Touring Sweden's southern Skåne province with Alaskan Rotarians -- October 14, 2010

Well, I should start where I ended last time, in Denmark. I mentioned that I rode a bicycle, but my very last night there I took a bad fall. I had been nervous about being hurt early in this trip, with still more than a month of traveling ahead of me. I couldn't afford to be lame or busted up! But sometimes the mind is willing but the body is weak. When we returned from Copenhagen, I got on my bike and started pedaling. When nothing happened, instead of getting off I pedaled harder. And over I went! The chain had come off completely so all the pedaling in the world wouldn't have helped. Crash! Onto the concrete sidewalk! Fortunately I was only covered in bruises and the damage was to my ego. It's probably just as well that I didn't know the extent of the bruising for several days, until I was in a place that had a full-length mirror so I could see my black and blue body. But at least it still worked okay. The only lasting damage seems to be something that still hurts in my left knee.

The next morning I got on a train that would take me to the south Malmö station across the amazing 8 kilometer Øresund Bridge from Copenhagen, a journey that also includes a 4 km artificial island and a 4 km long tunnel. At the station I was to meet some of the other Alaskans with whom I would be traveling for two weeks on our Friendship Exchange with the Rotarians in the southern Swedish province of Skåne. I wish I had understood better the geography of Sweden, and what that actually meant. Had I known it would be such a small part of the country, I would have arranged some time before or after the group visit to see more of Sweden.

We spent three nights in this northwest part of the province in Landskrona, then three nights on the southeast coast where I stayed in Simrishamn, four nights in the big city of Malmö, near Copenhagen, and finally four nights in the university city of Lund. I can’t say enough good about my four wonderful hosts who welcomed me into their homes and their lives, often accompanying me on our group travels during the day, taking me shopping, giving me lovely gifts, introducing me to their friends and their families, driving me around, fixing me meals and making me feel completely comfortable. Twice I was with a married couple and twice with single women. Always I had a lovely bedroom or apartment of my own. Everyone was retired, except one wife who was still teaching at a school, and everyone was busy with volunteer work for their community and with Rotary.

Now I realize that one big drawback for Alaskan Rotarians is that when groups come to visit us, as the Swedes did in August before we went to see them, our district includes not only the entire state of Alaska, but also more than half of Russia and the Canadian Yukon. But most districts in the world are quite small, like Skåne. In fact about 100 kilometers was the farthest distance we traveled from where we started the whole time we were there. In comparison, Stockholm is more than 500 kms away, and the northern point in Sweden is nearly 1800 kms! In other words, we saw a lot of a tiny area, but none of the rest. This was an important education for me in how Friendship Exchanges work, since I have been strongly encouraged to take over this program for our district, and needed to learn more about the system. Instead I have agreed to be chairman of the District Fellowship Committee. I believe it was the right choice for me. (Note to Self: get busy sending out Fellowship information!)

So for those friends who are waiting for a great tale about the whole country of Sweden, this won’t be it. Sorry. I really wanted to see Stockholm, which is known as the most beautiful city in the world. Either I will have to go back to really see Sweden someday, or I won’t ever do it. It’s not possible for an Alaskan to travel very often to Scandinavia, that’s for sure.

I was the first to arrive at the station, and am always impressed that even the smallest places have a well-marked “meeting point” to make it easy to find each other. Soon the couple from Seward arrived with our team leader and his wife from Anchorage. The five of us were delivered to our host homes, the first of four places on this trip. Mine was with a lovely couple in Landskrona. Another woman in our group was assigned to room with me for the first three days. I was shown a lovely apartment room above their garage, and my host walked with me around the waterfront and told me about all his projects. This man is a powerhouse! After retirement he has taken on huge youth programs, museum development, fundraising to get millions of dollars to reconstruct the waterfront, saving artifacts, businesses, and boosting community pride by leaps and bounds in the process. He and his wife were both born in the area, with deep roots and long history there. One night he had eight of his good friends over for a big dinner and slideshow of their last wine-buying trip to France. She is also busy, sewing up a storm of beautiful bags, hats, and other creations, with her women's group they recently completed a community cookbook, and she even goes swimming in the ocean every morning with some hardy and enthusiastic friends. These people don't know what "slow" means. They are so happy and so busy that they make me realize how small and quiet my life is.

My roommate arrived later in the afternoon and suddenly our whirlwind two week tour began. We were whisked off to a Rotary meeting that night, at a "castle" (which turned out to be a mansion that had been built for a local Lord's mistress). I finally met the other eleven members of the Alaskan team, and passed out the laminated name tags with neck chains that I had made up for each of us. We were able to have our group photo taken, and that night I formatted the picture for calling cards that we could use for the next two weeks, emailed it to a Swedish colleague who printed them up the same night and delivered them to us the next day! At that meeting, I watched for the first time the Alaskan presentation of our team leader. We would see that powerpoint again at other Rotary meetings.

I'll say right here that I am probably not a person who should travel with a tour group. I enjoy independent travel, wandering around and getting lost, meeting local people and finding out how they live, eating what they eat and finding out where they like to go. It's the cultural aspects of travel that I love the most, and seeing the landscapes, communities, architecture, shops, handcrafts, and watching families just going about their lives. With a tour group, you are with other people following a guide through museums, churches, factories, castles, galleries, gardens, schools, or whatever else is on the list. I don't like following, being told what I can do and when I can talk, and spending my precious time on someone else's agenda. I counted up the official tours on this visit to Sweden, and there were 17 (an 18th was to Copenhagen, but I skipped it), not counting the unofficial visits to other sights that I enjoyed with my local hosts. Several of those tours required that we each pay for the guide. (I seldom do that when I travel.) I won’t list all those tours or the schedule for our exchange visits, since nobody would want to read that anyway, so I’ll just offer my observations and opinions. We also had to pay for a meal at every Rotary meeting and usually at organized lunches. When their group visited us in my area, we almost always hosted them. Obviously my understanding of the program was incomplete when I set those visits up.

Apparently I’m not big on sharing a room with someone I barely know, either. I did okay on this first housing assignment, aside from snoring (she was louder) and bathroom time (I was lucky to get two minutes a day), and other various complaints, but at another stop when we were assigned together I rebelled. That’s a story for later.

There were some obvious differences with Denmark. Most obviously there were not so many wind turbines, the landscapes were more varied, and it didn’t seem that there was nearly as much emphasis on minimal energy consumption and maintaining a low carbon footprint. They are probably not so fanatically “green”, and definitely are not sold on wind generation for electricity. The food seemed more international and somewhat less traditional, and the people perhaps seemedmore serious. That’s even how they describe themselves, although I certainly met happy and very generous hosts. I was surprised to meet a woman who says her daughter wants to move to Copenhagen and become a Danish citizen, because life is better there. Apparently both countries are feeling the economic crunch and are reducing the social benefits that they can no longer afford. This same woman is a home health care worker who travels three hours every day to commute from her home in Sweden over to Copenhagen for a minimum wage job that isn’t even full time. Although it’s not cheap, at least there is good public transportation to get her back and forth.

Some things are similar to Alaska, even though I wasn’t able to travel to the North. They have moose as an obvious national symbol, although their name for them is elk! (http://naturetravels.wordpress.com/2007/10/29/what%E2%80%99s-the-difference-between-a-moose-and-an-elk/) They also have deer (some are like our American elk), wolves, reindeer (same species as our caribou, but domesticated more than 3000 years ago! Apparently more recent attempts to domesticate caribou have been unsuccessful http://www.borealforest.org/world/mammals/reindeer.htm ). In the north of the country they have aurora borealis (northern lights), and very dark winters with midnight sun summers. But the climate is generally more temperate, thanks to the currents of the Gulf Stream. They have fireweed and lupine like ours, huge wild rose hips (used for marmalade), Farming is everywhere and the land is very productive. The area we visited is famous for huge fields of yellow blooming rapeseed, which gets made into canola oil. It is also known for apples, apples, apples! We visited factories processing both, also for milk from oats, milk from cows, schools for kids who love horses, putting wine in boxes, and the requisite castles, gardens, museums and ancient sites, and (naturally) shopping at IKEA. They have an impressive idea and science incubator, where we heard about some great new inventions. Sweden is known for being innovative, developing such things as the computer mouse, steel ball bearings, the pacemaker, the celsius temperature scale, crescent wrenches, systematic classifications for plants, safety matches, a better zipper, Absolut vodka and of course dynamite (think: Alfred Nobel's prizes).

For some reason I kept receiving books, papers, and other heavy things that I eventually had to box up and mail home, along with some of my clothes. I'm determined to travel light and not check baggage unless I really have to do so. I was given an amazing corkscrew that actually makes it through security, also a wonderful down pillow that helps me sleep anywhere, and a beautiful little handbag made by my first Swedish hostess that now I use every day. These are things that I will always take with me when I travel. I loved looking at bicycles and the huge variety of bike baskets that are sold everywhere, If you looked at my pictures, I imagine you were surprised how many of them show bicycles! I loved being in people's houses, helping prepare meals and entertain their guests, seeing their fabulous kitchen gear, decorating ideas, Scandinavian appliances and furnishings. Every day provided more new ideas.

As always, there are many photos at the website: http://picasaweb.google.com/kristinalaska, see Sweden 1-2-3-4, but here are some of my favorites:

This is the remainder of a Midsummer Night's celebration, although one of the rings fell to the ground.
Just before sunset at Dag Hammarskjöld's farm.

Cow with halo!

The most famous building in Malmö, the Turning Torso -- and one of the oldest, a traditional windmill, now a private home.

Our 2010 Alaska Rotary Friendship Exchange team to Sweden.

Simrishamn Harbor

My second host lived in a brand-new house with my guest apartment attached, in a golf course development near the harbor shown above. It was modern and spacious and absolutely beautiful. This area is obviously affluent and proud of it. The very first night we entertained guests for dinner, and it was great fun. I made the risotto, she made a special main course. She did everything possible to make me comfortable, we walked to the golf course, strolled on the beach, spent many hours together. We became good friends by the end of my stay, and I hope she will come to visit me someday.

My third host lives in a large top-floor apartment in downtown Malmö, she was a famous journalist in her day, covering design and fashion events all over the world. She spent time in Africa and New York, and they both show in her home decor. I enjoyed this woman so much, we stayed up late every night talking over cognac, cooked meals together in the afternoons and visited while we walked through the city. Needless to say, this is where I skipped part of the group tours. It is also the place where the woman from Anchorage was assigned again to stay with me. In fact, our hostess thought we were a married couple, so she even had us in the same double bed! Obviously that wouldn't work, not even with the bed pulled apart to make two sleeping areas. Instead I got a "tourist" bed borrowed from the neighbors, a little folding cot, and we put it in the maid's room next to the kitchen. It served as a small office, and happened to be the only room in the place with an internet connection, so not only was it private but I could also be online every day, and I had a separate bathroom. For me, it was heaven even though since the bed was in the way, I couldn't completely shut the door. Funny, though, even with that big guest room all to herself, my unhappy colleague from Anchorage claimed she still couldn't sleep, and by the third night after she gave our hostess all her laundry to wash (no dryers in Europe, remember, so chances were it couldn't dry by morning, but of course I helped our frazzled hostess hang up all those pants, shirts, and underwear anyway...), this woman came out from her room and moved us from our cozy conversation in the living room and slept there instead. I couldn't believe it.

I should say that there were only five of us from the Kenai Peninsula, all of whom I liked very much, and the other seven were from the same group in Anchorage. We "non-city" people didn't know the others at all. Some were just great, but one of them was an obnoxious man who continually embarrassed the rest of us. He had absolutely no sense of decorum or appropriate behavior, and I had to remind myself frequently that I wasn't "guilty by association", nor was I in any way responsible for his behavior. Nonetheless, I kept finding myself apologizing for him to our hosts.

My fourth and last Swedish hosts were a wonderful couple in Lund, they lived in a fairly new apartment in the city, having sold their house a couple of years ago when the husband retired. They plan to move to their summer house on the East coast when the wife retires. We drove over there on the weekend, and I met their daughter and her boyfriend from Stockholm, and the neighbors all around who are all related to them. It's amazing to think of living in a nice seaside community, surrounded by your relatives. He is very active in sports-related volunteer work, and was a great host, going on tours with me, even taking me shopping. They both took me all around the local area, and on our own we visited traditional villages, old castles (one with a thousand-year old oak tree!), and walked on the beach. One night they had another couple over for dinner, what an interesting evening that was. The two men plan to walk the pilgrim's Camino de Santiago trail in Spain next year, and it won't surprise me if all four of them show up someday to visit Alaska. This couple gave me my amazing new corkscrew. I so enjoy seeing things abroad that I've never seen before, and new creative ways to solve old problems.

My last morning in Sweden, this lovely man drove me all the way to Malmö central train station so I could have a direct connection to the Copenhagen airport, and spent a lot of time trying to find a place to park near the station. We finally had to give up and just stop in front so I could get out. Still, he ran in with me to be sure I could find the right track for the next stage of my adventure.

To come: Ireland!