NetDynam 2.0

Our first sight of Sweden was from a train. The tickets had been bought for us, otherwise we might have taken the time to go by ferry to Stockholm and travelled by train to Växjö, but as it was we landed in Copenhagen and then boarded a train north, over the long bridge after the tunnel under the water which separates Denmark from Sweden. The airport at Copenhagen, at least when you get out of customs, is relatively tight-fitting, and not so many people in the hall felt crowd-like and made navigating about somewhat difficult. There were few places to sit about and wait, and few places to obtain food. It appeared that if you were waiting with the departee to leave, then there was not much to do or places to go in Copenhagen airport. We found a table and chairs anyway, on the mezzanine level, a place squeezed in between elevators and the SAS speedy entry and the line up of take-away food counters, which P dolefully scanned and reported that there was not much on offer of any quality we’d admire. We had to wait about an hour before our train departed.



Once we’d found the correct carriage and boarded the train, we’d had trouble securing our seats. A couple was already sitting in the seats in the area we were assigned. I said that we belonged in one of these seats—the one next to the window with the woman who had her feet on the seat opposite which was also reserved on our tickets—but they would not move, and offered us to sit opposite each of them, but I was not inclined to do so. They said we could sit there till Malmö when they would get off, but since there were other seats in the carriage, we repaired to them for the first part of our journey. I was a little surprised at their behaviour, but I then decided it must be due to my having been staying in Finland—for a start, I launched into English at them, assuming everybody spoke English, which was not the case in the Danish train bound for Sweden. In Finland to assume otherwise would have been wrong. And secondly, the Finns seem notably quiet and unwilling to make a fuss—they do not sit in a seat not assigned them, and if they do, they jump out rather than appear obstructive.

My first impression of Sweden when we emerged from the tunnel and began speeding smoothly through the countryside at a hacking 170kph was of an overpowering neatness. Everything so clean and well-swept and orderly. The fields, newly planted and growing a thin covering of green pasture or more likely some form of grain, the houses and their barns and out-buildings all swept and enclosed with a couple of trees about them for comfort—all neat and tidy. The forests, planted in rows, pretty tidy too—until you came to a place where felling had recently gone on, and the ground left uneven and strewn with stumps, broken saplings, and occasional boulders looking a little untidy, even if the newly cut up logs were all the same size and roundness and all stacked up neatly next to the denuded field.

Spring had obviously started in Sweden—still a mite behind the stage it had been when we were in the UK a week or so previously, but plainly Spring was marching north. Eventually it will hit Helsinki just when we are about to leave. At the time in Sweden, the trees were just that pale scattered green, and many still without leaves, although the birches were getting along nicely.

I also noticed that the favoured and obviously traditional colour of the houses and the barns was a type of dried blood colour, a dark red, a colour I later learnt was originally derived from iron oxide. I noted that the barns and many of the houses had a hipped roof, and remembered the same type of thing in the mid-west—well, Indiana and Illinois anyway—that I’d seen before. It was only now that I thought that this was where the style originated. I’d assumed that the red barn was a typically American feature of the countryside, but it seems the style has its origins in Sweden. This is in contrast to Finland where the wooden houses as well as some of the newer apartment blocks are predominantly shades of yellow. This colour red was also apparent in the curved beams and girders holding up the roof of Alvesta and Malmö stations. I peered and peered at them from the train, thinking that they could not possibly be wooden, that they were perhaps wood-formed concrete, but they sure looked as if they were imitating great big fat wooden beams, carefully honed. If I’d had felt more at ease with the train timetable, I would have taken a quick jump off the train to take a photo from the platform. On the way back, however, I risked it.

Although I eventually decided that they were concrete, two of the more modern buildings at Växjö University threw doubt on this, as they had employed very large, and very long wooden beams as apparent structural elements on the exterior of the buildings, which, from a distance, I assumed were steel girders. But no—they are indeed made of timber.

The town of Växjö is a sort of country town of about 80,000 people. Its biggest industry seems to be the university there, and that is indeed why we have come to this place—as academic gypsies, as P dubs our peripatetic ways. Växjö claims Linnaeus as its most famous son, and indeed, after amalgamation with another university they will both be then called Linnaeus University. The streets of the main town near the railways station are cobbled and fairly quiet, and there are racks filled with parked bicycles everywhere. It has a pleasant country town atmosphere. But for the same reason it is difficult to get a good coffee… and here I show my terribly bourgeois sensitivities …about which I do not mind. A good coffee is  a necessary prerequisite of civilisation, and I will pay for the privilege.

The final day we are in town, we have a holiday and walk about the streets. It is sunny and warm and the main street of town, a type of open mall with only bicycle traffic, is thronging with people. The sidewalk cafes are packed and there is lolling about on seats and chatting in groups everywhere. It is a holiday atmosphere. In the afternoon we note that people are gathering in the square, others are walking to and fro with cases of liquor, some are already sitting on balconies alive with hubbub. We wonder why so many people are having parties, then note a brass and wind band forming in one part of town, with a small crowd gathering about. It then dawns on us that the following day is May 1st, and remember that in Europe this is a big deal. Streets which are normally quiet at night have changed into those typical of some thriving metropolis.

The next day, a Friday, we leave at a time when the shops are normally open for business, but the streets are eerily quiet. Not so down at the railway station where we are to board the train back to Copenhagen airport. There are plenty of passengers waiting to get on the train, and indeed it is packed to the gunwales. We are lucky to have booked a seat. On the plane we fly north over Sweden for quite some time before heading off across the Baltic Sea back to Finland. I look down at the patchwork of greens patterned with winding rivers and blotches of lakes usually surrounded by little towns joined in turn by long snaking pale-coloured roads. Boats and harbours on the coast we leave behind, shortly to see the first signs of the Finnish coast: an array of randomly arranged spots and splotches and irregular shapes of small and large islands stretching for miles into the sea. It is difficult to determine a coastline at all. When do the water bodies become lakes, and when inlets? I muse to myself that now the water is no longer frozen, many people will be cut off or have to take the long way round to get off their islands, whereas just a few weeks previously, they could have walked or driven across the frozen surfaces, which are regularly marked for such purposes. As we come in to land I see the bare earth here is a pale yellow colour, that the only green is still the pine and spruce plantations and that the other notable trees are yet vertical sticks. Spring is not yet back to Finland.