Raphael Kessler

My first visits to Sweden were only to the capital, Stockholm which is a nice town although strange in its quietness. The Swedes are very inoffensive people, they don't make noise, they are generally affable and they even have a method of smoking that means they don't offend (they have a snuff they call snuss which they insert between their top lip and gums).

I took a number of pictures during my first two visits to Sweden, unfortunately, all but one of those pictures was lost. One photo being rescued by the virtue of being on the end of a previous film. This is the one picture that survived, the Royal Palace in Stockholm, allegedly designed specifically to be unassuming. If that is true, they were successful. 

The festivities commenced with the erection of a large pole, essentially a phallus, complete with symbolic gonads. It took a while for them to get it up, not too surprising if you saw what most of the participants looked like (photos 1&2). Then the traditionally dressed participants began to prance and dance in ways that they were obviously taught in the special schools they no doubt attended (photos 3-7). All this was accompanied by a small orchestra screeching away (photo 8). After some demonstration dances from the costumed day-release patients, the spectators joined in singing (photo 9) and dancing to songs about frogs without ears and tails and singing awakakak. Scared and bemused I left when this new depth was plumbed, scarcely with any sanity left.

In the town of Avesta, their big red painted horse is a symbol of the area and a tourist attraction (photo 1). The signs to try and stop farting however are much more amusing (photo 2). There was also a sign for the Pastor-sexpostion which was a little bit disturbing, particularly when I saw the pastor (she was not much of a looker).

Peter, my Swedish friend is a fireman which seemed to mostly involve eating ice-cream (photo 1). We also played badminton, had a barbeque, watched television, went out for a ride on the fireboat (photo 2) and had more ice-cream. It is fair to say it is a high stress job as some times the ice-cream shop is closed. On the lake nearby, there is a strange house, which floats with one room above water and another below, rented to holidaymakers (photo 3), strange people. When I went on shift one time, I took a bag of marshmallows, I thought if we got a good fire, they might come in useful (photo 4).

When not doing his fire-fighting  (through the use of ice-cream), Peter bangs away in his smithy, fishes and so forth. He claims that he was a top-quality competitor at orienteering. Though when we decided to get a closer look at some bison, the initial four-hundred metre walk to them turned out to be several kilometres. Why didn't we just turn around? You may ask, that was because our retreat through the pine forest (photo 2) was cut off by people behind us shooting. Not something I expected to happen to me in Sweden. Moose tracks could be seen in the area, though we didn't see any. The baby moose in the picture below was in Skansen.

Some random photos from Sweden I took in my friends' back garden in Borlange (photos 1 & 2). Some mushrooms we picked fresh in the forest (photos 3-5). Sweden from the air (photo 6).