Sweden! Uppsala

I'm sitting in a train on the way to Stockholm after spending the week in Uppsala, a small city north of Stockholm. It's just past midsummer, so it never really gets dark and - OH I JUST SAW A STEAM TRAIN, puffing its way across a bridge with olde carriages. Here is the steam train:

Now we are going really fast past a lot of fields, definitely faster than Sydney trains and much faster than NZ trains. Anyway, I’ve been in Uppsala at a conference (which was good), and in the meantime have been wandering around the older parts of the city, which has a canal, lots of cobblestones, many many bikes and very few cars. We had 30 degrees ones day, which I was not prepared for, but then it fell to 17 the next day so I suppose it balanced out.

Uppsala also has the largest cathedral in Scandinavia, with construction starting in the 13th century and several rebuilds since. The stone interior has been painted with beautiful repeating patterns of flowers and other motifs, different in every small chapel to the sides of the cathedral, which at first I thought was original, but then found out it was repainted in the twentieth century, so more in the spirit of the original. It made me think about buildings as living, and wonder why many of the buildings from the English reformation haven't been renewed - perhaps to do with continuity of use and political stability, as well as displaying the scars of the past.

Eating out in Sweden is quite expensive, apparently due to the high tax on luxuries. There are lots of restaurants beside the canal that runs through the city, looking out to the water and the small bridges that cross, some decked out with flowers. The route from my hotel to the conference venue took me along the canal, beneath the castle (pink), along cobbled streets around the cathedral, and past some grand old apartment houses (one painted sky blue). People in Sweden tend to live in apartment houses in cities in Sweden, with parks nearby and a very compact form with fields not far from the centre of town. There are trees everywhere and rough paths through the parks which gives everything a sort of half-wild quality. Linnæus of the botanical scientific naming system lived and worked in Uppsala, so there are lots of references to him - cafés, a tourist walk, and of course his house and garden. We went through the garden beds where he cultivated a whole host of different plants, for instance about ten types of thistle in one bed, laid out by genus and Latin name.

Dinner one night was in the state hall at the castle, which we found out later is not generally accessible to the public. It's a huge space, with a musicians gallery around one corner, and long tables with candelabra. The waiters were extremely well-rehearsed, at one point carrying in silver platters of icecream over one shoulder, turning to stand in a line with military precision and lighting the flares sticking out of the icecream. We were also treated to some musical comedy (spex) by a male choir with their mascot, Flora the cow skull. They'd chatted to one of my colleagues outside and now asked for her to come up to the stage so they could sing her a love song, but she hid so they asked for volunteers, and ended up singing their song to a guy, with much feeling.

As I write this last bit I'm in a train on the way to Copenhagen at 200km an hour, passing fields and forests, red farmhouses and little lakes. The weather's beautiful, with blue skies and a crisp morning. I'll get onto my Stockholm adventures in the next post :)