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.

Slag

Stockholm is, for the immediate future, the eastern limit of my travels - I now had to make an about turn and head almost due west towards Oslo, as I am hoping to circumvent the Gulf of Bothnia via Norway and Finland. My dilemma, therefore, was to devise an itinerary to get me there. My first stop was easy to choose: not only is Uppsala an erstwhile Swedish capital, but more importantly (for me), it was home to a certain Carl Linnaeus. He may not be a household name, but to biologists he is up there with Darwin and David Attenborough, for having devised the binomial system of classification of all living things which is still in use today. The town is cashing in on its famous son and there are a myriad museums and sites connected with his life and work. From Uppsala there are no obvious stops before Oslo and so I consulted The List. I find UNESCO world heritage sites a useful way to form a rough outline for a travel itinerary, which can then be fleshed out with more places as I do more research. I'm not overly dogmatic about them and do not feel I have to tick every single one off in each country that I visit, but I do feel that they are a useful starting point from which to begin investigating potential places to visit. They are invariably unique places and often they are either aesthetically beautiful or culturally and historically important or maybe even a combination of the two. Northwest of Uppsala (so roughly in the right direction) are two such sites, at Ängelsberg and Falun, that characterise Sweden's unique industrial past.

Even Falun's slag heaps (the detritus from the copper smelting process) are considered part of the World Heritage area.

Food In A Tube

Spring finally arrived yesterday with a bang: out of nowhere a balmy, sunny day with nary a cloud in sight. You could almost see the buds burst open in front of your eyes and by the end of the day most trees actually had leaves and were a beautiful, vivid green of fresh growth. I even managed to ditch my jacket and jumper and wear just a T-shirt for the first time as well (a memorable event which was duly noted in my personal diary). Café owners rushed to dust off their outdoor furniture as the sun-starved Swedes came out in force in their skimpiest clothing to take advantage of every last second of sun as if it might be their last, which, according to one particularly pessimistic countryman that I met on a bus, it well could be (at least for this year).

People are beginning to come out on Stockholm's streets as the sun makes a tentative appearance.

Desperately Seeking Spring In Sweden

From Copenhagen I crossed the Øresund, over the mighty Øresund bridge, to Sweden. Unfortunately my hitching exploits didn't get me far and I got stuck in Malmo and had to continue by train (the Swedes are notoriously reticent in picking up hitchers). The difference in landscape is immediately visible as so far the countryside had been dominated by flat farmland with the odd hill here and there, but now forests were holding their own against the agricultural hegemony and brick and cement houses have given way to brightly painted (mainly red or yellow) timber. And although the scenery might have changed a bit one thing that has remained constant during my trip has been the weather. I have been making my way steadily northeastwards and so have remained one step ahead of spring. Wherever I have been the signs of its imminent arrival have abounded: pre-spring flowers like daffodils, snowdrops and forest anemones are everywhere; the buds on the trees are awaiting to explode into leaf; and the weather's more changeable than a teenage girl deciding what clothes to wear to a party. The one constant has been the cold weather, with it barely ever exceeding 10 C so that my one jumper and thermal long-johns have become a permanent fixture of my daily wardrobe.

I headed quickly to the east coast towns of Karlskrona and Kalmar, which are interesting as they chart two tumultuous phases of Swedish history. Kalmar, the older of the two, used to mark the border between Denmark and Sweden and is famous for the treaty that was signed there which united the kingdoms of Denmark, Norway and Sweden. It was never really popular in Sweden though as they felt they were getting a raw deal from the Danes (with whom they have fought numerous times over the years and have a love-hate relationship) and it only lasted for 125 years. During that time Kalmar was at the centre of the Union, afterwards it withered away to a provincial backwater, albeit one with some nice old bits. As Sweden rose as a regional power (to the detriment of Denmark), with possessions on both sides of the Baltic, it decided to build a super-duper new naval base from scratch on a deserted archipelago on the south coast which became Karlskrona. Built in the latest baroque style the main town was off limits to civilians well into the Cold War era, but with the decreasing importance of the military it is now diversifying into a student and IT town.

Kalmar castle, at one time the capital of the short-lived union of Sweden, Denmark and Norway.