Crayfishing at Stjärnsund

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!

Paris - Sketches

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.



That half an hour might be too long for some.

Paris - Notes on photography

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.

Back from Paris!

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.

Ladders without order

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!

<.< *no comments*

Don't look at me~
hahaha I just found them sitting on the same neighborhood in Oerlikon, Zurich

_______


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

Flowerpots of Zü

If you like flowers,


There are many flowerpots in Zü.


One on each side of the road, one for every few meters or so.


Big flowerpots! Bigger than the size of a full-grown Zü-persons



Colorful flowerpots! Painted so that no two are the same.


There are flowerpots with plastic diamonds the size of buns


Don't you want one for your garden?


If pots are not for you, try the cows.

Day 6: MFO Adventure!

Philipp and I took a trip out to green walls in Zü and MFO park today. Why adventure? Since we missed, turned around, and go back to the previously thought wring stops, and made many mistakes along the way of visiting these green sites Zurich.
(PS: I'm too lazy to edit the pics today, so here it is, as it is)


These are the green walls at Futurecom, an advertising company. We looked at how they use a thick plastic-based black fabric, which are stapled to the walls to contain the plant substrate. Above the wall is a length of mirror which creates the illusion that the wall is longer than it is (can you see me in its reflection?).


And here is the MFO park when we found it:


Looks like an overgrown, unfinished building structure on the outside, but when you enter its green space,


You feel like you're entering a big room, except, that this is still outside!


And you realize that this is a building that is not to be put in category of 'finished' or 'unfinished,' because its a living building!


Unlike normal park where you walk across it, with this one, you have to climb it up!


As years go by, the plants continue to grow and climb MFO's manmade surfaces. Here we have the giant Aristolochia plant forming the columns of MFO.


Architecture critics praised this building for challenging our conventional notion of the park (crisp manicured lawn and trees), and incorporate the 'urban' sense verticality into people's experience of the park.


Kinda looks like the Patrick Blanc's Quai Branly doesn't it?
Except that this system should be more robust and dynamic.
And below is the picture of the behind the scene support structure:

Day 4: Feed the Dragon

YES! Ladies and Gentlemen! If you have an extra kid running around the house, get rid of your worries and please feed our hungry dragon!


What I wanted to tell you about Zurich is not how wonderful their public system are, or how clean the city is, or how clean their river is (maybe that, later). Instead, what I enjoyed the most about the city is this:


It's a dragon slide! So basically, you put the kid in the dragon's mouth, and chuuuuute, pop! The kid comes out of the other end, like so:


And the kids would do this again, and again, and again!


Since I consider myself pretty small, I decided that it won't be too rude to the children if I give the thing a try too! And ooooh! It quite fun to be sliding down the dark metal tunnel, and progress at a faster and faster speed until the bottom, where I'd be plopped into a room full of bookshelves of children's book.

Other fun things they got going on is the story telling session. At the children's book section of a different bookshop specializing in English books, a storytelling session is going on.


The storytelling session was something like in the movies, where you'd have a lively actor at the corner, and two dozens or so interested children... with their changing little faces:


Yes... in taking this picture, I was somewhere in scuffled in the crowd. Condensing myself as tiny as I can be, so to pretend that I am not an adult. Frankly, I think that the reader they have here is a pretty good actor! He makes simple books with size 24 font come alive and feel real. Ah... wouldn't you want to hear a book like this being read in full animation?


(I really do want to eat one)

Day 2 - People at work

This is Philipp, the head of the Verticalis project. We met for the first time when he picked me off from the station, and we had tea at the most beaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaauuutiful café I have ever seen. The café is literally right up by the edge of the blue Zurichsee (Zurich lake), and from there, you can see Zurich! We have been chatting a lot since and he is open-minded to ideas of different green wall systems from around the world.


And this is Simone, his student assistant at the greenhouse. Simone is an Italian from Tyrol, studying for an undergrad degree of environmental education, and now she is working for her summer job here. She taught me many things about making and maintaining a greenwall, from making "brownie" substrate, to "haircutting" a verticalis frame. Here we are preparing a Verticalis wall, for use at Hydroplant's showroom.


And that's me, sticking in cuttings of peperomia plants for my first set of green walls. We moved our tables outdoor because it
I'm happy that the people here in Switzerland are kind and they take their time to talk and exchange idea with me. Must say that they are much ore respectful than what I expected them Europeans be (after that horrendous 20 hour wait at the consulate, and the cold rejection they gave as, bah)

Day 2 - A Gardener's Exam

Simone and I took a lunch walk today. It was hot and sunny, so we took refuge under an oak tree, facing the fields, with the scenic view of the lake at a distance. On the fields, lo! Red and white striped poles and people carrying tripods on rectangular patches of grass:


At first they look like people playing games to me, but Simone explained that this is the gardener's exam. In ZHAW (the institution I am with), there are two kinds of gardener: the one that specializes in horticultural plant propagation, and the one that specializes in making home gardens (constructing stone walls, leveling the terrain, creating drainage slopes, etc.). Obviously, this is of the latter.

It seems that the test involves using staked strings to make accurately measured lines, and using that tripod thingy to measure the ground's slopes.


Good to know that somewhere in the world, being a gardener is a well respected profession, bukan sembarang jadi tukang kebon!

Day 1 - Back in Europe

And so I arrived in Zurich.

The immigration was friendly, the luggage fast, and the train punctual. No wonder they call Zurich the Singapore of Europe, and Singapore the Zurich of Asia. Methodical, organized, and fast. Without knowing any German, and only following the instructions of an e-mail print out from Phillipe, I arrived in the town of Wäedenswil within an hour of my landing into the airport.

I've somehow now have ended at a calm Swiss town by the lake...
a beautiful blue lake, from which you can see the city of Zurich at the other end. It was a warm morning, with cool breeze and ducks flying over onto the edge of the lake.

... errr....

Why am I here?

This is what got me here:


A Dreer award travel grant for the study of green walls (growing plants on a vertical surface).


And this is some of the plant materials that I got introduced to today at Verticalis, they are planted on rockwool, a type of organic foam made of melted rock. More details about the research on later posts.