Farewell Holsby and on to Stockholm

Visiting Holsby was a special time for Melody. It was also quite enjoyable for me. I liked the village where we lived. All of the houses are close to the road, there are no fences between any of the houses. The place has a very open and friendly feel. The cars are only allowed to drive 30 km/h, so people just walk straight down the road. Many of the people associated with the school also live in the village, so they have a real community feel as well.

Here we are up in "the beak". Don't ask me what that means, ask Melody. In fact I better ask her again. It is the loft of the chapel where students hang out to play games and they have a little kiosk (that's um- concession in Canadian and tuckshop in Aussie).

 On the night we presented to the students, telling them lots of stories, some about people we know in Siberia, and some stories from the Bible. We also presented the idea of an internship in Siberia to the students. It turns out that a couple of them are interested in the idea. Here we are on Tuesday morning having breakfast and getting to know each other better.

Glad we didn't forget to get a family pic in front of the Holsby School.

This swing has memories for Melody.

 This is the chapel, where both services and classes are held.

We left Holsby on Tuesday morning after breakfast. What should be a four hour drive to Stockholm (we know because it took us that long the night we arrived from the ferry, while the kids were sleeping in the back of the car) took us six hours on the way back. Traveling with kids can be a real chore sometimes. Both of them complained a lot, PJ kept climbing out of his seat belt, and they of course fought a lot. It was made even worse by the constant rain while driving, which progressed from a steady drizzle to heavy rain for the last two hours into Stockholm.

We navigated our way into Stockholm, which is a busy city. There is one section that we had to drive through that is a network of underground tunnels, replete with exits and traffic. Traffic needs to change lanes in these tunnels. I can just see Vic Roads freaking out over this, as changing lanes in a tunnel in Melbourne is a serious taboo. Sweden has a reputation for being a highly safe country in Australia, but we would never approve of such dangerous behaviour. Mind you, it doesn't bother me, I think Australia is a bit of a nanny state anyway.

When we were getting close to the ferry, we took a wrong turn. I eventually found a place to stop and ask a local for directions back to the ferry. He kindly led us in his car through winding streets, all the way to the ferry. How kind!

Putting up with the rain on the roads made it a hard enough day as it was. We arrived at the ferry at 4pm, three hours before we needed to check in. We were allowed to leave our car in the queue (at the front) for the boat. We locked our car and decided to walk into town. We had planned to find the Stockholm Palace (Sweden is still a Monarchy). The rain of course made this a bigger task. We walked around in the rain for an hour and a half, getting ourselves quite wet in the end. But we were glad we did this, we had to see something of Stockholm, since we had come so far.

I could not take nearly as many photos as I wanted to because of the rain. As it was I got some water on one of my lenses and I was concerned. We found our way into a fancy hotel bar, where the bar manager let me use a cloth napkin to clean and dry my camera.

So, what follows is a short excerpt of our adventurous stroll through old town Stockholm.

A view of the old town island.

There are many cyclists in Finland and Sweden. They don't seem to mind getting wet either. We saw lots of cyclists. It made us feel a little less silly about getting so wet.

We loved discovering these little lanes, which are quite narrow. It would be a lot of fun to explore the whole island (only 600 metres long) for a few hours. This didn't happen though.

And we finally made it to the palace. This was where I got some water on my lens, because I just had to take a photo even if it was raining.

I must comment that the palace is quite grey. In fact I want to say something of a comparative nature between Russia and Scandinavia. Russia has often been accused of being grey in the past. There has been some truth to this, but in reality that is in the context of communism, when diversity was discouraged, and all colours merged into grey.

It is quite possible to take many examples of historical buildings from Scandinavia and Russia, and in so many cases the Russian equivalent is far more colourful. The case in point here being that the Winter Palace in St Petersburg is far more colourful than the Palace in Stockholm.

I remember our Swiss team mate commenting that the houses in their village that are being built are too colourful (colours such as peach and yellow). Personally, I like this. My prediction is that Russia will be very colourful again within a generation.

It's probably just another thing in a long list of how adjusted I am to life in Russia.