Sweden's National Day

June 6th is Sweden's national day, previously known as flag day. Sweden has never had to win their independence from anyone, so it isn't celebrated with the enthusiasm as independence day is celebrated in the US or Norway, but Swedes do at least get the day off. In our little town, the national day is celebrated with picnics, and incredibly informal parade, and a speech.

The parade is lead by the marching band and drill team. They are followed by the guest of honor in a horse drawn carriage.

Each of the local clubs (such as the chamber of commerce, soccer team, and volunteer firemen) gathers at the start of the parade, and one member from each club holds a flag. The other members walk behind the flag.

We walked through town, and people came out of their houses to watch and wave. Some people joined the parade, others tagged along afterward at a safe distance. We walked to the soccer field where we were lined up on the field according to our clubs. The band played, the drill team twirled their batons, and a giant flag was raised.

The guest speaker was the press secretary for the police department, and she's widely recognized as a very entertaining speaker. Much to the horror of my gravel-in-my-sandals feet, we had to stand there in the middle of the field for this entire process.

Finally, we sang the national anthem (for which it would appear few know the words), and exited with a half lap around the field.

After that, the soccer parents sold hot dogs, coffee, and cookies. I was impressed by how many had come to watch, and probably more importantly, picnic together.

Pictures from Bremen

You know I have two blogs, right? The other one (www.norekefoto.wordpress.com) is more of a professional blog for showing pictures, so I've put highlights from my pictures from Bremen there.

Bremen: been there, done that, took a picture

On Tuesday, it was still dumping rain, so I decided to go shopping. The Swedish krona is strong against the Euro, and I think I could spot a clearance rack anywhere in the world, so there were bargains to be had. I was impressed that there were so many book stores in Bremen. I'd say there were at least as many book stores as there were shoe stores, probably more if you count stores specializing in sheet music. Here in Sweden, shoe stores abound, but book stores are hard to find. I have never seen a store that sold sheet music.

Tuesday evening was the big conference dinner at the Ratskeller (the wine cellar under the town hall). The atmosphere was lovely. While the wine buffs were disappointed, I thought the food was quite good for a buffet for ~100 people. The cream of wild mushroom soup was particularly good. I found it odd to be one of only 5 women at this dinner. All of the conference participants were men, and only a few had brought their wives. It would appear that standardization is still a guy-thing.

On Wednesday, it was not raining, so I walked around taking pictures of everything I'd seen the previous days plus a couple more areas. On Wednesday evening we went out for dinner with a large group of guys. Many were tired of German food since they also got that for lunch at the hotel every day, so they chose a Tapas restaurant. Again, it was a bit disappointing.

Several of us had been looking forward to touring the Mercedes factory on Thursday, but it turned out that the only English tour was long since sold out. Thursday morning it rained again, so I went shopping again. It cleared up in the afternoon, so I expanded my walking radius in the direction of the train station. That turned out to be a pretty scary part of town, so I returned to the historical district and walked along the moat instead.

I had also been looking forward to some good workouts at the hotel gym. It turned out that the gym was tiny with only a few free weights and 4 stationary bikes. I biked for a half an hour on Monday, but after that I did not bother to go back. I much prefer an elliptical cross-trainer, a stair master, or even a treadmill. Our suite had a bathtub (we do not have a bathtub at home), so over the course of the week, I got quite good at reading a book while soaking in the tub.

Erik had a late meeting followed by dinner and drinks with the guys, so I opted to eat by myself. I had white asparagus with new potatoes and hollandaise sauce at an inexpensive cafe. Yum.

On Friday morning, I did the tour of the historic town hall. Erik and one of his friends finished up early on Friday afternoon, so we went walking and souvenir shopping. We listened for a bit to the German chancellor, Angela Merkel, who was giving a big speech in the town square (undoubtedly having a lot to do with the elections on Sunday). We walked to another part of town which had been described to us as "a normal area where people live," but we ended up at a beer garden for dinner. Again I had white asparagus with new potatoes and hollandaise sauce. It was more expensive but still quite good.

When I was in Germany in 1989, I remember seeing a poster for spaghetti ice cream. I was fascinated, but didn't understand what it was or have the opportunity to try it. Since then I've seen it a few more times (but only in Germany). Bremen has an abundance of ice cream shops, and it seemed like they all had spaghetti ice cream. I can now read enough German to know that it is made of vanilla ice cream, strawberry sauce, and shaved white chocolate. Not being a fan of strawberries, I still didn't try it. On Thursday night, I discovered that the cafe had a chocolate variant of spaghetti ice cream, but I was too full to try it then. On Friday night, knowing that our dinner companion was a big fan of chocolate desserts, I suggested that we try this. The spaghetti turned out to be extruded soft ice cream which quickly lost any resemblance to spaghetti as it melted. It would have been much better with a high-quality thick fudge sauce instead of the ordinary chocolate syrup, but all in all, it wasn't bad, and my curiosity was finally satisfied.

Back at the hotel we remembered that we had coupons for free cocktails and beer at the bar. I metabolize alcohol so poorly that I rarely bother drinking, but since this was our last night to use the coupons, I figured I'd give it a try. I wanted something sweet and fruity without too much alcohol, so they made me a Cosmopolitan. It was quite good. Erik and his buddies were all drinking free beer, so I decided to try a Mojito. That was not at all as tasty, and after about 3 sips, I decided it was time for bed.

I did take a bunch of pictures in Bremen, and I'll post them when I get the chance.

Bremen, Days 1 and 2

Well this is embarrassing. I hadn't intended to stop blogging, I just didn't get around to it for a while. Luckily it would seem that the only person who noticed was my mother, and I have long since reassured here that I was still alive.

I'm currently in Bremen, Germany, where my husband is attending a conference. I tagged along hoping to have a bit of a vacation like I did last year in Budapest. Well my first impression of Bremen is that it's nowhere near as interesting as Budapest, but hopefully that will change as soon as it stops raining. In Budapest, it also rained the first days, so I went to a museum. I tried that here, but the museums are all closed on Mondays. I later found out that they are only in German anyhow, so it really didn't matter. The cathedrals were open, so I went there. The famous cathedral had a large exhibit, but the signs were only in German. The quiet cathedral mood was completely destroyed by the hammering of renovation work, so I didn't hang out very long. The church across the square, nearly as large but not as famous, had an exhibit about Tjernobyl, but again, it was only in German.



I was pleased to discovered that the town hall, a Unesco world heritage site, was open. I was promptly disappointed to find that the only open part was an art gallery. There was a sign saying there were guided tours every day, so I went to the nearby tourist office to buy my ticket. It turns out that this week they were only doing tours on Monday and Friday mornings. I was too late. I was surprised that the tourist office really didn't have any suggestions for what an English speaker might do in town on a rainy Monday. All she came up with was the science museum which is all the way across town, and I really wasn't in the mood. Thank goodness for the internet. I can at least look information on the places I visited today and get inspiration for where I might want to visit when it stops raining.

When Erik was done with his meeting, we went for a long walk in search for someplace to eat. We found plenty of restaurants, but nothing that inspired him. We eventually ended up at the same place where we ate yesterday. I had french onion soup and a chef salad. It hit the spot.

Yesterday we drove down from Sweden. There was a lot of construction on the autobahn, so Erik found the drive more tiring than fun. It took about 7 hours to get here. Erik promptly ran into some colleagues, so we went out to dinner with them. We went to a nice restaurant where I had steak and mushrooms. The flavors were delicious, but the meat was tough. At least it wasn't all that expensive for a fancy restaurant.

So if it keeps raining, I might get around to telling you what I've been up to the past couple of months. Otherwise, I've got plenty of exploring to do.

A new challenge

On Thursday, I delivered a two-hour lecture on Internet Marketing for my network of small-business women.

The network's board had been looking for somebody to do a lecture on the subject, but the person who had been recommended to us was not interested. I'd been to a couple of similar lectures and figured I could do something like that myself. It's been years since I led trainings with the San Diego Tracking team, and I've never done much public speaking in Swedish, but I figured I could do it.

It's a subject that I'm interested in, and I spent quite a bit of time gathering information and putting together a PowerPoint presentation. The PowerPoint part took a lot longer than I thought, taking up pretty much all of my working hours for the week preceding the presentation.

I'd originally planned on practicing by giving the lecture to a friend on Wednesday. We had a hard time getting our schedules to sync, so we ended up calling it off. As it turned out, I didn't even have a complete draft of the presentation until noon on Thursday. I spent the afternoon making fine adjustments to the animation and graphics. An hour before I'd planned to leave the house, I made the final saves, and went to print out my notes. Much to my horror I discovered that there was no way to print the notes without printing them together with the slide, one per page. That would mean 74 pages! I probably didn't have time to print that many pages, and I was already getting a low ink warning on my printer, so that wasn't an option. So instead of eating dinner and fixing my hair, I copied and pasted my notes, one at a time, into Word so I could print them out on four pages. I packed my laptop, threw on my clothes and a little makeup, and I finally made it out the door 10 minutes late.

My lecture was at a school, and while our access was through the main door, it was far from obvious which door that was. I taped a flyer on the door, but there were already people wandering around. Because it was hard to find and there were people who had said they were coming who weren't there, we waited. Unfortunately there were several people who did not show up, so there were only 12 people. I'd been hoping for more, but considering turnout at out network's events over the past year, 12 wasn't bad, and it included 4 first-timers.

We started the lecture 15 minutes late. I felt like I was off to a slow start, and the first few slides felt awkward, but I soon got into the groove. The first half of the presentation took one hour, then we had a break for coffee. 20 minutes later, I started up again. People had a lot of questions, especially about Facebook, and soon we were about to get locked in when the automatic alarm came on. I had to breeze through the last 15 slides, but then we packed up and got out just in time.

The next day, I was thrilled to find e-mails and Facebook peppered with comments praising my presentation. One does not get rich delivering lectures like this, but after spending so much effort on preparation, I do hope to be able to deliver it a few more times for other groups.

Next month, I'll be giving a lecture, also for entrepreneurs, on the use of pictures in marketing. I'm also thinking about doing a photography workshop for the same demographic.

Bonus points for Beethoven

We saw The King's Speech the other day--fantastic movie! Reviews of the movie abound, so I won't bother with another recap. I'd seen some trailers and thought it looked interesting, then I saw my friend Romy's review and absolutely had to see it.

I love that it's based on a true story, and Colin Firth was incredible. I can imagine that it's a lot easier to fake an exaggerated stutter than to portray the tension and exertion of one trying oh-so-hard not to stutter. Reviews of the movie abound, so I won't bother with another recap. For me, the icing on the cake was the exquisite use of Beethoven in this movie. Now the allegretto from Beethoven's seventh symphony is hardly obscure, but in the climactic scene of The King's Speech, it was absolutely perfect. It starts off quietly, carefully, but not tentative, yet with underlying strength and determination. Then it builds, gaining confidence until it soars in triumph, all the while perfectly timed with the speech.

I was tickled to find out that I was not the only one who was thoroughly moved by this scene's use of Beethoven. This article even contains a link to the music.

I also saw Eat, Pray, Love recently, another movie for which I had high hopes. Unfortunately this one did not quite live up to my expectations. I haven't exactly read the book, but I did the next best thing. I listened to it on CD, all 11 CD's of it, read by the author. Needless to say, this took quite some time because I listened only in my car, and only when I was alone for more than a few minutes. By the time I was done and returned it to the library, I felt like I was losing a friend.

Julia Roberts was good, as usual, and the photography was nice, but I was hoping it would be more like the book. I guess that's the price one pays for compressing it down into 133 minutes.

I've also been watching Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. Or I should say, I've been trying to watch this. I think I've tried three times now, and I fell asleep every time. Some people might find this blasphemous, but I've been getting less and less into Harry Potter with each movie, and I think he's finally lost me. I think I like the idea of the Harry Potter stories more than I like the actual films.

M & B's Excellent Adventure

Last week we sent to see a slide show hosted by the local church. Normally we don't attend church events, but we were invited by our neighbors to see pictures from their trip to South America. It was so cute to see this retired couple recount their great adventure. Being dairy farmers, they had not had much opportunity to travel. B's brother has lived in Ecuador for a long time, but they'd never been to visit. Speaking neither English nor Spanish, the idea of foreign travel was daunting to them. Luckily M&B's kids decided that they were going to visit their uncle. They'd bring their own kids and their parents too for a real, multi-generational family adventure.

M&B were skeptical at first , but they soon realized that they were unlikely to get a better opportunity. For months, I saw them in training with their walking sticks on our dirt roads, not knowing what had sparked their sudden enthusiasm for walking.

I'm not going to go into the details of their trip, but I'll say that it moved me to see them showing pictures of the huge airplane that took 400 passengers. How easy is it to take things like that for granted? For one who's been traveling internationally since before I can remember, I was touched to relive the experience through their eyes.

They went to the Galapagos Islands, a big city, small towns, and a resort in the Andes. They encountered weird and wonderful plants, wild animals that were not the least bit scared of humans, and extraordinary scenery. They stood on the equator where they experimented with balancing eggs and pouring water down drains. They ate things they'd never dreamed of tasting. And after a few weeks, they returned safely home with suitcases full of souvenirs and a whole new perspective on the world.