a visitor

Who's a lucky boy? Ja ha... That'd be me. I recently had a visitor drop in for a couple of weeks. My girlfriend, Belle, visited me in Göteborg.

It was time to share my knowledge of Swedish customs (lunch at 11:30am), language (tjena! hur är läget?), and food (inlagd sill). Of course it was a lot of fun showing off the city I'd been living in for the past four months, so far away from her and Melbourne.

First of all I had to serve some traditional Swedish foods. I served a mid-summer's style meal of inlagd sill, otherwise known as picked herring in English. Remember it's sill, and definitely not seal! Also served up with some fresh potatoes, boiled. Some of the herring was excellent, some of it not so.

Typically during the day we'd meet each other for lunch, as I was still working during the day. Something different in Göteborg compared to Melbourne is the ferry across the river, so typically we'd be catching that to meet in either Lindholmen or Järntorget. During the first week the weather looked pretty threatening, but usually it kept from raining too much.

It didn't stop us from checking out the sights around town, including walks along the canal, visiting the animals in Slottskogen (a large park) and going for after work drinks along über-trendy Avenyn.

Although the weather isn't always this cooperative in summer, in Sweden, luckily for us the weather did improve. The second week of Belle's stay was sunny and, would you believe it, hot!? Now it was time to get out an enjoy the best Göteborg has to offer. Personally I think the best activities are the outdoors ones too:

• cruising in the archipelago
• a picnic next at Delsjön
• outdoor dining in Haga
• drinks in the sunshine along Avenyn

We went on a cruise in the archipelago. It combined the lovely views of Göteborg's southern islands at sunset, and a wonderful summer meal: salmon, mussels, and as much shrimp as you could fit in (or be bothered shelling!). Highly recommended when in Göteborg (in summer... with good weather).

kicking things off with a parade

Last weekend was a nice, long, four day weekend. I think it was for most of Europe, whether they were celebrating May Day: for workers rights; or Ascension Day: a Christian holiday; or even Walpurgis Night or Day: a confused holiday for either Pagans, Satanists, or Roman Catholics.

In Göteborg they celebrate Walpurgis Night with a parade by Chalmers (a University in Göteborg) through the middle of the city. The parade is called The Cortège and students have been selling programmes for the event on the streets for a couple of weeks beforehand. The programme tells you what the floats in the The Cortège are all about. The Cortège satirises the previous year's worth of news, current affairs, and the affairs of shady celebrities.

A colleague of mine from Australia, Deepika, has an apartment overlooking the route of The Cortège, so we were able to avoid the crowds, and frantically try and work out what the hell each float was all about. Between bad attempts at translating the Swedish in the program, a little local knowledge and watching the floats, we were able to work out most of them.

Here are some of the floats. Such as this one, regarding the attempts to shut down The Pirate Bay, a Swedish bit torrent tracker:

Quite a number of the floats seemed to be a good excuse for the male students to cross dress. Paris Hilton is an easy target...

And the final photo I'll put here shows that Göteborg has the opposite problem to Melbourne with the weather forecasts: they get told it'll be sunny, but it seems to always rain! Can't say that's really been my Göteborg experience so far... thankfully! As usual more photos are here.

more sydney

After a nice long weekend touring the Rutherglen region of Victoria, I'm back in Sydney. Due to more delays in the project I'll be here next week as well. The nice thing about interstate as opposed to international travel is I can fly home for the weekend. And so I'll be doing that again. A good choice as it turns out it'll be raining in Sydney all weekend. Rain is good of course, but not quite to the same damaging extent as last weekend's storms I hope!

Luckily during the week days there has been fine weather. Warm during the day, but not quite warm enough in the morning to catch the ferry to work, still waiting to do that. By lunchtime however it's quite nice to head to Parramatta park to eat lunch. I was even able to donate blood yesterday at lunchtime. Parramatta has an impressive donation centre.

Last week I found some other Ericsson engineers to have a few dinners with; Stan and Dave. It's always nice to have company at dinner, to relax with and have a chat. I was able to give them a hard time about being old, and they got to give me a hard time about young. All in good fun. This week however I'm on my own again as they're back in Melbourne. Spanish tapas bars are a lone traveller's best friend - instead of looking like a loser sitting alone on a table, the traveller can look cool and sit at the bar. Other than looking cool, it's easy to befriend the barman and get some of that aforementioned dinner-time conversation.

Hence two of three nights I've had Spanish for dinner. Last night however, I headed out to Mark's house for dinner. As mentioned in an earlier post, Liz and Mark have just had twin girls. The twin's are now 15 weeks old and just starting to become self aware. For instance they're starting to listen to themselves when they make noises. This is a good thing as they don't scream as much : ) They're also starting to put their hands in their mouths and work out that it's part of their own body. Very cool stuff. They know who mum and dad are too. The twins would look at Mark or Liz if they were talking... and they'd cry if left with me!

Warning: if you don't like pink - do not have twin girls.

We watched the Rugby League state of origin match last night too. Alas, the Blue's couldn't quite pull a victory out for Mark though. It was Queensland's first victory at Homebush stadium. Tough times.