Doing that Cartesian rag

There is nothing like too much time in front of a computer just dealing with email to induce severe mind-body dissociation. The L.A. Times had a great story on just that today, but guess how I heard about it -- a daily email alert from them that leads to way much time reading their stories.

Fortunately I have discovered an antidote. I get up and walk around! I particularly like to walk by the scene shown in this photo, which is less than 100 yards from my building. Nothing like a little non-virtual beauty to restore the soul. 

Birka

Today we took a ferry to Birka Island in Lake Mälar, about an hour and 45 minutes by boat from Stockholm. It leaves from right next to the city hall, which you can see it the first photo. Very striking place, the city hall -- we had our opening reception for the IAMCR conference there Monday night.

In the next photo are a bunch of people getting off our ferry, the Victoria, at Birka. It was a beautiful day to be out on the water. There is a simply amazing quality to summer light in Scandinavia, more on that later.

The reason for going to Birka, aside from taking a beautiful ferry ride through a fjord in Sweden -- something I would be dying to do anyway -- is that it is one of the sites that has produced the most information about how a Viking settlement actually lived. There was a trading village there from the 800s to 1000, which left hundreds of graves behind, which were largely untouched, with all their grave goods.

Most of the original things found have been moved to the National Museum of Antiquities in Stockholm, but they have created a nice museum to explain the site with maps, replicas of what the village might have looked like, and replicas of a lot of the best stuff. I was intrigued with a map of the Viking world, shown here with our museum guide, Elin.

We also took a tour of the grave sights, the village site, and a fort that stood on a hill over- looking the village -- both enclosed by a city wall and stockade.  Here is our other guide, Ulrike, on the hill beside the fort, overlooking the fjord and a meadow (now) where the village stood. The meadow was excavated in the 1990s and they found a lot of interesting things there, too. It is amazing what archeologists can do with ancient garbage dumps.

We walked back to the ferry area to have lunch and do some shopping in the museum store. (Always a danger in Scandinavia when your wife teaches Viking history and literature -- we ate lightly to compensate.) Right across from the store was a stand of birch trees that made me think again of how much I like the quality of light coming through the trees in Scandinavia summer.

Here is a view of the hill that the fort stands on. The spot is marked by a cross, a monument to a Christian missionary who helped convert the village back in the 1000s. The shot is from the ferry we took back to Stockholm. Fabulous day despite a wee bit of sunburn.

Gamla Stan

I took off from my conference in Stockholm early this afternoon so Sandy and I could go play a bit. First stop was Gamla Stan, the old city. Walking in from the subway stop, we found this corner, which was on Sandy's list of things to look at. When the building was built in the 1400s, someone put in a piece of a genuine Viking runestone as part of the foundation. It is a busy corner, so someone in the 1600s planted an old cannon barrel in front of the wall as a sort of bumper to protect the building against the bigger wagons that were starting to use the street.

Then we headed for the palace area of the old city to see the armor museum, which had an interesting sounding special exhibition on war booty that Sweden had "won" or taken from several countries over the centuries, particularly Denmark, Poland and Czechoslovakia. There is a controversy between those countries and Sweden over whether some of it, at least, ought to be returned. 

Here is Sandy at the entrance to the museum, with a huge carved representation of the Swedish arms. 

After the museum and palace, we went into the main cathedral nearby, which you can see below. 

After that, we walked to the end of the island that the old city is on and caught a ferry across the harbor to another island, which has the zoo, an amusement park, and a folk museum or living history village, full of historical houses, farm buildings, churches, etc. right next to the zoo. In fact, it was really fun to wander between the folk village, 

where we paused to watch some Swedish folk dancers, and then the zoo, which has only animals from Sweden, like moose, which they call elk -- you can see one in the next photo -- and reindeer. The most exciting was a couple of wolverines, which I had never seen live before, unless you count comic-book based movies ;), but they moved around too fast to get a good picture of them.

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.

To the furthest west point in Europe

This afternoon, a friend from Lisbon, Cristina Ponte, took us on a drive out to Cabo da Roca, the furthest west point in continental Europe. A breathtaking view on a peak high above the ocean, as you can see from this photo of Cristina and Sandy at the point.

She also took us a bit north of that to see her home town, Sintra, which is so unbelievably cute, that it is on UNESCO's list of world heritage sites. It was 

where kings and other rich folks build their summer palaces to have a cooler place to hang out. It works. While Lisbon was in the 90s, Sintra was in the 70s today, with a bit of fog even.

Here is photo of Sandy pointing to a street named after Lord Byron, who found the place Byronically evocative enough to hang out there.

We also walked up to the Castelo dos Mouros, a fortress built by the Moors during their 450 years in Portugal, but abandoned in the 1100s after they lost the siege of Lisbon. It is a quite interesting place, made even more evocative by being nestled into a dense and lush forest of very tall sycamores on one

 side.

And it extends way up onto a rocky crag as you can see from the last photo. Some of its walls look a bit like the pictures you see of the great wall of China snaking over vast mountainous panoramas.

The arcades project

I am just enough of a cultural theory geek that I really could not resist this one. Sandy and I came down to Lisbon from Porto by train this morning and decided, for some forgotten reason, to walk from the train station through a very sunny and hot dock neighborhood to the main plaza and from there back to our hotel. 

About half way back, by the main plaza (Praça do Comércio), we saw this invitingly shady arcade with a delightful-looking cafe, Martinho da Arcada (little Martin of the arcade), which a guide book tells me is the oldest cafe in Lisbon. So we gratefully plopped down for a drink.

Apologies to Walter Benjamin, whose epic arcades project was really about the early modern shopping arcades of Paris as a way of talking about the whole modernity project -- although if this is indeed the oldest cafe in Lisbon, under a still wonderfully shady and attractive arcade on a square old enough that the Inquisition used to burn people there, then it seems like early modernity had more staying power than the Inquisition, at least, thank heavens.

And more Art Nouveau at one of the world's most amazing bookstores

The promotional magazines about cities you find in hotels are usually pretty useless, dedicated to really pointless but expensive consumption. Today in Porto, however, Sandy found a real gem in one: the Livraria Irmãos Lello, a family-run bookstore in the old city that has been in the same location since 1904. Here is the façade, which is pretty impressive as a neo-gothic confection.

It got even better inside. Here is Sandy in the front of the store, with an absolutely amazing staircase rising behind her.


















Here is another view of the staircase, from above.

We loved the place. It made us think of all the Straubies back home who are big Art Deco fans, Julia, Kristy and Chris. It has a great collection of art, literature and travel books, too.