25/7 – Only in Sweden.

It’s only in Sweden, where you’d find the sign for changing tables next to the male symbol as well as the female one at public restrooms. It’s only in Sweden we have special rubbish bins for disposable BBQs. However, it’s also only in Sweden where the waiters/waitresses still run away with your credit card and take it out of your sight when you want to pay at the restaurant. The young guy at the campsite in the Namibian desert and the chubby lady serving you fish on the beach somewhere in Brazil, have both figured it out. Guess we’ll get there one day eventually. 

11/3 – Ice Yachting and Orange Mystery.

I had almost forgotten how much I love it. Ice yachting. Must be some kind of self-defence mechanism. If I haven’t done something I really enjoy for a while, it’s like I forget how much fun it is, which then results in that I don’t really miss it anymore. Quite emotionally practical most of the time, and makes it even better when you suddenly get to do whatever it was you’d forgotten how much fun it was. Like ice yachting. Swooshing along the ice with the wind curling around your glasses to make your eyes tear. The water from on top of the ice, with these tiny, tiny ice pieces in it, splashing in your face, making you feel like you’re a convertible a hailstorm. Doesn’t it sound great? Not? Well…it is. Thanks dad for a great morning on the ice.

Got the same feeling around Christmas about a year ago, when I took the cross-country skis down from the attic for the first time in way too long. For a few weeks around Christmas and New Years, I spent hours and hours in the tracks. My hometown area had the best winter since the 80ies and I re-discovered my childhood cross-country skiing tracks. One track a day, with a bigger smile on my face for every mile in the snow landscape. 

As I was enjoying all the different tracks around the area I kept meeting and seeing all these family out on for a winter holiday day in the wonderland and still, just like 25 years ago, they’d all fallen for the big orange mystery. It would be interesting to find out how it all started: Let’s see what we’re going to do here? Cross country skiing or ice skating for a few hours, with gloves and hats on and the lot. And let’s try to bring what we want to take along, in our pockets without big bulky rucksacks. Do we need to bring a snack? Sounds like a nice idea. After all it’s quite a full-on sport. So what do we decide to bring? Something, which is easy to keep in our pockets? Something, which is ready to be eaten without peeling, for example? Something, which can be eaten without making a mess? Something, which doesn’t really freeze if it’s really cold? Nah, skip all that. Let’s bring oranges! Of all the fruits in the world, except for coconuts possibly, oranges must be the most unpractical edible item to bring when going winter sporting. Since generations and generations back, Swedish families have always brought their dear oranges along though. And I don’t think anything will ever stop that. We love our oranges when we go cross-country skiing and without them it wouldn’t be a proper family day in the snow, would it?

4/1 – Quote of the year 2011.

Guess we all have different everyday life and references. The lifetime dream for one is routine work for the other. So, have a guess, what’s the profession of my friend who gave me one of the best quotes last year?

In Swedish: “Sen har vi byggt klart en ny väg upp till nya garaget vid sommarstugan. Hyrde en minilastare med grusskopa och det var ju bland det roligaste man kört på länge!”

Or roughly translated to: “Also finished the new gravel road to the summerhouse. Rented one of these bobcats, which was one of the coolest things I’ve driven for ages.”

Yup, spot on, good guess! That was my friend the jet fighter pilot, commenting on what he’d spent one of the weekends in July with. Guess many of us would swap with him any day to have his “just another day at the office” reference system. But it’s all relative isn’t it, and I guess that’s the beauty of it. Sorry Captain Carlsson, but can’t help smiling every time I think about how happy you looked when telling me about the bobcat.

3/1 – GPS heaven or beware of the asphalt dust.

Since I was lucky enough to get Christmas off from work, I made sure to be in Uppsala with my near and dear ones to get properly fed for the New Year. Christmas means winter in my part of the world and winter means time for winter tyres again. For the second year, it also means time for hometown hassle and great frustration management challenges behind the wheels.

Quick background for you non-Swedes; In Sweden we’re supposed to have snow and ice during winter. Snow and ice make the roads slippery. With normal summer tyres that means very slippery and a lot of cars where they shouldn’t be, such as in the ditch or with metal-to-metal contact with other cars or metal-to-wood contact with trees. With winter tyres, it’s less slippery and thus fewer accidents. To make it even less slippery you use studded winter tyres and you’ll get even less cars driving into each other or skidding off the road.

So far, so good and logic is still intact in the Nordic countries. However, if you in some cities don’t have the roads covered with snow and ice all the time, the studs will of course wear the asphalt a little bit more. More costly than necessary, of course, but to me an okay price to pay for safer roads once the ice is there. Because of this extra wear of asphalt on warm winter days, they’ve banned driving with studded winter tyres on most of the streets in the city centre in my hometown since last year. Mainly, to save the people who have chosen to live as central as you possibly can from the dangerous asphalt dust the studs presumably cause.

So, now, instead of producing the dangerous asphalt dust when driving straight through the city centre for about 15 min, we’re producing the same kind of asphalt dust for 45 min driving serpentine criss-cross routes to get from A to B and onwards to C legally. Instead of exposing the people living along the city centre routing for the unhealthy dust, we’re exposing three times as many people for it. Only difference being that they live slightly outside the city centre and not in the middle of it all. Possibly with the hope for slightly fresher air than the ones enjoying the closeness to the downstairs restaurant and nightclubs. But that was before we had to spend half the morning to plan the routes across town, with it’s banned and one way streets, to make sure it didn’t take us an additional 38 min to get to back to B after stopping by at C, in case we forgot something there.

Guess there are some positive things with it though. We got a new road sign, which looks kind of funny. It would fit perfectly in the road sign collection you used to get for your play mat as a kid. The one with roads and blocks painted on it and a nice space for your plastic petrol station. And if you haven’t really got around to use your new GPS, this is the time and location for it. Get the newest updates with the non-studded-tyres streets and see if you can beat 20 min per straight-line kilometre you need to move yourself.

Point is; I really can’t get the logic of this exercise. The choice is, either more asphalt dust and exhausts produced in total, or more accidents since people will skip the studs. Loose-loose situation or I must be blonder than I think.

By the way, almost forgot - Happy New Year! Didn’t really mean to start in such a grumpy way, but hey, can only get more cheerful as 2012 trickle along now. All the best and enjoy your New Years resolutions for as long as they last.