day 09 – 11.07.09

Posted: July 15th, 2009 | Author: Gergana Milusheva | Filed under: fun, trips and notes | No Comments »

I really wanted to wrap up my story about Stockholm in a single post but, apparently, it is not going to happen so we move along

We start off walking aimlessly around the city

they call it the Venice of the North, or so I’ve heard

before we know it, we are on a small island in the middle of the two main canals which is, actually, the oldest part of the city; it is bears the melodious name Gamla Stan

up until a hundred years ago, these cozy streets were buried in dirt and there were large stones that people should step on in order not get buried in the filth while crossing the street to see their neighbor…

now, the buildings are totally renovated inside and wealthy people live in these apartment buildings; I don’t envy their wealth, though, because I have no idea where they park their Porches…

some of the streets are quite narrow and the atmosphere is great…

the wider ones have become a tourist attraction – with street stands, souvenir stores, street musicians – the entire menu

while we were attempting to get away from one of these streets:

do you notice the hair colors? as I found out later, there are almost no ash blonde people here…

all children are ash blonde but at the age of 15-16 (like the girls in the picture), their hair darkens to a more natural blonde shade like the ones we have in Bulgaria… However! This color “did not say enough” (I am quoting here), so all Swede ladies bleach their hair!!!!! Viva the peroxide blondes!

In fact, women here have nothing to do with these in brotherly Norway… good-looking and well-tended (well not as much as the Danish women in Copenhagen)… perhaps because the following is not such a rare sight

later on we are going to meet my classmate who has lived here ever since we graduated, so all this information is really from him and his girlfriend (she told me about the blonde hair color)….

the maternity leave in Sweden is 1 year long; but it can also be a paternity leave; or they can take turns; it wasn’t fair that the mother would occupy the entire leave, so many fathers wanted to take a paternity leave in order to bond with their child; taking care of the child is considered a privilege… and these are no fiction stories: we saw a lot of fathers like this one, actually…

we get out of Gamla Stan and we come upon a strange type of architecture… neo-modernism from the 60s:

историята на това място, така както ми я разказаха:

here is the story of this place as they told it to me:

some 60-70 years ago, there was a hill in the center of Stockholm with extremely poor and dilapidated, insanitary buildings; the city decided to get rid of them and build the bright future in their place instead (in the picture); there was a competition as it should be, a winner, a project, a beginning of the construction works and everything was fine but the part of the plan (and its execution) was to demolish not only the old building but a part of the hill as well… (?!?!?!!!????)

I did not understand why it needed to be such a severe intervention but there is no hill there anymore and the modernism of back then looks a bit sad nowadays, especially when it goes for 4- or 5 blocks

we dedicate the rest of the day to devoted listening to stories similar to this one from our local hosts over a beer or, OK, more like 5-6 beers

tomorrow, we will let our hosts take a break from us and we will look around …

coming up next – day 10 – 12.07.09

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