U for Uddevalla

ABC Wednesday - U

Uddevalla is a town of around 31 000 inhabitants situated on the West Coast of Sweden, in the province of Bohuslän. Bohuslän is known for its rocky shores, and the beaches of Uddevalla are filled with seashells.

Uddevalla has one of the largest shellbanks in the world, a remain from the last glacial period.  Subfossils from more than 103 species have been found. Due to the lime-rich soil there is a unique flora and fauna in the area and it’s a habitat of many different butterflies.

  

▲ Shellbanks Museum

Uddevalla got its city rights in 1498 but was probably a place of trade long before that. Historically, the town was often besieged and changed nationality several times between Norway, Sweden and Denmark.

In the 18th and 19th century, Uddevalla's main importance lay in its herring fishing.

Sometime around 1870-1880, Uddevalla began to attract industries. Uddevalla has a small port and once hosted a large shipyard. This was closed in 1985 in connection with general recession in Swedish shipyard industry.

▲ The health spa resort Gustafsberg is said to have been the first of its kind in Sweden. The old bath-houses still remain and have been turned into a hostel.

From the town, you can take a tourist boat to the old spa resort, or to islands off the coast.

Children fishing for crabs

In Uddevalla, you will also find Bohuslän’s Museum, which has about 300 000 visitors per year and is renowned for its generous opening hours and free entrance.

Personal notes

Most of the photos in this post are my own, from a holiday visit to Uddevalla in the summer of 2004.

Only the two pictures from the Shellbank Museum were copied off a tourist website, because I didn’t go there.

I stayed three or four nights at a small bed & breakfast hotel, looking idyllic on the outside, but rather reminding me of Fawlty Towers. (I blacked out the real name here, since it’s been eight years, and much may have changed since then.)

I remember that when I arrived in the town (by train) the rain was pouring down. Only one of my three days was sunny (and even then not very warm). That’s when I took a boat trip to Gustafsberg, the old spa resort, and snapped the few sunny photos.

The other days, I spent a lot of time inside the museum! - very thankful for the free entrance policy, which allowed me to come and go as I pleased… 

This was before I got a digital camera so the photos were taken with my Olympus XA2.

And those were the days when from a three-day-trip one came back with only a dozen or so photos, rather than at least three hundred ;)

 

 

 

Of Birds and Windy Weather

When was it I came close to complaining it was getting too hot? A week and a half ago?? The last few days I’ve been back to wearing a winter jacket! On Saturday for the opening of the sculpture biennal I took a spring/summer jacket, but so wished I’d taken a warmer one instead! So the next day I took one of the winter jackets out again. (Actually all my winter coats/ jackets are still in a wardrobe in the flat and usually never get put away any further than that. But I had “put them away” in the sense of giving them a brush and going through the pockets etc, and hoping not to need them again for another four months or so…)

Walking home from the Supermarket on Sunday (with the warmer jacket on), I stopped for a while on the walkbridge over the river, put my groceries down, and watched the gulls playing in the wind. They certainly seemed to be enjoying it (the wind) even if I wasn’t…

You who live near windy coasts and other waters that attact gulls, will know what I mean. They wait for a hard gust of wind, throw themselves against it, flap their wings like crazy… Sometimes they get lucky and manage to take advantage of it for elegant loops. At other times the wind gets too strong for them and they just look ridiculous, flapping away but being blown backwards instead. But they take it all with a laugh!

But the gulls can be bullies too… This one kept bothering a family of goldeneyes:

The goldeneyes I’m really happy to see, because when I started watching ducks from this spot in the river, three or four years ago, there was one pair of them, male and female, among a flock of mallards; but then the female disappeared, and for two years I kept seeing the drake alone; still keeping close to, but also some distance from, the mallards. He looked lonely!

Now there is again a male and a female and I think I spotted some little ones too. It could be a different drake too of course, but in my imagination it is the same one who has found himself a new wife…

I’d still need an even better camera to spy on birds!

The Silver 70s

In December 2011, I blogged about having received an email request to use an image I had published on my blog back in 2009. It was not one of my photos, but a scanned image of an old ticket from Leeds Rolarena in 1972 - when at the age of 16 going on 17, I spent a month in Yorkshire, staying with an English family. (If you want to read or revisit that story, you’ll find it here.)

The request came from someone putting together a video for a 1970s exhibition at Leeds City Museum. The exhibition has come and gone (January – April 2012), but the videos from it can now be watched on YouTube (published by the museum). The clip where my ticket appears (briefly) - My 1970s: Going Out - is just one of 52 short videos on a wide variety of topics. If you’re feeling nostalgic about the 1970s, go to YouTube to watch some more…  Knock yourself out!

 

Sculpture Biennal 2012–The Grand Opening

Today was the opening ceremony of the Sculpture Biennal 2012 in my town (Borås, Sweden).

When I set out from home around 10:30 AM it looked like we were going to have a sunny and fine day - but the wind turned out to be so cold I actually wished I’d taken my winter jacket! Brrr! And just as the opening ceremony started at noon, so did the rain…

I’m glad I went early because that gave me a chance to walk around and look at many of the sculptures before the “crowd” began to gather – and I even got a bit of blue sky in some of my photos.

Most of the new/borrowed sculptures this time are displayed in and outside/near our Cultural Centre (the building in the background above), which was re-opened last autumn after a major renovation. The building houses the art museum, the town library and the town theatre.

Opposite the Cultural Centre is one of two big old churches in the town centre belonging to the Church of Sweden, which used to be state church until church and state were separated in the year 2000.

Actually this church is not all that old – it’s from 1906.

In the Sculpture Biennal of 2012, the Cultural Centre and the Church are cooperating, and some of the borrowed sculptures are on display inside the church.

The Biennal opening ceremony took place in the little park behind the church. You can see from the way people were dressed that it was far from a hot day!

         

I have to confess that when it started to rain, I gave up staying around to listen to the whole speech. Instead I sneaked away to have a cup of tea in the café, before the rest of the crowd got the same idea…

The sculpture in the pictures above is

Var rädd om jorden [Look after the Earth]
by Carl-Fredrik Reutersvärd

Here is what the Biennal brochure says about it:

The breadth of Carl Fredrik Reuterswärd’s art manifests itself by crossing the boundaries between different genres and techniques. His works often show the influence of humour, puns and word association games. At the age of 55, Reuterswärd had a stroke which paralysed him on his right side. Since then he has worked hard to re-learn how to write and paint - now with his left hand.

The bronze sculpture called Var rädd om jorden [Look after the Earth] (2010), is an exclamation mark at a distance, but the Earth detonated when viewed more closely. Looking after one another and our Earth, living to ensure we do not poison, over-consume and stress ourselves into violence and unnecessary depletion of the Earth’s resources, are the messages the artist wants to convey. The work was donated to the town of Borås before the re-opening of the Cultural Centre.

More sculptures coming up in future posts!
(Also in my Picture Book blog.)

 

And the Moral of the Story Is …

In yesterday’s post - answering the question what kind of book I would write if I could – I said that although I always loved to write, I never really felt I had a Great Story lurking, just waiting to be told.

This morning I woke up reminded of something that might contradict that statement: On several occasions lately, I’ve woken up in the morning with the feeling of having dreamt “a complete story” rather than the usual odd fragments shifting shape and focus from one part of the dream to the other.

The annoying part is that I’m never quite able to recall the details! It’s just that feeling… of the dream having had a starting point, and a proper (hm!) plot, and reaching The End before I wake up. But the memories of it dissolve when hit by daylight!

This morning I stayed in bed for a while, trying to recall the dream. But of course the notepad and pencil that should be beside my bed weren’t there, and I had to get up to get them, and before I’d found them, most of the dream was gone. All that I was able to jot down was one sentence, summing up the “moral” of the story:

“Sometimes the person who we think is placing obstacles in our way, is really the one who is trying to clear the way.”

Then I put the notepad aside and completely forgot all about it during the rest of the day - until just now when I happened to find the pad again, and saw the words I had written on it.

As for the rest, I only vaguely seem to recall a house full of people, and flowerpots being moved around and turning up where they shouldn’t be – and that the person responsible was not the one everyone suspected.

If you happen to be a Great Novelist, please feel free to steal the plot. I doubt I’ll be able to do much with it…
*LOL*