Sharjah

Summer is over, the weather is good and tourists are streaming into the UAE.  And not just into Dubai - last weekend the final race of the Formula 1 season was held in Abu Dhabi, which meant real traffic, hour-long queues for taxis, and strange sightings across the UAE.  In other words, a perfect time to leave town and explore Sharjah.

Sharjah is the emirate directly north of Dubai.  It has taken us anywhere from 15 minutes to two hours to travel between downtown Dubai and the city of Sharjah.  This time we left Abu Dhabi on Friday morning, guaranteeing a relatively traffic-free trip.

Sharjah is the most conservative emirate and is famous for its cultural center.  It has nearly half of all the museums in the UAE and a well-preserved fort.




The Sharjah Museum of Islamic Civilization had artifacts from the Berlin Museum of Islamic Art when we were there, but we enjoyed the permanent collection, which focuses especially on contributions to science, most of all.

We were most pleasantly surprised by Sharjah's corniche.  Sharjah is built along two bays, and there is a great running and bicycle path along both, as well as on a bridge which connects the two.  We were very, very slightly reminded of the amazing bicycle paths in Stockholm.

The Blue Souq is a pair of beautiful buildings right on the water.  We were eager to be charmed by the inside, but unfortunately it is more mall-y than souq-y.

We enjoyed getting to know one of the other emirates, and may be back for its most famous event, the Festival of Lights.

Spring-time in Stockholm

Stockholm is one third water...

....one third park....



...and one third city.



It is also a hundred percent cute. Here is a public bathroom:

 Here is a phone booth:

And here is a bridge.



When we visited friends in Stockholm a few weeks back, when the city was flooded with spring.The whole world smelled like lilacs.





Our friends live on Kungsholmen, an island brimming with young people. We saw them in full force, running around the island, picnicking by the water, and sunbathing. We have never seen so many buff, happy-looking people in one place.

We expected to find a city -- instead, we often felt as if we were in the middle of a wedding, or a sappy rom com. (Imagine living in the grassy church scene at the end of Funny Face for a week! Only Fred and Audrey were missing.) We couldn't go for a walk without seeing baby birds -- we counted five different kinds. Unfortunately, no good documentation for the goslings, signets, and more obscure sorts of baby duck we encountered. A mallard, and our apologies.












We saw willows weeping, fields of lush dandelions and banks of violets.


We played mini-golf....

....went running, and biked, and even kayaked around the islands, all the while shepherded by our lovely hosts. 

Stockholm is perfect for biking, and we biked everywhere, stopping for fika (the Swedish word for coffee + sweet snack), and enjoying the sunshine. Our hosts were charmed by the warm weather, and we were delighted to be able to move around without breaking a sweat.
 

It was so beautiful out, that we had a hard time going inside. We did make it into the national church, where the royal family has marriages and baptisms. A wonderful impromptu song broke out from other visitors. 

And we had to go in to see the Vasa, a ship which set out on her maiden voyage in 1628, and promptly sank. The Baltic Sea is brackish, and the Vasa remained well-preserved underwater until 1961, when a massive international team managed to pull her up, whole. The ship may not be sea-worthy, but we were impressed anyway.

We didn't expect to enjoy Swedish food as much as we did (Mary Wollstonecraft is far out of date, but she was so damning of the fare that her censure stuck). The tradition of sandwiches for breakfast made us extremely happy, as did other sandwiches: here, skagen, shrimp mixed with caviar and dill on toast, made by our hosts. 

On the sweeter end of the spectrum, we tried chocolate balls and princess torte, and were not in the least disappointed.

Well, Nick was.

But disappointments couldn't linger long. There was so much else to do, and see, and eat, and smell, and chat about. 

 

 

There were cliffs to climb and views to see, grass to loll in and flowers to gaze upon.

 

 

It was a wonderful week of being outside in a beautiful city with dear friends.  

 

Grinda

"In the summer twilight islands seem to rise 

on the horizon. Old villages are on 

their way, retreating further into woods

on the seasons' wheels with magpie creaking.

When the year kicks off its boots, and the sun

climbs higher, the trees break out in leaves 

and take wind and sail out in freedom."

-Tomas Tranströmer, 17 Poems

On our last full day in Sweden, we took a ferry to Grinda, one of the islands in the Stockholm archipelago, where Tranströmer's lines seemed to come true. The whole world seemed ready to sail out in freedom -- leaves, birds, sky, sun....and us along with it.  

Inhabited since the middle ages, Grinda was largely farmland until it was bought by Henrik Santesson, the first director of the Nobel Foundation. Santesson built a lovely villa there, but sold the island to the city of Stockholm in 1944. It has since become a park and nature preserve. 

About half the island is a working farm, with cows, goats and chickens. Fresh eggs sit for sale inside the barn -- just take the eggs, and leave your money in a jar.

Trails fan through the pastures to the woods behind. We wandered through birch groves and cliffy outlooks, winding up again in the fields, surrounded by goats. Midway through our hike, our host realized that he'd spent his bachelor party creeping through those very woods -- army style, in the middle of the night. Our trip was a little less wild, but we enjoyed imagining his epic day a few months ago.

We have an ongoing debate over which is the greenest place in the world -- Evergreen State College in Olympia, Burke's Gardens in Virginia, or a little gravelly patch called Sowers Mill Dam Road....but Grinda, with its impossibly lush meadows backed by dense forest, gave us pause. You can see why...

Circling an island, however small it may be, makes us hungry. We stopped at the house Santesson built -- now a restaurant -- for lunch. (Lunch in Sweden is no sandwich affair. Sandwiches, we learned in Rattvik, are actually a breakfast food. Instead, we sat down for dinner, round one. And what a dinner it was!)

Two heaping baskets of bread, some seafood stew and asparagus-gnocchi later, we wandered back to the dock, full of sun and cider, ready to laze on the beach before setting sail (or, rather more prosaically, catching the ferry) home.

Rättvik

Welcome to Rättvik, our overnight excursion from Stockholm! Rättvik is a small town (population five thousand) in Dalarna, a region famous in Sweden for its forests, ski slopes, classic vacation cottages, and lovely lakes. (In Girl with a Dragon Tattoo, Superintendent Morell retires to Dalarna, stumped.)

It was a short stroll from the train station along the lake to our hotel....but first we stopped at the local grocery store, where we obtained these gems....and ate them outside. 

And then it was on to our retreat house right next to Lake Siljan. The retreat house had a sauna, a boat house, a church, a ping pong table, a breakfast spread, a gym, and special wooden stables for church-goers (not currently in use). 

Though we enjoyed exploring the church, playing ping pong, and our massive breakfast (consisting primarily of sandwiches, which made us feel very Swedish), we were most grateful for the view. 

The town wasn't touristy at all (and there was scarcely anybody about), so we wandered the lake shores, the 600 meter-long dock (with trees growing at the end)...

...saw children's projects at the local library....

...and grown-up projects, too. 

The town wasn't quite empty....along the edge of the lake, we saw a lovely little fitness group, dancing to songs from Grease. When we retire here, we will definitely join in.



Before catching our train home, we meandered up the hillside. Having already spent a few days in Stockholm, we were accustomed to smelling lilacs wherever we went, but the view, the copious wildflowers, and the lovely little houses made us a little sad to wander back down.

Sweden & Scotland Reading Lists

Sweden

Mary Wollstonecraft's Letters Written in Sweden, Norway and Denmark (1796). Full of interesting observations (one, "it may be delivered as an axiom, that it is only in proportion to the industry necessary to acquire wealth that a nation is really benefited by it," might resonate with Abu Dhabi residents). 

Selma Lagerlof. The Saga of Gosta Berling. First woman to win a Nobel for literature. 

Tomas Tranströmer The Great Enigma: New Collected Poems (contains his 1954 17 Poems, for which he won the 2011 Nobel). 

Stieg Larson. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. Perfect plane reading....we can find out what all the fuss was about. Henning Mankell is also on the list, should we run out of material. 

Scotland

Samuel Johnson. Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland (1775).  

James Boswell. The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides (1785). Yes, these are straight off of Margaret's lists for oral exams. Did she read it then? She can't remember. Will she read it now? Definitely.

Robert Burns, Complete Poems (includes his 1786 Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect).

All things Walter Scott. All things. But perhaps his 1802 - 1803 The Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border is best for evening reading, and lolling beside lochs, and huddling over tea to avoid summer rain. And John G. Lockhart's Memoirs of the Life of Walter Scott (first published 1837 - 38) - but very selectively. There are ten volumes -- that's at least nine too many, for carrying purposes -- in the second edition.

Robert Louis Stevenson, Kidnapped (1886). Loads of Scottish landscapes, and loads more adventure. 

And tour books, but we haven't got those yet. If we splurge, we will go with Eyewitness, as usual, but if we find extremely cheap, older guides in our favorite Abu Dhabi used bookstore, we may be tempted into roughing it with those. Suggestions -- on reading of any kind -- are very welcome.