Swedish Vacation Update - Estonian edition

I just came back from a brief trip to Tallinn via the Victoria ferry.  The ferry system connects many of the countries bordering the Baltic Sea and (if I understand correctly) us part of the European highway system.  They are more than just a way to get from point A to point B however and offer travellers all you can eat buffets, gambling, duty free shopping, lame house bands and tacky shows.  In short, it’s like a weekend in Atlantic City.  The ferry I was on was staffed primarily by Estonians so between the boat ride and a day in Tallinn, I’m now prepared to make the following superficial and sweeping generalizations about a whole nation of people.

1. Estonians can’t make good beer.  I tried two types of local beer in Estonia and both reminded me of that cat piss known as Coors Light.  Even worse, I saw locals buying lots of the stuff which indicates that Estonians not only can’t make good beer, they don’t seem to even know what good beer is.
2. Don’t get a tattoo in Estonia.  I saw a lot of Estonians with tattoos and they all looked like they got them in the gulag from a blind guy.  I’m not a big tattoo fan to begin with but if you’re going to get one make sure your artist can draw better than your average first grader before he puts ink to skin.
3. Customer service as a concept hasn’t worked its way into the Estonian mind.  Estonians regard customers as an inconvienience and will go to great lengths to encourage you to go somewhere, anywhere else, just so long as you’ll stop bothering them.  At one cafe, a lady asked if we could hold off ordeering for ten minutes so they could change shifts (apparently preparing a couple of cups of coffee would have disrupted the intricate process of changing the wait staff) only to see the very same people working after the suppossed shift change (and, coincidently, after it became clear we wouldn’t be going to search for another cafe).  I’m sure old Joe was smiling wherever he wan as. 
4. Estonia has no Surgeon General.  You don’t notice how few people smoke in the states until you go somewhere else.  Estonians smoke like chimneys and they do it everywhere.  This, despite the fact that cigerrettes have warning labels that put ours to shame in their size and directness of consequences. 

Other than that, it was a good trip.  Good weather, (hopefully) nice pictures and a fun time.

Swedish Vacation Update Part 2

My last post was all about the good things I’ve been finding here in Sweden.  But, all is not well in the land of the eternally pale people.  Here is the downside to traveling here in Sweden.

1. Computer keyboards:  Swedish computer keyboards are set up differently than our to accommodate their extra letters (å, ö, ä) and that throws the whole thing out of whack.  The world will be a much better place when everyone speaks American…just like Jesus did.
2. The price of gas:  Holy Cripes!!!  You think it’s expensive to fill up your gas tank?  Well, buckle up bonehead cause you ain’t seen nothin’ yet.  I rented a Nissan Note (by the way, a fun little car with tons of room) and it cost me 484 Swedish Kronar to fill it up with 35 litres.  Now for those of you not up on your Kronar to dollar and litre to gallon conversions, that works out to just over $10 per gallon. 
   

   You'll need a loan to pay for your gas soon...

3.  The price of everything else:  If you think discussions about U.S. monetary policy are exclusively for pencil necked geeks in Washington D.C. and don’t effect you then just take a trip out of the country.  Our weak dollar policy may mean that foreign nations can buy our goods and services cheaply but it also means that you can’t get a decent meal in Sweden for less than 25 or 30 dollars and a nice (not fancy, just nice) meal with a drink or two is going to propel you into the 50-60 dollar range (per person of course).  In fact, it’s pretty hard to do anything here without spending gobs of money.  I think even a no-frills trip (backpacking on a Euro-rail ticket, camping or sleeping on the train, living off of sandwiches you put together from the cheapest stuff in the supermarket…ah, the good ol’ days) would cost you a pretty penny.
4. Stretch pants:  While summer in Sweden can hardly be described as ’scortching’, it is warmer than the locals are generally used to.  Also, there is some truth to the stereotype about Swedes being beautiful.  So, why Swedish women seem to insist on wearing stretch pants with everything is totally beyond me.  It makes you feel like you’re having some sort of bad 1980s flashback or something.
5. Low speed limits:  Given how well Swedes can drive and the amazing condition of their roads (I can’t remember a single pot hole in over 700 miles of road) some of their speed limits are maddeningly slow.  You’ll be able to resist the urge to speed though, since traffic cameras are everywhere ready to snap your picture and send you a ticket in the mail.
6. No greens:  Swedes donät seem to have fully grasped the concept of the salad.  When you see it on the menu, it usually means you’ll be getting a few pathetic strips of iceberg lettuce next to your entree.  I suspect it’s there more to fill up your plate than your stomach.  The explanation for this lack of green stuff in the diet may be explained by #7, below.
7. Toilet paper:  Sweden is a highly industrialized, civilized nation and its citizens are among the most happy and satisfied in the world.  Yet, the idea that toilet paper can be both efficient and comfortable seems to be beyond them.  I swear that some of the material that passes for toilet paper here and that I’ve unfortunately had to experience, would do a better job at removing paint and varnish than any 30 grit sandpaper you could get at Home Depot.

Iceland…the place to be

Congratulations seem to be in order for Iceland which has been rated as the best place to live. Props also go out to Sweden and Finland (although my mother-in-law would say this was clearly a bogus list since it’s obvious to everyone that Finland is the best place in the world to live).

The U.S. got bumped out of the top 10 but is in a still respectable 12th place. Hey, at least we beat Denmark.

I got to visit Iceland for a week in the late ’90s and had a great time. It was a beautiful place with a tourist industry still too new to get ‘Disneyfied‘ (hopefully it’s resisted that temptation).

Nordic War Museums

I’m really backed up in terms of things I need to post about.  Case in point, last summer I was on vacation in Sweden and took a quick side trip to Finland.  While there I got to check out two military museums:  the Swedish Army Museum and the Finnish Military Museum.  The websites aren’t particularly informative (at least the English versions) which is unfortunate because the museums themselves are worth the trip.

As a disclosure I should say that I’m not particularly fond of military museums.  I find them kind of stale and lacking in the quality that lets me share (even if in a very small way) the dramatic stories of the people who lived through past conflicts.  The National World War II Museum left me unimpressed (although I understand I’m definitely in the minority on that).

These two museums avoided that and were pretty compelling for different reasons.

The Finnish museum understandably focused on the nation-defining event that was the Winter War and the even less well known (to those of us in the U.S. at least) Continuation War.  The story is extremely compelling (little Finland held off the Soviet army for almost 4 months and opened up a big can of whoop ass in the process) and recent enough that many families have parents or grandparents with memories of the war.  It’s not a big museum (which is another plus, after all, how many rifles and artillery pieces can you stare at in a day?) but you can actually interact with many of the displays.  Unlike displays I’ve seen in other museums, everything isn’t hidden behind ropes, plexiglass and tons of signs warning against touching, filming or even thinking about anything on display.   You can actually get behind the sights and work the controls of some of the equipment.  The highlight of the displays, for me, was a recreation of a bunker from the Winter War.  Again, you were free to move about in the bunker, pick up the coffee pot, sit in the chairs, and actually get a feel for living in such a place.  I was lucky enough to be escorted through the museum by a relative of my wife who could give me a local perspective of the place.  By the way, if you think Americans are patriotic, you haven’t met a Finn.

Sweden hasn’t been in a war since 1814 so it’s a little harder to make a museum which will seem relevant to modern museum attendees.  In that regard, they don’t really try.  Rather, they attempt to describe the history of warfare going  back from pre-history to the modern era.  Sweden’s military history is used to highlight trends and themes about warfare and the lives of soldiers through the ages.  It’s bigger than the Finnish museum (but to be fair, Finland has only been an independent country since 1917) and spends a lot more time on Sweden’s imperial heyday but they do a decent job.  I particularly liked one display where they had rifles used by Swedish forces for (I think) a couple of centuries side by side.  You could pick them up, work the mechanisms (no ammo!) and compare them which was quite cool.

Also, since Sweden doesn’t have a recent history of combat, they focus instead on the conscript system in Sweden and how soldiers have served since 1814.  One part I thought was surprisingly good were recreations of various living quarters and NCO/Officer clubs throughout the 20th century.  Sweden is a pretty regular contributor to UN peacekeeping missions so that allows some discussion of the modern Swedish force as well.

Stories from Sweden…Baghdad edition

I’ve been back from Sweden for a little over a month now and realized that I hadn’t yet written about some of the more noteworthy events I witnessed while I was there. So…here’s the first in a (hopefully) multi-part series about those events that I’ll be writing over the next couple of days.

Ready? Let’s go!

I was walking through Stockholm with my wife, brother in law and his wife (I don’t know if I can officially call her my sister in law but I’m not sure what term I could use to describe her. It’s a bit cumbersome to always have to say ‘My brother in law’s wife’ but ’sister in law’ might mislead people into thinking I have a sibling.) for a day of sightseeing when we hear car horns blaring and shouting down the road. I turn to look and see a bunch of cars driving towards me, men hanging out of the windows, yelling and screaming and holding up Iraqi flags…

My first impression?

OH CRAP!

What happened? Did something (or someone) get bombed? Did someone die? I felt the old PTSD kicking in and was missing my M-16.

We decided to take advantage of a nearby Irish bar and figure out what was going on over a beer. Fortunately, the Irish bar had some TVs on and it quickly became clear what was going on. Iraq had beat Saudi Arabia in the Asia Cup. Now, I’ve never even heard of the Asia Cup but that doesn’t mean too much. I’m a bit of a sports dolt. I don’t even know if it’s baseball or football season (I usually figure it out when I hear people talking about Superbowl parties).

Because Sweden has such a huge Iraqi population the event became big news and Iraqis congregated in the thousands in Stockholm.

In the end, everything returned to normal the next day. I have to admit that even after finding out what all the hub-bub was about I was a bit nervous. It’s become traditional in parts of Arabic society after all to pull out the AK-47s and shoot off a couple of rounds when there’s good news at hand.

It was such a joyous occasion in Baghdad that day that stray rounds killed four and wounded 17! Can’t people just give each other a ‘high five‘ (although these people take the practice a bit too far)?

Methinks I need a mace…

 

While I was in Sweden I lucky enough for my trip to coincide with the Medeltidsveckan (Medieval Week) festival in Visby, Gotland. Visby is a medieval city with most of its walls intact (not as well preserved as the towns on the Romantic Road in Germany: Rothenberg, Dinkelsbuhl, and Nordlingen, but still very nice). The city has maintained it’s old town quite well and many of the ‘tourists’ came in costume (hundreds of them if not thousands) adding to the atmosphere and definitely helping to recreate the feel of the time (but thankfully, not the smell).

 

The highlight of the time there was the tournament. The actors put on a fabulous show.  The crowd was split in two (on either side of the tournament field) and fools were around to help develop a competitive spirit between the two sides.  They did a great job since I’ve never seen Swedes so willing to get rambunctious.  They were hootin’ and hollarin’ like Texans at a rodeo!

 

 

I’ve been to a couple of renaissance festivals here in the U.S. and I have to say this one is in a whole different class. How, you say? Let me count the ways…

 

1. The organizers allowed NO (none, nada, zip) commercial advertising or products in the festival areas (which encompassed a pretty large -and beautiful- area in the town itself). That’s right, no Coca-cola cans, no corporate banners or booths asking people to sign up for credit cards and “Live like a king!”
2. The city itself had a pretty interesting medieval history, including a sack by the Danes (Damn you Dennmark…first the sack of Visby, then Brigitte Nielson, haven’t you done enough damage?) which was recreated (but I missed). I imagine if the Swedes tried to recreate the battle of Gettysburg it just couldn’t compare to seeing it on the actual battlefield either.
3. Having everyone speaking a language I could barely understand (and I mean barely - my 4 year old nephew is like a walking dictionary compared to me. I try to get by with nodding and pointing a lot.) helps create the illusion of being in a time warp. Maybe people are all talking about what to watch on TV that night or what they downloaded on their iPod but I can’t understand any of it so it’s easy to imagine they’re talking about the witch burning or where to get the best mead.

I was there for two days (the festival goes on for seven) and would recommend a longer stay only if you decide to go ‘all in’, dress in medieval costume,  stay at the designated camp site for reenactors and dive into the experience.  Yet another thing to add to my ‘to-do’ list.

Just call me Huck Finn

This past weekend I was kayaking along the Delaware River from Dingmans Ferry to Smithfield Beach. It gave me a chance to put my new inflatable kayak through a water trial.

I was a bit hesitant about getting an inflatable but it really is shaping up to be a great decision. Advanced elements makes a kayak that is light, quick to set up and works well. It doesn’t track or maintain momentum as well as a hard shell kayak but it does better than I expected (I did 21 miles in a little less than six hours and -even though I wasn’t racing- passed everything on the river that didn’t have a motor attached to it) and its portability is a huge plus.

Two events were especially noteworthy on my trip.

First, it’s not unusual to see park rangers patrolling the river, making sure no one is causing a ruckus, getting drunk and that everyone has their life preserver with them. This time was no different except this time the rangers had a couple of M4 carbines in their boat.

Now, I don’t know what kind of crime they’re seeing on the Delaware river but this struck me as a bit of overkill. The Delaware (at least within the area of the national recreation area) doesn’t host any commercial traffic, isn’t close to any high value infrastructure and while people visit it for fishing, boating and swimming, there are plenty of better opportunities for some crazed terrorist looking to kill people. I hope I’m wrong (all the rangers I’ve ever met have been professional, courteous, and a wealth of knowledge) but this looks like yet another agency that succumbs to the lure of post 9/11 money and fear mongering. It seems as if theirs an element within every law enforcement agency that is dying to militarize their organization. I’m a big fan of the military and think it has many valuable lessons it can teach other government (and many private) organizations but those lessons don’t have to be transfered verbatim. I’m just a bit dubious about every Tom, Dick and Harry carrying around a popgun regardless of the threat.

The second item of note on the trip was the really cool part. Twice I got to see a bald eagle flying right overhead. I’ve never seen one so close outside of a zoo so I was very happy that I decided to bring my camera around for the trip. It was nice enough to perch long enough for me to get about 20 good pictures of it. I missed the shot of it flying which would have been great but maybe next time. For now, this was a pretty big rush.

New Orleans story…

Here’s another picture from New Orleans…as you can see it’s much different from the pictures of the place a year ago.  I’m guessing florists and other purveyors of plants have had really good business as everyone moves to restock their balconies.

Before I forget I wanted to write about an interesting thing I saw in the French Quarter.  I was perusing one of the many tacky tourist shops in the area and the shopkeeper was a muslim woman wearing a head scarf.  I thought it was interesting because someone who obviously takes their religon seriously was making a living selling ‘New Orleans Hooker’ T-shirts and beads with boobs on them to drunkards and tourists in a city which is almost as associated with sin as Las Vegas.

Now, don’t get me wrong, I’d be just as surprised to see a bible thumping ‘Jesus Freak’ running one of these stores but they’re a bit harder to spot.

I thought it was interesting that right next to the cash register the woman had a variety of pamphlets from an organization called WhyIslam.  I picked up a couple and asked the lady if a lot of people took the pamphlets and she said “Oh, yes.” which I found surprising.  I guess I just didn’t figure that people visiting a tourist trap in New Orleans would be interested in finding out more about Islam. 

I haven’t read the pamphlets yet but I’ll give my thumbs up to seeing an example of the old melting pot of America working.  Good for us!

New Orleans wrap up…

 

I just got back from New Orleans on a honeymoon trip.  We were only there for a few days so we really only got to explore the French Quarter but that part of the city is up and ready for tourists.  Most of the businesses are back in operations and those that aren’t are in the process of restoration. 

In fact, I’d recommend a trip there now very highly.  The weather is great, businesses are open and there aren’t tons of crowds.  There are some really good deals out there for a few day trip (check out site59) so what are you waiting for?

I took a boatload of pictures that I’ll post on my Flickr site over the next day or two as well as put what (I think) are my best here.  The picture above is of St. Louis Cathedral which really is quite beautiful and has a great open square and garden.

We stayed at the Place d’Armes which I recommend highly.  They’ve got a gorgeous courtyard and are located right in the French Quarter about two blocks from the Cafe du Monde which you’ll want to hit at least once.

Food was initially a bit of a challange as I’m a Pesco-vegetarian and ‘the Mrs.’ is lactose intolerant but it didn’t take very long for us to find a ton of items that were great to eat.  More on all of that later…stay tuned!