On Monday, my boss told me that I don’t need to come to the all day office meeting on Tuesday. In fact, if I do come, I’ll be put to work somewhere else anyway. Great. That doesn’t sound like a promising day. Might as well take a Swedish style holiday then.
I’ve wanted to go to Malmo since I came here, but the occasion and the price never seemed right. Malmo is 4 hours and 30 minutes away, so a day trip is kinda rushing it, but because of this last minute holiday (and fears of futureregrets) I decided to go now. After all, once I depart from Sweden, there is no telling when I will return again!
I called Stina, who is by now in Malmo, and luckily she is there and I can stay over at her place! Yay!
Weekday price are lower than weekends, and last minute tickets are even cheaper. At about 14:50, I booked an SJ train ticket, packed my stuff, and ran home to get change (and of course, toothbrush). I brought some sushi for dinner on the rail, and I departed at 17:40,cheduled to return on 17:38 on the next day to pick up Liana from the flygbussarna at 18:00.
Unfortunately, in all the rush, I brought my camera but forgot about my camera battery. So, I have no camera to take picture of Malmo right now, but I got my laptop, and here’s the mac’s photo booth shot of me in the train:
Now this is written on Monday, from the train from Stockholm to Malmo. There was pay-internet at the train, but even without purchasing any connection time, you can see the exact position of your train! Wahoow! It’s like an airplane!
Update: I borrowed Stina's camera, so when I get the pictures from her in the coming weeks, I can post them later!
The long Swedish summer holiday means that there's a lot of delayed projects, and as a result, there's no major construction around for me to participate in while I'm at Green Fortune Stockholm. Luckily this project came up. I was not there for the fabric and irrigation mounting, but I was there for the day-long planting of the wall.This wall is located in Alingsås, a small town in west of Sweden, some 4 hours by the train from Stockholm, and it is placed in the newly renovated waiting room for the Alingsås hospital. The wall is about 10 meters square, and we planted some 220 plants, including philodendron, nephrolepis, hedera, monstera, etc. (see the planting schedule up there?) The wall looks a little empty for now, but in time, the plants will grow, cover the wall, and look nice like the other ones!
It was a long day, and to describe everything would be an overkill. So here's the dot point summary: 4:15, woke up. 5:04, goes to office to fetch Gustav and the perlites. 6:10, took the train. 10:00, arrived at the hospital. 11:30, started planting the monsteras at the bottom. 13:00, lunch. 14:00, proceeds with the herdera... 15:00, sweated under the superbright bulbs... 16:00, finished planting. Clean up time! 17:40 Swept the last traces of soil off the floor. 18:30, took the train back 23:00, arrived in Stockholm. 24:00 mignight, home again.
Just not to lead you on the wrong impression that I am holidaying in Europe, here are some pictures of my colleagues and what we do up here in Sweden. I mainly travel on weekends, and I actually go to work nine-to-five everyday. Most of the time, I am working on sketchup renderings for the company project, but every now and then, I get to do my green wall study and go on a maintenance trip with Louise or Anna.
Above is of Louise doing the maintenance at Halsotek (a medical center). Theirs is the oldest plantwall the company has in town (2.5 years old), and it has ivies taking root and breaching the structural wall behind it. And below is Anna doing maintenance pruning on the 7 meter plant wall at the Neurological department of Karolinska Institute. When you are up there with the ladder, the wall is higher than you think!
Here am I doing a night maintenance (9pm!) using the 4 meter scissor... because of the leverage, controlling an object 4 meters high is not that easy! I had a difficult time preventing myself from getting swayed by the scissor and stumbling down on the stairs. This office is the only place that I know of in downtown Stockholm that opens until 12 midnight. It's a law firm (you budding law students out there, your life isn't that much of a different than that of an architect!).
And I don't have the picture of Hans and Johan, who owns the Green Fortune office that I am interning for right now. There's something odd about taking the picture of your employer in working situations. Maybe some other time.
There is a path behind the Cathedral of Notre Dame that exists only on clear cloudless noons. When the leaves of the horsechesnuts are at its shadiest, a stream of sunlight is shaped by its hands and it falls on the sand.
The path quivers in the wind, disappears under the clouds. Walk only on this light, and at its end, you will find a different world than where you began.
So goes the story of the path in my imagination. People often talk about paths under the moonlight, but how about those created by the sunlight? Can it be just romantic, a secret walk in broad daylight? I think it would make a nice material for a children's book one day, so I made sketch: perhaps the two children are using the momentary path of sunlight to reach another world... or perhaps just another playground.
This is is going to be a messy rambling about my visit to Paris from three weeks ago...
So, this is my favorite street in Paris. Actually, it is the type of street that I liked the most out of my wanderings in Europe. It's a small, pedestrian only, slightly sloped cobblestone path, set between flat façade stone buildings, with fine pinnate leafed trees set in symmetrical arrangement. When I first saw it, I felt that I have seen this kind of street before (which turns out to be at Placa de Tossal in Valencia, Spain). From an urban planning vantage point, this is a very efficient street that does multiple things at once: it deals with a steep change in gradation, it provides an environment where people can gather and socialize (at the café), it has space for urban greenery, which in turns gives the street a "cathedral-like" effect (with its sun-bathed leaves), it creates a courtyard for the people living in the building and... it's simply darn pleasant to be in a street like this.
I stood there for a while to sketch, and wondered what is the secret to this intimate street? As a larchie Living this modern and car-invaded cities, I want to make a street like this. A calming street, a kind of street that makes you forget the worries of your daily life, and enjoy the sound of the leaves rustling in the wind. A kind of street that makes your transitory passage feels homey and comfortable precisely because it is an ephemeral experience.
An ideal street, a magical street, the kind that mostly exist only in children's book.
Speaking of literature... places like this reminds me of the mythical café under the trees that are conjured up by Zeráfiel's poems. If only I can tell him, how haunting his words continues to be.
"What was said I have forgotten already as the sun falls into the grasp of the tree, leaving shadows across empty cups of coffee."
It's been a while since I blogged... there seems to be so much to record, but not so much to tell. Well, forget Paris for now. This is better.
I was lucky to invited by Stina to visit her hometown in Stjärnsund a small (300-person) village, 2 hours north of Stockholm. I arrived in the evening, right after work. We had dinner at her home and then her family took me out on a crayfishing trip with their friends, the family of Anders. Anders' house is right by the lake and they own a motor boat that they have used for crayfishing for decades.
We set out on the boat around 9pm, right before sunset, when the pink moon starts rising over the horizon. We 'drove' (went with the motorboat) to their traditional spot by a small island, and then turned off the motor that is driving the boat. Then anders took two wooden paddles, and we slowly approach the white styrofoam floaties that mark the location of the crayfish trap that Anders and Classe (Stina's dad) under the water in the afternoon.
Now, this white floaties have a long string attached to it, and as we wound that string, we pull the crayfish trap cage from the bottom of the lake...
Then you take the collect crayfish out into a bucket. And here is Classe with one of the crayfish. He has to hold the creature from its tail so not to get pinched by their red claws.
After we emptied the cages, we'd put more fresh fish baits in, and lowered the traps again, which is to be collected on the next morning. In the mean time, we keep the crayfishes alive in the bathtub overnight. Remember, they have to be boiled alive!
The next morning at about 8am, we set our boats again to collect more crayfish! Here you can see how calm the lake water is, and you can see the sky on its reflection. And about that fake owl there, it bobs its head up and down along with the swaying of the floating wooden deck. It's set there to scare away the sparrows from pooping on the deck.
It was a warm fine day, as warm as it gets in the part of Sweden, and I took some short videos where you can see how the crayfishes are lifted up from the water and taken out of its cages.
Here is Stina pulling another crayfish cage. In total, with one night and one morning outing, we caught 133 crayfish with ten cages, out of which, 35 are small (less than 10cm, so we had to return them to the lake). The catch for different cages varies by location. We had one cage that caught none, while another cage got 19!
A little about the crayfishing tradition. In Sweden, the crayfish party is a special traditional celebration marking the end of summer. The crayfishes maybe abundant in local waters all year round, but because the risk of overfishing, when, how and how much you can fish these delicacy is highly regulated. You cannot fish these delicacies most of the year, but the first weekend of August marks the beginning of the crayfish season where people who own land by the lake, can legally fish them. Not every Swede gets a chance to crayfish every summer, so I was pretty lucky to be invited into one.
The part I find amazing about this system that, these legal frameworks do work, people do report the crayfish they got and return the smaller crayfish to the lake, and as a result, the population of these sought-after creatures are pretty stable. Oh, and its worth noting too that the crayfish they have in Sweden is Canadian crayfish. Most of the local crayfishes died a few decades ago because of a fungal disease outbreak.
And this is Mr. Crayfish with his feisty red pincers! And you can see Anders at the behind him. Soon, Mr. Crayfish and friends will be boiled alive, with some dill, salt and pepper! Yummmms!!!
And the crayfish party is not complete without the toast, cheese, beer and... schnapps! And songs too! Lots of traditional Swedish songs that I don't know what it means but sounds good anyways~ I think we should sing more at parties!
Those street people who make pencil/charcoal drawings of your faces in Paris are pretty good. For about 40 euro a piece, you get this realistic, hand drawn + romanticized image of yourself.
The artist usually start drawing by outlining the approximate location of the face, and then start by drawing their eyes.
In the beginning of the sketch, the facial features are pretty generic. You can kinda tell from their finished sketches that they have some preset facial character and shapes that they are used to drawing, which they modify as they go along to suit a particular person.
This picture was taken at a gallery near Montorgrueil, on the way when I was looking for a snail restaurant in this neighborhood. It's accidentally blurry, but somehow I like how it turned out and convey the sense of that place: a warm, classic gallery-way of Paris that contain cultural knick knacks for the unusual shopper. The place contains vintage door handles, Kenyan soapstone works, iron locks, ivory seed keychains, handmade soaps from Marseilles, etc. I found a blue stone bowl for myself. It's nice and quiet here because they're mostly closed (July is the traditional holiday month for the French).
The way red lanterns hang here reminded me of this illustration that I nabbed from the internet, but don't know who to attribute it to:
After the days in Rome, I have switched from a Nikon D40 SLR to a small Sony point and shoot pocket camera... you can say that it is a downgrade, but do you notice the difference? Maybe there is some difference in the field of depths, but other than that, probably not. After using some of my friends more powerful and heavy cameras (D80 and D90 in particular, especially matched with that gorgeous 50mm) it seems that the lesser Nikons are not very expressive at all. And expressive here, is the keyword, because I feel that taking pictures should not be just fact-notetaking or for extended memory storage (what to do with all those travel pictures anyway after you show them back to your friends and family?).
However, digital memory is so cheap, that all the tourists (including me) take so many pictures of everything that we think is worth taking notes of. We have spent so much money getting here, why not take all the pictures we can get?
But taking so many pictures reduce the meaning of each pictures.
I wonder what will happen to this data mountain of thousands and millions of pictures that we produce everyday, everywhere.
All that images, that information, that binary codes of 010110,
Is it going to disappear?
Or perhaps a day will come when what we can visually recognize now no longer exists, and somebody is going to mine them in the future to extrapolate what life was like when we took these pictures... like the way they do in the Pale Cocoon movie?
I miss film cameras... oh how precious were pictures made by films then.
And am very thankful to be back in Stockholm because that I don't have to be so apologetic to the French over the fact that I can't speak French anymore! Snobs. This is how it regularly goes for me:
"Pardon Madam, can you help me in English?"
"NOOOOOO" *grumpyface*
(You understand English don't you Madam?)
Other than that, Paris is a BIG city. By that I don't mean aerially big in the way Houston is, but big in a sense that it has such a rich urban design and cultural heritage that the seven days that I have there is not enough to see all of the parks and green walls that I have come here to see, but enough to experience that annoying Frenchness of theirs. In Jeremy's word: "You've got to love and hate the French at the same time. You love them because they stick to their traditions, and you hate them because they stick to their traditions."
Now in summer, there is so much tourists around the Eiffel, Monalisa, Louvre, etc. that the city feels an amusement park, where you get tossed from one famous icon to another famous icon.
Still no Stockholm pics yet, but let me share you a really gooood playground in Zurich. Click to see the whole panorama...
The playground looks like blocks of wood put together in lumps. I like how it forces children to find their own way up to the slide. Unlike norma playground where it its clear about where you have to go to get there, this kind of confusing set up makes kids (and even us) think up of their own unique way to climb... there is no one way up! (in life too...)
It's not that hard actually (there's a logic to the chaos after all... duh, its design), because I gave it a try too!
Don't look at me~ hahaha I just found them sitting on the same neighborhood in Oerlikon, Zurich
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On a separate subject, I have been in Stockholm for a few days now. I haven't had much internet access for a while, which is why I haven't updated the blog yet. I don't have my cables with me either, which is why there is no Stockholm pictures quite yet. But I felt compelled to post after reading Andrew's email about his blog of Japan. So here is a post, and the above is the last interesting Zü pictures I have to share with you. hohoo
