Sweden
Posted: Sun Sep 05, 2010 2:17 pm
A year ago in May, I had the chance to fly to Sweden to visit with a friend. It is a very beautiful and nature-loving country!
I was most amazed to see how clean and well kept everything was over there. All of the houses and buildings looked like they had just been freshly painted. Even the barns and sheds, which matched the color of the house. Unlike in the US, the predominant color for houses was red, not white. The second most common was a bright, sunny yellow.
The Swedes have an excellent forestry plan, as well. They take an area of trees, cut them down for timber, then they take the roots and the small limbs, chop them up and form them into logs. They sell these logs in the stores, and all the proceeds from the sales goes in to buy new seedlings to plant in the area they just harvested. Why can't we do that?
One of the coolest things we saw over there was Rokstenen church. It was a typical Swedish church, but sometime in it's history, someone found a huge stone built into the wall of the storeage shed owned by the church. This stone was covered in runes. The best that scholars can tell, it was carved in the 9th Century, and is memorial to the son of a Chieftain who died in battle. It invokes the name of Thor, and other figures that were prominent in Viking hisory.
Sweden is really a marvelous place to visit. We were very lucky that my friend speaks enough Swedish that he could communicate with the store clerks and such because not a great lot of the people we encountered could speak English. We didn't get anywhere near Stockholm, which might have more English speaking people. The smaller towns like Finspang, where my friend lives, does not.
I was most amazed to see how clean and well kept everything was over there. All of the houses and buildings looked like they had just been freshly painted. Even the barns and sheds, which matched the color of the house. Unlike in the US, the predominant color for houses was red, not white. The second most common was a bright, sunny yellow.
The Swedes have an excellent forestry plan, as well. They take an area of trees, cut them down for timber, then they take the roots and the small limbs, chop them up and form them into logs. They sell these logs in the stores, and all the proceeds from the sales goes in to buy new seedlings to plant in the area they just harvested. Why can't we do that?
One of the coolest things we saw over there was Rokstenen church. It was a typical Swedish church, but sometime in it's history, someone found a huge stone built into the wall of the storeage shed owned by the church. This stone was covered in runes. The best that scholars can tell, it was carved in the 9th Century, and is memorial to the son of a Chieftain who died in battle. It invokes the name of Thor, and other figures that were prominent in Viking hisory.
Sweden is really a marvelous place to visit. We were very lucky that my friend speaks enough Swedish that he could communicate with the store clerks and such because not a great lot of the people we encountered could speak English. We didn't get anywhere near Stockholm, which might have more English speaking people. The smaller towns like Finspang, where my friend lives, does not.
