Focus on Sweden » Events

The Stockholm marathon syndrome

Paul — Mon, 01 Jun 2009 14:14:01 +0000

I don’t hear people saying that they compete in a marathon. It’s usually that they participate in one. Fair enough, given that it’s so damn hard to finish one. For a normal person, just getting to the end of the 42.195 km run is a great achievement by itself, hence the more usual participate term.

However, this is good enough if you’re not from Kenya. If this is the case, everything changes. You have to win, or if you don’t, you have to finish in under 2:30h. And win the next one.

13,718 people finished the 31st Stockholm marathon this Saturday, out of which 13,717 came after a Kenyan.

As a nerd that I am, I turned to Google for an answer to the question “why do the Kenyans run so fast?” and Google showed me this article, which I think summarizes the answer in an articulate way:
“…the answer is really kind of simple. Just live with them for awhile. You’ll quickly understand.“

Please follow this link for more photos I took during the race.

Valborg on Riddarholmen

Paul — Thu, 07 May 2009 09:36:09 +0000

April 30th is the day the Swedes celebrate the end of winter. Apparently, Uppsala is the place to be on this day. The students are starting the celebration early in the morning, with alcohol, and try to keep the party up until late night.

In the morning of this year’s April 30th, I was cycling to work, when I noticed a group of people with questionable faces, queuing in front of Systembolaget, waiting for the opening to buy booze. One usually sees these queues Friday evening, which is basically a Swedish ritual, but in that morning’s context it looked a bit unusual.

Getting back to Valborg, in the evening large fires are lit in various areas of Sweden, as a sign of celebration. There are a couple of locations in Stockholm for these fires, and that evening I went together with two friends to Riddarholmen.

The day was perfect, with a beautiful sunset happening behind the City Hall, a bit chilly, but very warm nearby the fire, if you managed to make your way there through the crowd. There were about 500 people gathered to watch that particular fire on Riddarholmen, from families with kids sitting on top of their parents’ shoulders and covering their faces from the heat, to drunken Russian tourists posing for photos taken with mobile phones in front of the fire.

After watching the fire for half an hour, we cooled down with beers in Akkurat. For a couple of hours.

The Viking Run

Paul — Tue, 17 Feb 2009 21:15:40 +0000

Vikingarännet (The Viking Run) is an annual skating race, covering 80km between Uppsala and Stockholm, on the ice of lake Mälaren. This year, it took place last Sunday and Sigtuna, a small town north of Stockholm referred by the term city, was a good observation point for the race.

The frozen part of lake Mälaren nearby Sigtuna was also chosen by a couple of flying devices enthusiasts to land. The plane in the image is called SeaMax and it has been adapted with wheels to land on the ice.

The main issue with this race is that they don’t know if it’s going to be on, until a few weeks before, because short term predictions of the ice state must be followed. The event has its name from the historical transportation routes on the lake Mälaren, during the Viking times.

Midsummer’s retrospective

Paul — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 21:23:06 +0000

Things tend to become a little stale around here, since there isn’t much going on at the moment, except planning for the holiday in Romania next week. But since I don’t want to neglect my only subscriber, as Feedburner indicates, I’m going to write a bit about this year’s Midsummer’s Eve.

The Midsummer’s Eve is one of the biggest celebrations in Sweden. People get together in some specially designated places and have picnics, watch live shows and, the most important part, dance around a big pole, called the maypole. This is the symbol of fertility, and given the shape and the looks, one can squarely think of something that resembles the image and has something to do with fertility.

We sat down at the table captured in the picture, in Farsta, south of Stockholm, and ate a lot of goodies, but the party binder was the nubbar, a Swedish sort of flavored schnapps. Some mistakenly may think that the Swedes are a bit quiet, but after a few shots of schnapps a very nice neighbor who joined the party started confessing that he’s been feeling inclined to do number two with the toilet door open, as his father used to do it in the past.

This is not the neighbor in cause in the image below, but a kid from the neighborhood. He seemed to like to pose for pics, but for an unidentified reason I took them in a hurry and they didn’t come out very sharp.