Pics 1 (Belgium to Finland)

So far my time in Tehran has been rather mundane, with most of my time spent lazing at home, watching various films I'd picked up en route and sorting through my pictures, getting rid of duds and touching up the others. I'm about half way through them and so thought I might post a few of my favourites because when I'm on the road I don't always get the opportunity to add pics to my posts even when I would like to and along the way I've taken a few pics that I really like and would like to share.

Bruges canals by night.

Church door in Brussels.

Clichéd maybe, but still very pretty. Windmills at Kinderdijk.

The red light district in Groningen. The prostitutes sit behind the glass doors on show for prospective clients. During the day not so many of them are at work and they while away the time by reading, knitting or chatting with their neighbours. The setting is happily mundane and ordinary.

One of the main portals of Bremen's cathedral. As you can see Jesus looks all beatific whilst the evil Jews have devious faces and hooked noses. Obviously this door was made prior to WWII and so today, alongside the door, there is a plaque with a long apology for the Holocaust and explanation of the door's iconography.

Roof detail of Lubeck's Marienkirche.

Detail of the colourful houses in Ribe.

Grey day in Visby.

Obviously these stones do not roll as they have gathered some very photogenic lichen. Gotland.

Reflected trees in Stockholm's peaceful Skogskyrkogården cemetery.

Quiet little alleyway in Stockholm's Gamle Stan (Old Town).

Grave goods from a Viking burial, including a bronze Buddha. God only knows the things that little statuette must have seen on its voyage from the subcontinent to Scandinavia.

Amateur photographer and his muse on Oslo's cool opera house.

One of the many, expressive, enchanting statues in Oslo's Vigeland Park. Public art at its best.

The colourful, wooden, Hansa warehouses of Bergen's Bryggen district.

The wooden stave church at Urnes is almost 850 years old. Not bad going.

After attending a country music festival in the small town of Skjolden I couldn't be bothered to find a place to sleep and so just passed out on a bale of rock wool at the local port. It was quite comfy actually.

A good night's haul dumpster diving with Monica in Røros.

The incredible Lofoten islands.

Getting lost in Finland's Arctic forests in Oulanka national park.

Flowers by the window of an old, wooden house in old Rauma.

Intermission

A couple of weeks after deciding to go on this new trip I received an e-mail from my best friend from school announcing that he was getting married this summer and that I was invited to the wedding, to be held in Germany. Perfect, I thought, another wedding I will miss because I'll be on the road - all my friends seem to wait until I'm travelling to get married for some reason. But since I knew I would still be in Europe I insisted to myself that I would not miss this one and figured out roughly where I would be at the appointed time and set about finding a cheap flight. Yes, that's right, I would have to have to momentarily suspend my no-flying principles in order to attend, but there was no other way around it - this trip of mine isn't supposed to be a jail sentence and so I decided to make a 5-day exemption from my self-imposed rules. Luckily Ryanair fly from Tampere in Finland to Frankfurt Hahn in northwest Germany (though not really close to Frankfurt at all, though that actually suited me to a tee). It seems strange to me, but in the UK budget airlines, and especially Ryanair, are universally despised for their poor service, added charges and flying to hard-to-reach airports. But that's what makes them so cheap in the first place - people who complain have only to take more conventional flag carriers. If you pay bargain-basement prices you would be stupid to expect five-star service. In fact my one complaint of budget airlines is that they're too cheap: flying half way across the continent now costs less than taking the train half way across the country. The price doesn't correspond to what is being offered and people take flying for granted, which leads to flights taken on a whim and elephant-sized carbon footprints. The problem, of course, is that air travel (or at least jet fuel) is not taxed and so therefore is artificially cheap compared to other forms of transport. But since I was taking advantage of this cheapness I suppose I'm not really in a position to pontificate.

From right to left: Marina (with Elouan), Yann, Bahareh, Florian, Guillaume and Me (looking surprisingly presentable - so much so that even my friends were shocked).

Viking Wisdom

As you head north from Lübeck you start travelling through the Jutland Peninsula. Had you been wandering around this area some 1200 years ago you might not have survived for very long as it was the heart of the kingdom of the Danes, who liked to go viking (apparently, the word viking, as indicated by its gerund ending, is actually a verb, and refers to the act of piracy and plundering that was carried out by various Norse peoples, and not to the people themselves - but seeing as that's not how people know them let's just call them Vikings and be done with it). Even though their pillaging days are over you can see their legacy in place names: the further north you venture the greater the number of towns that end in -by or -lund.

The two greatest Viking cities of the time, Haithabu and Ribe, were both situated on strategic crossing points of the peninsula and controlled the burgeoning trade between the North and Baltic Seas (much like Lübeck was to several centuries later). Their halcyon days, sadly, are long gone. Haithabu was sacked by some marauding Slavic tribes, and, although it reformed as the Germanic town of Schleswig and enjoyed moderate prosperity, it was never to regain its former glory when it was the largest city north of the Alps; and Ribe? well it never lived up to expectations and remained on the periphery of Danish affairs, especially once the capital left Jutland and moved to Copenhagen.

The Viking past does, however, live on in other ways (and not just the museums that try and cash-in on the Viking popularity with dress-up actors with long hair, stick-on beards and uncomfortable looking woollen shirts) - not so much in military terms, but in the towns' mercantile natures and openness to the world, mirroring the days when Norse traders roamed as far afield as Baghdad and Iceland and even the shores of the New World. Both towns were centres of learning, punching above their weight in terms of literary sons, and both were home to many sailors and merchants as I discovered when ambling through the old streets of Schleswig, taking pictures of picturesque old buildings.

"So you like old knick-knacks?" demanded an older, heavy-set man with a pail as I was kneeling down to get the right angle for my composition. "You're not Chinese are you?"
When I told him that I thought the old town was very pretty and that no, I wasn't Chinese, but Scottish, he brightened up and launched, unbid, into a reminiscence of his seafaring days.
"Ah, I was in Scotland once. In Lewis. Didn't like it though - I got fined £25 for wolf-whistling this lady there. £25 was a lot of money in those days."
"Indeed," I agreed, as I thought it was better to just nod sympathetically.
"But at least you got somewhere with them, mind you, not like those French Canadian lasses; there was one nice one in Montreal but you couldn't get (and at this point he made a gesture with his fist where he held his thumb between his second and third fingers - I had never come across it before but the meaning was pretty evident). No sir. Not without a ring on her finger, being Catholic and all. No ring, no - (and once again the sign)"
Again I thought it best to nod and make a few acquiescing "mmmm" sounds, as I didn't quite know what the appropriate reply was.
"Do you like fish?" he asked, changing the subject (or at least I hoped he was changing the subject). "I'm off to get some herrings," he said, pointing at his bucket.
Sensing a possible escape route I truthfully said, "Sorry, I'm allergic."
"Too bad," he muttered, before trundling off to the quayside.

And as quickly as he came he was gone again, ready to bestow his worldly wisdom upon other needy youngsters.

Hansa

The low, flat landscape of the northern Netherlands imperceptibly gives way to the low, flat landscape of northern Germany. Having spent a year at school here I always feel comfortable travelling through Germany, both from my ease with the language but also from a sense of familiarity. During that year our history lessons spanned the 14th to 16th centuries. At the time Western Europe, and especially Germany, was split into many little fiefdoms and kingdoms. One of the most important, and breaking the whole feudal trend, was the Hansa, or Hanseatic League. The League was comprised of (semi-)independent trading towns around the North and Baltic Seas, stretching from Scotland and Norway all the way to Russia in the east and Belgium in the south, interested in freeing and facilitating trade. In many ways the Hansa was ahead of its time, an early forerunner of the EU, with its emphasis on the rule of law and free trade to maintain stability in what were, for the rest of Europe, tormented times. The Hansa became so powerful that it even took up arms against countries, managing to sack Copenhagen and earn a draw with England. The Hansa have stuck in my memory probably because our class managed to persuade our (very easy-going) teacher to play a computer game, called Patricians, which aims to simulate the Hanseatic trade, as part of our lessons. (Which just goes to show how useful computers are as an aid to learning.)

Lübeck's iconic Holstentor and a couple of the city's churches with their spiky spires (Lübeck is also known as the City of 7 Towers because of them).