Stockholm

We flew from Lisbon into Stockholm yesterday. I am here for the meeting of the Inter- national Association of Media and Communication Research, a wonderfully global group of scholars from all over. Sandy is here to stock up on things for her Astrid Lindgren course and generally catch up on Swedish culture. 

Before I had to show up to register for my conference, we decided to walk around a bit downtown, walking from the Central Station almost to the edge of Gamla Stan, the old city, which you can see here. 

Then today, after my main meetings were over, Sandy and I met to go to an evening reception of my conference at the city hall, which is quite a grand structure from 1923. Here is a picture of Sandy on the walkway above the main hall.

Strikingly, but a bit oddly, they built in another grand reception room, the Gold Room, made with 18 million small gold mosaic tiles. 

In a sort of neo-Byzantine style it has all sorts of odd and interesting motifs, all sorts of figurative themes as people, along with a number of historical figures. It includes an extremely odd figure which one of the speakers had actually mentioned today at the conference, a veiled woman with an incongruously bared breast, presumably Turkish, since she sits beside a man in a fez. Granted that a lot of the other figures, historic and otherwise are naked, but it seems a very weird representation of someone presumed to be Islamic. A very odd Orientalist inclusion.