photography: the fine edge between spring and winter in sweden

I have not had the time I would like to take pictures lately but here is a taste of the drawn out end of winter here …

The coolest part of this?  I ride past this water on my way to work.  And getting on the bike again was a dream.

This is misleading because it was the only day so far where the kids did not wear snowsuits out.  Maybe tomorrow again, as it was over 10 degrees Celsius today.  But last year it took until mid-April.

I love taking pictures of sand and bikes.  I have no idea why.  But early spring sand cakes give me hope for summer.

Photography: winter in stockholm as seen by a five year old

I give over the blog today to a guest photographer – my five-year-old daughter.

These pictures were taken with a Fisher Price camera with a broken battery cover and a smudgy and apparently uncleanable lens.  There is no zoom but a surprisingly sensitive auto flash.

On the way to the grocery store.  An eye for hearts.

The cobblestones of Old Town on a weekend outing

Somewhere in downtown Stockholm

A bus stop in our neighborhood.  I think the smudgy lens gives a haunting, and accurate, feel to the Swedish winter.

An interior shot

Photography: The destruction of the ghost dagis

It is called the ghost dagis (Dagis is the Swedish word for preschool. It is in our neighborhood, and it was condemned soon after we moved in.  For a while, the municipality mowed the lawn, and we played in its private, though decaying yard.  And sometimes other preschools would go there to play too, with the sounds of children echoing from behind the empty fence.

Then they let it go, and it got lost behind its big fence and between its stately neighbors.

We never heard any ghosts there, though.

They took down the ghost dagis these past few weeks, and I have been oddly fascinated, taking random, bad pictures with my phone, as the ghosts fly into the gray winter sky.

I like the graffiti here.

This was a week ago. There is nothing but rubble now.

Salvaging details …

Photos: Skating on a frozen lake in Sweden on a Sunday morning

We had a birthday party for my son – he turned three! – this weekend, and the day after, I got to go skating for an hour. I am not a good skater and I use hockey skates, not the long-distance kind, but I do not fall down, and it helps me embrace the winter and the crystaline, yet weak, morning light.

Our lake is surrounded by ugliness – even more so with the new national soccer stadium looming over it – but it is protected still by a thin wall of trees so you can feel the quiet, especially in the frozen winter when you can skate around and around on the big ice road.

 

 

 

My apologies to the good people at the Seattle airport

So I complained about the lack of play areas for kids at airports. But I had never been to Seattle, where they have this heaven for small children. We had a four hour layover and it saved us.

So between Stockholm and Seattle, we encountered two wonderful playgrounds.

Which leaves no excuses for all the other slackers. And, yes, I am looking at you Oakland.

In praise of playing – and play areas – at airports

We fly off tomorrow on a three-flight, 24-hour odyssey back to Sweden.   We do this sort of thing often enough.  And I have just two words for airports worldwide:  play area.

We stumbled upon on our first play area in Salt Lake City a few years ago, and it was like a gift from the heavens, with a big choir singing and everything.  Since then, we discovered a shabby one in Chicago, which likely saved us and hundreds of people on a series of airplanes from a toddler meltdown.

Seriously, why does not every airport have play areas?  All people do is complain about small kids on planes.  Why not give them a place to have fun before they get on board.  Why not get them out of the waiting areas?

A few weeks ago, in Stockholm, E and I wondered why the Stockholm airport had no play area.   It seemed thoughtless and odd.

Then we  found this, based on the work of a beloved early 20th-century children’s book illustrator Elsa Beskow:

 

Seriously, you could charge for this collaboration with Junibacken, a cool children’s museum in Stockholm, which opened in 2011.  It could be an attraction.  We might come early next time around.

Why is this sort of thing so hard?

Let us play, let us play, let us play.

Pedaling past traffic jams without even knowing it

I live near the traffic jam on the front of our local weekly.  The mess is because they’re putting in a tram line, which is very cool, but apparently a nightmare for drivers.

The beautiful thing?  I had no idea.  I ride my bike to work now, and if I didn’t ride, I would take the subway.  So the traffic patterns of my car-centric (for Sweden) Solna are a mystery to me.  We are talking about getting me a driver’s license but never for the day to day.

Here is something from a passage I wrote on why I still hate to drive:

But it took New York and New Jersey to finally take me from fast to angry, as I completed the crazy car trifecta of the Southland (LA), the Balkans and now the Tri-State area. I took a newspaper job that meant hours of driving up and down a 8-lane stop-and-go boulevard of dusty exurban strip malls. On weekends I suffered the potholes and chaos of New Jersey highways, the hell of the Brooklyn Bridge on a Friday night, and the gridlock of the West Side Highway on a Monday morning. I got buzzed time after time after time, almost always by young guys taking their rage out on me, never with the fastest car, now in a hand-me-down four-cylinder 2002 Dodge Neon.

Mine is not an aggressive rage. It is defensive, built on honor and a sense of outrage. I will not get in your face. But do not dare get in mine. Even then my anger does not ignite into a big ball of flame. I fume, sulk, hold a mean grudge. This withdrawn, quiet anger is just as male as the raving lunatic beating his chest, mirrored in how I cried easily as a child, and then learned not to cry.

Instead I learned to seethe.

The only problem with the bike riding is the dark.  I had to go buy a fluorescent vest today, to go with my bright yellow helmet.  It’s safe.  It’s necessary.  But I shudder to think what my 12-year-old self would say about me now.

Ahhh, to ride free in the California sun.

But I’ll take dorky over dead.  And I’ll take dorky over the traffic jam …