Saturday 9 August - Part 3
Linköping, Old Town
Having turned back from Löfstad castle, we managed to find our way into Linköping, and even to the Old Town museum area. The shops and workshops etc were closed by the time we arrived, but (after having spent quite a long time just figuring out the parking app!) we wandered around there for a while just looking at the old buildings.
▲Two types of old phone booths▼
There are no working phone booths left in Sweden - you may still see some, but you won't find a working phone within them.
The sign on the building in the background in the first photo - Wärdshus - means "Inn".
Bank Office
"Welcome to take photos of yourselves and your
children sitting on this carriage."
(Neither I nor my brother felt like
climbing up on it, though!)
This sign outside a café in the Old Town feels like an
anachronism as it announces that they now only accept cash free payment.
The sign also says that you can't use their tables for eating food that you brought yourself. Not sure if the same rule applies to the one below! (photo snapped elsewhere)
Paintwork Museum
"Puppet Theatre"
Ropemaker's Workshop
Hand-made jewellery?
"The Soapmaker"
Buildings belonging to an old "Folkets Park", with ticket booth in the foreground.
These are parks for fêtes and fairs, dancing and concerts etc.
So glad you finally got to see all the museum old buildings. Thanks for telling me English translations of what they each were for! Painting all those wood structures was important, but they did seem to like red paint.
ReplyDeleteBarbara, red wooden houses are very common in Sweden and this is related to a special kind of paint produced from bi-products of copper mining - Falun Red, named after the town with the copper mine where they developed it. It's been used since the 16th century, and has a special quality of also impregnating wood to better preserve it in our cold climate. At first it was mostly used by wealthy people as it was expensive, but in the 19th century, with industrial production etc, it became more common and increasingly popular. And it's still much used.
DeleteThe reasons for using red paint are so interesting and make a lot of sense. Were there no tourists around or were you just lucky when you took your photographs?
ReplyDeleteJanice, there were very few people around because we arrived after closing time. (I.e. all shops and cafés and museum buildings closed.) (We meant to get there earlier, but ended up at Löfstad Castle instead, cf. previous post...) It's not a gated area though, so one can still walk the streets, which is what we did.
DeleteOnce again, several words show here that Swedish and German have a lot in common. Wärdshus = Wirtshaus; Maler(i) = Maler(ei)... Also, the "Dockteater" reminded me of my grandma; in her Swabian dialect (broader than my own, as is often the case with older generations), a "Docke" was a doll/puppet.
ReplyDeleteMeike, yes, a lot of Swedish and German words obviously have the same roots. The main difficulty for us learning German is usually the grammar, and I suppose that probably works the other way round, too! ;-)
Delete