkier than most. I blame the lack of control I was given - I wasn't rolling so wasn't prepared for the change in direction... so yes I am blaming others for my problems.

Roadside letterboxes. Just a break from all the glass.

Part of Kjell Engman's Julbord (Christmas feast) exhibition at Boda - all made from glass

Hyttsill dinners are an old tradition where at the end of the day the cooling furnaces of the glassworks were used to cook up food for the factory workers, locals, and vagabonds who were traveling through the area. They were given food in exchange for news from the around the country, and of course there was lots of drinking and singing involved. Herring featured strongly, along with sausage, bacon, and, naturally, potatoes, though no-one except us Aussies ate the skins. Two 'troubadors', on guitar entertained us, and there was a glassblowing demonstration. A different glassworks hosted the dinners each night, this one was at Orrefors, just next door to where we were staying.

The classic Orrefors Intermezzo glass, a legitimate memento from the hyttsill

Water cooled wooden moulds for wineglasses. Quality control is an issue with handblown glass, as it is hard to get a consistent product. When wandering around the factory outlets, even the 1st quality retail range had a remarkable degree of variation between pieces. Less mechanisation is used in the process than I would have expected - some machines keep the the article rolling in a warming furnace in between steps, like when a glass is waiting for the stem to be attached. Machines also cut the top lip of the glass and grind it smooth, and in the case of the Intermezzo glass shown previously, an air gun shoots the pellet of blue into the stem before it is stretched out to its final form.

About to attach the base

It was great to wander around and drool over the glass in the factory outlets. Of course it was hard to balance the emotion of "want! want! want!" with the concept of 'fragile and heavy' when thinking about souveniers, but at least one memento was bought for personal use: 'Seaside'. This was a 2nd quality piece, with minimal flaws, about 2/3 the price of a 1st quality piece. After looking at so much hand-made glass, I began to get an appreciation for the fact that a hand-blown piece of glass will have some flaws, and this gives it a bit more soul than mass-produced machine-made articles. Of course, I tried to minimise as much as possible the amount of 'soul' in what I was buying; after all isn't it man's task to strive for perfection?

Shooting Around Southern Sweden on my Summer Holiday

East Coast: Stockholm - Uppsala - Småland [Kalmar & Revsuden]

-Part 1-

Hej! I just got back from a 10 day holiday in the mid-south of Sweden, driving from coast to coast. It's a bit of a rushed post, as I am in the middle of important experiments, and I will probably have to fiddle with the pics later, but in the meantime:

[Click to enlarge map]

I flew down the 900kms to Stockholm [1] to catch up with Lucy who was still in Sweden after travelling with her friend Katherine down from Luleå via the inlandsbanan ("inland track", not the "inlands banana!"). We caught up and stayed with Jenni Best, an Aussie who commutes for work between Luleå and Stockholm. Dinner was at the trendy Sturehof cafe in the center of town, where you rock up with a booking number, not a name. Big, bustling and full of good seafood, it is well known even up here in Luleå, and it was very good though we didn't touch the thousand dollar wine.

We then got in our woefully underpowered 1.6L VW Golf, and drove 60 km up to Uppsala [2], the town where the first university in Scandanavia was established. We spent the day there, managing to catch a brass quintet concert in the church, had a look at the burial mounds in the old town, and had lunch with my ex-boss and PhD supervisor Yi-bing Cheng who was in town for a conference. A swim, a waterslide and some diving board action in the baths ended the day, with a traditional Swedish pizza dinner* follwed by fresh strawberries with ice cream. It is strawberry season here, and the smell of ripe strawberries fills the air as you walk past the many stalls selling them by the litre.

It was here in Uppsala that got my desire to drive on the wrong side of the road, go the wrong way up one-way streets, and drive into town squares closed to traffic, mostly out of my system.

Uppsala Cathedral

Uppsala University

Yi-Bing and Me

Dappled

Uppsala Slott (Castle)

Viking Burial Mounds - of commoners probably

Runes

Then it was down the east coast about 500km to Revsuden near Kalmar [3], where we stayed with Kattis and her family in one of their summer stugas by the lake. They were very welcoming, and it was great to just relax in the sun and hang around and not do too much for a couple of days. Great sunny weather however didn't mean that the lake was warm - in fact only one of the times we went in could we actually hang around in the lake and go for a swim. So why jump in otherwise - because there was no shower in the stuga! bathing was done in the lake of course!

The summer weather, when it is here, is glorious in Sweden. Days are often 25-30oC, slightly humid so they feel warmer than they should (or is that just my chilled Luleå blood not coping anymore?)