Leer "Motos de nieve y las mejores cosas de la vida".
The day starts sunny and warm. Well, the idea of warm here is different to my idea of warm back at home. Having minus 6 degrees Celsius looks like a warm temperature here. The main activity today was the snow scooters and the dog sledge. Because we are going to stay outside for a long time the company in charge of the activity make us wear an additional overall and change our shoes. Even in a sunny day the additional protection is very welcome because the wind can freeze you quite quickly.
The snowmobiles are a nice piece of engineering, using the tactics learned over centuries about the snow to make a big and noisy toy for going around in winter. You get quick instructions on driving them, and you are ready to start the trip. They look powerful, and feel powerful, but when you are sit driving them you realize you are not going to use that much power. You are a beginner, and drive like a beginner. We could speed up only a couple of times, and were not able to reach even 80 kph.
The ride is designed to be fun even at low speed. The woods covered by snow, and the sound of the engines and the novelty of the situation make every turn a chance for surprise, and the sunny day we had made it even better. We drove for 30 minutes to the river, and there we had coffee and sandwiches. At that point we were supposed to change to the dog sledge, but a silly mistake made me lost it. Free advice: don't try to learn how to make snow angels when you are in tight schedule. The only possible solution for me was continuing the ride in the scooters, what was not bad at all, just incomplete.
The afternoon included more outdoors activities, namely downhill sledge and snow football. Snow sledge was really funny, even if you have to walk uphill in the snow for 5 minutes for a ride of 30 seconds. It can be dangerous, as one of the guys realized when he fell and broke his nose, but... what is life without risk?
Snow football is totally different from normal football. Is not that easy to play when the ground can disappear below your feet and let you stuck to the knees in snow. It has, however, the advantage of making me look a little bit less useless in the field than the grass version would do.
To close the day we decided to stay outside to see the aurora, but it was clowdy and we just went out for a walk in the night, and flowing our Swedish guides we ended up waking trough the snow in a frozen river. There were two things that really impressed me: first one was fining the ice under the snow. In the areas of the river where the snow was thin, you could just wipe it away and see the ice. It was hard as concrete, but was really only frozen water, we had snow on the top and water in the bottom of the ice. It was a layer water over water over water, and me walking on it. Isn't that cool? The second one was realizing how hard is walking in the snow. The las 50-70 meters of walking were done on a lot of snow. My legs totally disappeared with every step. So to walk a single step i had to take all of my body out of the snow, walk a step, and get stuck in the snow again. And it keeps like that for every step.
However it was a really nice feeling. After getting out of the river I felt tired, and my breathing was heavy, but I felt good to. It was new, enjoyable and made me remember that the best things in life are for free.
Showing posts with label trips. Show all posts
Showing posts with label trips. Show all posts
Thursday, January 22, 2009
Wednesday, January 21, 2009
Moose soup
Leer "sopa de alce"
The main activity today was a visit to a reindeer farm, managed by sami people. The sami are a ethnic minority living in the north. They are semi-nomad people, moving around big areas with their reindeers. They consider themselves sami more than Swedish, and because of that they are not really part of the national states where they live. It has the big disadvantage of making them foreigners, even if they owned the land for millenniums, in a similar fashion of indigenous people in the American continent. Because our host has a impossible to remember/pronounce name (wich included his genealogy up to his grand-father's father), so I'm going to call him "our host" from now on.
There are not that much to see in the farm, but there is a lot to talk about with our host and his people. Sami live mostly in Norway and Sweden, but there are a few thousands living in Finland and Russia. They have their own language, but usually also speak the national language. So our host spoke sami, swedish, finish and english, and a few words in many other languages. He says he is not able to write in any language but Swedish, can read also his own language, some Finish and not English. But he is able to communicate with people, what is what languages are made for, something we ("educated" international students) were unable to do.
There are a lot of contrast in the live of sami. They still move around with their reindeers, having a winter house in the valley, and a summer house in the mountains, dropping school very early and living a rather simple live. At the same time they host tourists, own skin-selling companies, try to teach inuit how to ... (criar?) caribus, travel using powerful snow scooters and make calls with their cell phones. It was funny listening to talking about the isolated live they have. Our host say that "when you are in the mountains, you have to go high, open areas to make a call." But as he said, their live is simple, not primitive.
We were allowed to feed the animals, and then we were invited to go into a house. It was wooden, round, with a conic ceiling a fire in the middle and a lot of reindeer skins as main furniture. Actually they depend a lot on reindeer, they use their skin not only as insulation, but to make shoes, pants and almost everything, they eat their meat, drink their milk and use their horns to make tools and handicraft that is sold to tourists just like me.
Then we had a lunch consisting of moose soup and bread. The soup was really simple: potatoes, carrots, Swedish cabbage and moose meat. The only spice it had was salt, what is good, because you can taste the actual flavor of the food. The lunch was served with a really nice and fun talk about the sami people, with our host making jokes and asking us about our countries, instead of just talking like if we were in a lesson.
I can't recall all that he said, but I remember some talk about the customs for daily living, how to find a wife, how to burn wood, how to protect children from bad spirits, how to make a ghost to leave your house and the one thousand and one uses of pee.
To close the visit we drank some really strong Colombian coffee (they love Colombian coffee), waited to the fire to extinguish and said goodbye as the night comes... at 3 pm.
==========
Today's movie: "Sun Storm." Solstorm in Swedish. The trailer in youtube.
The main activity today was a visit to a reindeer farm, managed by sami people. The sami are a ethnic minority living in the north. They are semi-nomad people, moving around big areas with their reindeers. They consider themselves sami more than Swedish, and because of that they are not really part of the national states where they live. It has the big disadvantage of making them foreigners, even if they owned the land for millenniums, in a similar fashion of indigenous people in the American continent. Because our host has a impossible to remember/pronounce name (wich included his genealogy up to his grand-father's father), so I'm going to call him "our host" from now on.
There are not that much to see in the farm, but there is a lot to talk about with our host and his people. Sami live mostly in Norway and Sweden, but there are a few thousands living in Finland and Russia. They have their own language, but usually also speak the national language. So our host spoke sami, swedish, finish and english, and a few words in many other languages. He says he is not able to write in any language but Swedish, can read also his own language, some Finish and not English. But he is able to communicate with people, what is what languages are made for, something we ("educated" international students) were unable to do.
There are a lot of contrast in the live of sami. They still move around with their reindeers, having a winter house in the valley, and a summer house in the mountains, dropping school very early and living a rather simple live. At the same time they host tourists, own skin-selling companies, try to teach inuit how to ... (criar?) caribus, travel using powerful snow scooters and make calls with their cell phones. It was funny listening to talking about the isolated live they have. Our host say that "when you are in the mountains, you have to go high, open areas to make a call." But as he said, their live is simple, not primitive.
We were allowed to feed the animals, and then we were invited to go into a house. It was wooden, round, with a conic ceiling a fire in the middle and a lot of reindeer skins as main furniture. Actually they depend a lot on reindeer, they use their skin not only as insulation, but to make shoes, pants and almost everything, they eat their meat, drink their milk and use their horns to make tools and handicraft that is sold to tourists just like me.
Then we had a lunch consisting of moose soup and bread. The soup was really simple: potatoes, carrots, Swedish cabbage and moose meat. The only spice it had was salt, what is good, because you can taste the actual flavor of the food. The lunch was served with a really nice and fun talk about the sami people, with our host making jokes and asking us about our countries, instead of just talking like if we were in a lesson.
I can't recall all that he said, but I remember some talk about the customs for daily living, how to find a wife, how to burn wood, how to protect children from bad spirits, how to make a ghost to leave your house and the one thousand and one uses of pee.
To close the visit we drank some really strong Colombian coffee (they love Colombian coffee), waited to the fire to extinguish and said goodbye as the night comes... at 3 pm.
==========
Today's movie: "Sun Storm." Solstorm in Swedish. The trailer in youtube.
Tuesday, January 20, 2009
Kiruna: How long did you say?
Leer: "Kiruna: ¿Cuanto dijo?"
From Göteborg to Kiruna the trip takes 20 hours, that begin in a modern X2000 (3 hours to stockholm) and continues in a couch wagon, not as modern, to Kiruna.
Kiruna is the biggest municipality in Sweden, and in the world. It has, however, the lowest population density. It is located beyond the polar arctic circle, and so north it is cold. Really cold. Obviously there are not that many people dreaming about living there. Despite this, and following the policy in Sweden about sending national processes to the less populated areas, some processes are centralized in Kiruna, including traffic fines and TV taxes.
There are other reasons to live in Kiruna. An important one is the iron mine. The iron that pushed the industrial development of Sweden, that is an important revenue for the country even today, and that was sold to support the Nazi Germany during world war II. But that's a long and complex history, and I'll talk more about it after visiting the mines.
The first notorious event, for me, was the snow, the real one. Down in Göteborg snow is a joke. Only a few millimeters each time, and don't last. But here the snow stays, and everything around is white, so white that it looks like the sun rises earlier.
A short walk from the train station to the hostel is a totally new experience because of the snow in the ground and the snow falling, and it makes me realize how cold this town really is. After checking in the hostel I can say the trip is over, and now it is time to enjoy the place.
From Göteborg to Kiruna the trip takes 20 hours, that begin in a modern X2000 (3 hours to stockholm) and continues in a couch wagon, not as modern, to Kiruna.
Kiruna is the biggest municipality in Sweden, and in the world. It has, however, the lowest population density. It is located beyond the polar arctic circle, and so north it is cold. Really cold. Obviously there are not that many people dreaming about living there. Despite this, and following the policy in Sweden about sending national processes to the less populated areas, some processes are centralized in Kiruna, including traffic fines and TV taxes.
There are other reasons to live in Kiruna. An important one is the iron mine. The iron that pushed the industrial development of Sweden, that is an important revenue for the country even today, and that was sold to support the Nazi Germany during world war II. But that's a long and complex history, and I'll talk more about it after visiting the mines.
The first notorious event, for me, was the snow, the real one. Down in Göteborg snow is a joke. Only a few millimeters each time, and don't last. But here the snow stays, and everything around is white, so white that it looks like the sun rises earlier.
A short walk from the train station to the hostel is a totally new experience because of the snow in the ground and the snow falling, and it makes me realize how cold this town really is. After checking in the hostel I can say the trip is over, and now it is time to enjoy the place.
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