stockholm in a weekend

Not last weekend, but the weekend before, I went and visited Stockholm; Sweden's largest city and capital. From my Australian perspective it's funny that the largest city is the capital - seems like it's getting everything its own way. Makes you realise Canberra is an anomaly, but we already knew that right? :-) Anyway, the Swede's are quite generous when it comes to "the youth". In Sweden you are a youth until you are 25, which means that I get discounted public transport tickets - and even better: discounted airfares with some of the Swedish airlines. Invited to a party in Stockholm, I checked the airfare, and it's less than $200.00 Australian. Going to Stockholm for the weekend was a no brainer.

Another thing an Melbourne native should get used to overseas is most big cities have a rail-link from the airport to the centre of town (Melbourne doesn't!). It shouldn't be a cause for excitement, but hell, I was anyway: the Arlanda Express took 20 minutes to hit Stockholm Central (40km away), and most of the way it was travelling at around 185km/h. (Possibly the fastest I've been on land?..)

The party was fun. Met a bunch of people from work and elsewhere - both Australian and Swedish. And also an Aussie couple that had become Swedes! There was plenty of discussion, nachos, music and red wine. The low down is that you need to visit the Vasa and Gamla Stan when in Stockholm.

The weather gods have been favouring me so far. Awesome snow on arrival, and now only a couple of weeks later Stockholm produced a sunny Saturday for all to enjoy.

First stop when exploring Stockholm is the tourist bureau. Purchasing the Stockholm card seems to be the sensible thing to do for a weekend - it allows unlimited use of the public transport system and entry to all the museums and other attractions. It's a short walk from there to Gamla Stan - otherwise known as "Old Town". Gamla Stan exists completely on the island of Stadsholmen (literally: City Island), and until the 19th century the Stockholm was contained on the island. Given medieval towns were prone to burning down, Gamla Stan contains architecture from the 17th century onwards. This includes the Swedish royal palace which burnt down in 1697 and had to be rebuilt. The palace is still in use today as the official residence of the head of state, and it's open to visitors. It wasn't that interesting however. I should have visited the Swedish parliament (the Riksdag) instead, but I didn't know I was looking at it, even when I took a photo of it! Ooops, haha.

Stockholm city hall is an impressive brick building on the corner of one of the islands. Unfortunately the hall was closed for a function on the weekend I visited.


Wandering back out onto the streets, I almost missed the Nobel Prize museum. Don't miss it though - it is really interesting! Over head is a rail which constantly rotates profiles of each of the winners, down the middle you can read about the things that have been "prize worthy" through-out the years and the social and political context these have fitted into. To one side there is a theatrette showing 3 minute interviews with the prize winners - explaining their inventions, discoveries, or contributions in their own words.

At the back there is a space for temporary exhibitions. Currently the museum is hosting "Design4Science", an exhibition dedicated to the sculptures, illustrations, sketches and models that have helped advance molecular biology. For example the structure of haemoglobin was not known until Max Perutz built a model of it from x-ray images he'd taken. Some of the most complex ideas can be simplified by models, such as Ahmed Zewail's 1999 prize winning invention, a method to photograph chemical reactions. The video below demonstrates the concept: a laser is broken by a spinning disc with slots in it, this is aimed at a fast moving 'thing' (i.e. a chemical reaction).

Not content with finishing a day of tourism just yet, I headed to the Armémuseum. Yup, that's a funky Swedish spelling of Army. The museum documents military history in general as well as specific Swedish history. Unfortunately all the information is in Swedish! I got by, but I'm sure it's a lot more interesting if you know the language ;-)

A quintessential Swedish military innovation is moving their bicycle infantry around not by marching, and not even by the soldiers peddling their bikes, but instead the bicycles were towed by a tractor!

That's enough science, culture, and history to work up an apetite! So that night I met up with Shona, a friend from university and work, and one of her colleagues for dinner. We had Indian, and after joking with the waiter that Swede's can't eat hot food, they served up the hottest vindaloo you've ever had! We barely got through it alive. It had to be washed down with beer - of course! After a false start in a crappy bar (though it was cheap), we then hit the suggestively named Berns Salonger. Berns' is quite fancy, and with fancy came the famous Swedish alcohol prices (i.e. expensive!), but it was fun.

Sunday brought an overcast day, but that didn't matter too much, I headed indoors to check out the massive Vasa. The Vasa is a 17th century warship that the Swede's built, and then it promptly sank on its maiden voyage. In fact it didn't even get out of Stockholm! Why? This is a classic study into not being able to say "No" to a demanding customer. The King demanded a massive ship: it was to carry 64 guns, all to be heavy artillery, and 300 soldiers. Ship design in those days usually had one gun-deck, but to accommodate 64 guns the Vasa had two. Putting heavy artillery on the upper deck made the ship unstable and top heavy. The ship was to be manoeuvrable, and so it was built too narrow to support its weight. A stability test (30 men running from side to side) showed that it was unstable, but the Admiral ignored the results because the King was fighting a war in Poland and needed it immediately.

Can anyone see the parallels in software engineering here? Customer demands every feature, plus a few more; testing shows its got bugs but the customer needs the software today; deliver the software and then watch it crash!

Given that it sank, you'd expect this all to be history, but the Baltic Sea isn't as salty as other seas. The ship was well preserved in these waters, and in the 1960's it was found, lifted, sealed with plastic, and then put in a museum. It's all quite impressive and well worth a visit. It's so big that I couldn't get far enough away from it to get a good overall photo of it.

Just down the road from the Vasa is Skansen - a Swedish version of Soveriegn Hill. I was mainly attracted by the promise of seeing some bears. The promise was fulfilled: they had recently woken up from hibernation and were roaming around their enclosure, and even play fighting a bit.

There were an array of other Swedish animals from wild wolves, wolverines, elk, otters and seals, to domesticated horses, ponies, sheep and goats. The main purpose to Skansen is to preserve what life was like in Sweden before and during the early parts of the industrial age. Not that thrilling really.

After Skansen it was time to get back on the Arlanda express, head to the airport, and get whisked back to Göteborg and work for another week.

hanoi's cultural sites

Work today (Sunday) has been cancelled!. I took the opportunity to sleep in : ) The hotel had an Easter Sunday brunch, which was good because it didn't start until late in the morning... making it quite compatible with sleeping in! This afternoon, one of the local engineers is going to take Mark and I out somewhere in Hanoi. But for now I've got some time to write about yesterday's touring.

Yesterday I went and toured some of Hanoi's cultural sites: the Temple of Literature, the Museum of Fine Arts and, the Army Museum. Along the way I also walked through Lenin Park. I quite like the way Hanoi has parks and lakes scattered throughout the town. They provide some relief from the busy streets. Lenin Park, as the name suggests, is named after Vladimir Lenin. It has a statue of Lenin, which the local kids were climbing all over. I missed getting a photo of them all over him, but here they are afterwards, posing:

The Temple of Literature, or Văn Miếu, also had nice gardens. It was founded in 1070 as a Confucian temple, but 6 years later became Vietnam's first university. Some of the architecture is from the 11th century. It is probably the only place in the country that has architecture that old.

Of course over the centuries the temple has had a few additions. The most historically significant addition is the stone steles which record every doctor laureate who graduated from 1484 onwards. These steles are mounted on the backs of stone turtles - one of the symbolically important animals in Vietnam. Turtles indicate stability, and the king of the time recognised the importance of having well educated subjects.

This reads "... virtuous and talented men are state-sustaining elements: The strength and the prosperity of a state depend on its stable vitality and it becomes weaker as such vitality fails. That is why all the saint emperors and clear-sighted kings didn't fail in seeing to the development of men of talent and the employment of literati to develop this vitality."

Over the next 300 years the names, and birth-places, of 1,306 graduates were recorded on these stones. The kings themselves set the questions of the final examinations. I saw some paintings in the museum I visited next, which showed the joy of the villagers when a graduate returns to their home town.

These days the temple is used for ceremonies, and hosts (according to the taxi driver) around 1,000,000 tourists a year. Out the front of the temple there is a stone commanding horsemen dismount before entering. These days however, there is motorcycle parking inside the grounds, and they don't have to dismount before entering!

Next I wandered over to the Museum of Fine Arts. This is housed in a massive French colonial building. Unfortunately camera's were not permitted inside the Museum, so again the quality of the photos is not so good as I had to surreptitiously use my mobile phone camera. I visited the ceramics exhibition first, but I found that pretty boring and moved on quickly. Next I visited the exhibition of native Vietnamese costumes. These were slightly more interesting, but didn't hold my attention for long. Then I came to the contemporary art exhibition. This was fantastic! Of course war has heavily influenced the previous 2 or 3 generations of Vietnamese, and this was reflected in the paintings and sculptures exhibited.

In the late 1940's and early 1950's the Vietnamese fought the French, in an attempt to gain independence. The above painting illustrates the jungle on fire, with an anti-aircraft missile chasing an unseen French aircraft. Below is a painting that depicts Việt Minh tanks rolling into Saigon in 1975. The paintings were quite compelling, and I'd recommend going to see them. There are easily more than 100 items in the contemporary exhibition.

Lacquer is a traditional Vietnamese material used by artists as there are native trees that produce lacquer. Most of the the paintings, old and new, were lacquer paintings. The sculptures were all made of bronze, and this was also a traditional Vietnamese material.

Before leaving I also visited an exhibition of some uncommon Buddhist sculptures from the 1800's. Uncommon because instead of depicting religious figures, they depicted ordinary people. It has been suggested that the artists used the religion as an excuse to produce sculptures, and maybe obtain funding. In actual fact they wanted to do their own thing, so it was only very loosely tied back to Buddhism. Luckily for the artists, the king at the time (who was Buddhist) really liked them and used them to decorate his court. The king was on to something too, I quite liked them as well!

Moving on now to the Army Museum, I arrived at the same time as three bus-loads of young army recruits. As part of their training they must have to learn about Vietnamese military history. There's plenty to learn too! While the museum focuses mainly on the war with the French, there are significant amounts of captured American hardware, as well as smaller exhibits of ancient weapons. In this photo the recruits are being told about a captured French artillery piece:

I suspect the communist party had a fair say in the exhibits of the Army Museum as everything always pointed to Vietnamese victories. Furthermore I was surprised at the emphasis placed on the war with the French. It seems that this war was more important in the minds of the Vietnamese. Sometimes some of the translations might have been a bit askew, such as the caption on a French helmet riddled with bullet holes: "a steel helmet - evidence of the failure of the French".

I'd always (mistakenly) thought that the war between the Americans (and Australians) and the Vietnamese was between well equipped armies and guerillas. I hadn't realised that the Chinese and Soviets had equipped the Vietnamese too, and that it was a war between two well equipped sides. The Vietnamese had MiG fighter jets, tanks and anti-aircraft armaments. They shot down over 2,000 American aircraft. In addition they captured more aircraft when they took airfields along the way. In a funny kind of communist way, people can be heroes of the republic, but so can pieces of equipment! This MiG-21 fighter is a hero of the Vietnamese republic for shooting down 14 aircraft:

The museum also featured some war-based artwork. There were some paintings inside, and a few sculptures scattered around outside. One sculpture was a massive combobulation of different pieces of destroyed French and American aircraft. Below is a photo of just one jet engine amongst all the different parts:

Outside the museums, I had to tell a few enterprising locals that I didn't want to take a motorcycle back to the hotel, I'd much prefer a taxi. It was well after lunch time, and I was pretty hungry. After 2 weeks of having Vietnamese lunches I really really wanted a sandwich. Hence I used room service for the first time, and ordered a club sandwich and a coffee. It was pretty good : )