I have good memories of Copenhagen, it felt more light hearted than the other Scandinavian capitals. I wouldn't mind visiting it again. Here we have an open air concert in front of the City Hall.
A market scene. Notice the frisør, probably adopted from French friseur. The Bethesda mission building in the background also provides a location where the picture was taken.
Copenhagen crowd. It might have been a religious gathering, from the headdresses worn.
This is most likely one end of the Strøget, a very long shopping street. The amount of car-free spaces in Copenhagen is one of the reasons it's very pedestrian and bicycle friendly.
Nyhavn (New Harbour) which historically was a disreputable area due to the sailors, but is now just a tourist attraction.
And of course how could I not visit the emblem of Copenhagen, Hans Christian Andersen's Little Mermaid.
There are more pictures to come, of a visit to the Tivoli gardens in the evening and beer in the Carlsberg brewery.
I made a stopover in Malmö in southern Sweden before returning to Copenhagen.
It was pleasant enough, there wasn't any place of a cultural nature that I had to visit; it was just a place to catch my breath.
At the time, the economy was centred around the harbour, being the closest Swedish port to Denmark.
It's amazing that now with the Internet I can look up the names on the buildings and confirm that the photos were taken there.
This Swede was rather protective of her children.
The hostel was in the outskirts of the city and a walk took me past a farm where they were making hay while the sun shone.
The main pedestrian street. It seems that the Øresund Bridge to Denmark has revitalised Malmö's economy, away from heavy industries towards knowledge industries and it's a very liveable place now.
Finland is a land of lakes and I wanted to see some of them so I travelled northwards to Tampere, Finland's second largest urban area. Alas, its latitude is only 61N so I was nowhere near the Arctic circle. It's the furthest north I have been on the planet so far.
When I got there I rang up Arto, a Finnish hosteller I had met on my travels before Finland, I seem to recall in Switzerland. Unfortunately he had just come back from a long trip elsewhere in Europe and was simply too exhausted to meet up. We sent each other postcards occasionally over the following years until we lost touch.
I don't remember where these photos were taken from. Obviously some high vantage point overlooking the city.
Strangely one thing I remember of the hostel was that the best option for dinner was a pizza from the restaurant downstairs. It wasn't too bad either. It may even have been run by real Italians.
As you would expect, products like paper pulp from coniferous wood are an important mainstay of the economy.
I watched the operation of this canal lock for a while. At that time in my life I hadn't seen many canal locks yet.
The low angle of this shot suggests that I was actually on the boat going through the lock so perhaps I took some kind of tour.
I have no pictures of the return trip to Helsinki, and thence Stockholm. I've already posted the pictures of Stockholm in a previous entry so the story will continue in Malmö.
This is the imposing ferry I arrived by. It was like a floating hotel really, and I imagine a civilised way to travel if you had a berth.
Helsinki is a severely neat city. Somehow I felt that suited its northern clime. This is its cathedral. All these places have long tongue twisting Finnish names so I try not to misspell any.
I found a small market. I always enjoy browsing at markets. I must have been intrigued by these furs. They were sleek to the touch.
I rang up Päivi, the girl I had met back in Nice. Obviously there was no Internet in those days so she must have given me her number. We met and she showed me a place to have an economical lunch.
She took me to some of the sights of Helsinki. This is the interior of Temppeliaukio, a Lutheran church that is embedded in rock. A very modern design which attracts a lot of visitors.
Sibelius was the Finn most familiar to me, from his music. His compositions evoke the stark beauty of this northern land. This sculpture is dedicated to him.
I corresponded with Päivi sporadically over the next few years. We lost touch when she got married.
I visited the Vasa in her museum. She was a ship that sank in 1628 in a strong wind only 1300m into her maiden voyage. She was top heavy, a design flaw, Sweden was a great power and the king was impatient to launch her. Sound familiar? Other than the salvage of her cannons she lay undisturbed in Stockholm harbour until she was salvaged in 1961. She was extraordinarily well preserved due to the cold Baltic waters and a snapshot of Swedish society four centuries ago.
In 1988 she was moved to the Vasa Museum. When I visited her, she was in a temporary museum called the Vasavarvet, being treated with polyethylene glycol. Today the Vasa Museum is the most popular in Scandinavia.
Skansen on Djurgården (obviously a cognate of Tiergarten in German) is an open air museum and park, and a quick way to get an introduction to Swedish natural history and culture.
And if you are a kid, get to view or pet animals.
Up till then I had only heard about runestones in Norse tales.
There was a demonstration workshop on the grounds.
A major shopping street in Stockholm.
Most of the photos following were actually taken on the return visit but posted here to avoid breaking up Stockholm across two posts.
I remember passing a Swedish girl outside a shopping centre who was wearing a fishnet blouse that left nothing of her buxom chest to the imagination. She swished past so fast that by the time my brain registered what I'd seen she was gone. I thought, wow the Swedes are very relaxed about public nudity. If this happened today I would look around to see if there were fashion photographers following her.
When I first arrived I called at the tourist centre for a city map. Unfortunately they were out of the English version, but seeing that they had the French version, I asked for that. I should check if I still have it in my keepsakes,
I missed good films after all those weeks on the road. I had seen mention of Fitzcarraldo, a film by Werner Herzog, a filmmaker I respected. So I thought, surely they would have English voiceovers for an international film? Today I don't understand my flawed logic. As it turned out, it was voiced in German and subtitled in Swedish. I had to see it again in London to get the full story. Later, in Rochester, I saw Les Blank's "making of" film, Burden of Dreams. The intriguing thing is that Herzog pulled off an engineering feat equivalent to what the fictional Fitzcarraldo had done in the screenplay.
Stockholm has a unique hostel, the af Chapman which used to be a training ship for the Swedish Navy. I didn't try to get a bed here as I knew it would be very popular. But I did pay it a visit. I stayed in a hostel in the suburbs, very bucolic but also some ways by metro. I remember the stations were deep underground, perhaps to be well under the frost line?
Stockholm has a gorgeous harbour.
It is flaunted a lot in tourist brochures. Or go to an Ikea store to see a poster.
Colourful sculptures in the vicinity of the water.
Gamla Stan, the old town, with narrow alleyways.
And lots of milling tourists.
Some scenes of Stockholm taken before heading south to Malmö. This looks like a market but I remember nothing of it.
Some kind of formal occasion.
A street entertainer.
Geometric pattern on the plaza.
In the evening I boarded an overnight ferry bound for Helsinki. The archipelago that surrounds Stockholm is impressive. Stockholm is one of several cities that lays claim to the title Venice of the North.
There are islands of all sizes, some with what looked like holiday homes with boat landings.
One that is a navigational landmark with lighthouse.
Hackneyed but I can't resist photographing sunsets.
I waited for the yacht to line up to take this photo.
It was comfy inside the huge ship. I had not booked a berth or even a seat so I found a suitable spot in the lounge for my sleeping bag. It wasn't the most restful of nights, mainly due to the noise from people going past even in the small hours of the morning (duty free alcohol in international waters might be an explanation), so I was bleary eyed the next morning in Helsinki. You'll get to see the size of the ship in the next post.
