Adventures of David and Paul: Winter in Umeå and Luleå, Sweden

In February we took a trip to Sweden to visit our friends Janice and Peter and experience winter north of the Arctic Circle. February might seem like an odd time to go to Scandinavia, but the Arctic in winter offers spectacular natural sights like the northern lights and snowy fjords, seasonal oddities like the world-famous Ice Hotel, and plenty of outdoor activities like dog sledding.

So we packed our long underwear and flew to Sweden. We landed at Stockholm Arlanda airport and immediately boarded another flight for Umeå, where our friends live. It has about 80,000 people and is the 2014 European Capital of Culture. We immediately noticed the clean and simple Scandinavian design. Buildings and furniture are Ikea-esque: simple, modern, stylish and functional.

Our route for the trip. Plane, car, and rail.

This is Peter, our Swedish guide for the week. He is wearing typical Swedish clothes.

This is Janice, our Canadian guide for the week. Her favorite Swedish word is farthinder.

Our friend's apartment complex had a free guest apartment where we stayed. It had an odd layout but was surprisingly spacious. Our apartment, and indeed the whole city, has an interesting heating system. Trash is burned and used to heat water. The steam/water is distributed across the city in pipes and used to heat buildings, so everyone has free heating in winter.

We also noticed that it wasn't really that cold. The weather was much warmer than usual. Although it was snowy, it was in the low 30s. Atlanta actually had a lower temperature this year (6 degrees) than Sweden had during our entire trip! Even with the comparatively balmy temperatures, there was no sun to be seen - multiple people told us that Umeå hadn't seen any sun the entire month. Despite the cloudy skies, our first activity was taking a walk around a lake. Umeå has an interesting urban design, with a vast network of bike-ped pathways and somewhat sprawling housing with very few shops/commercial activity except in the city center or at roadside shopping centers. The downtown is cute with a pretty large pedestrian-only shopping and entertainment area.

Sweden is super bike-ped friendly. Except for the ice.

Taking a walk for a picnic!

Yum! Lunch on a frozen picnic table with a super cute baby.

Fire by the lake

Night out on the town in Europe's Culture Capital 2014

Bishop's Arms Bar - at this point, we'd been awake for something like 36 hours

Snowy bikes in downtown. The sidewalks are heated from underneath.

The next day, after crashing and waking up after noon (darn you, jet lag!) we decided to give curling a try. It's a surprisingly difficult sport where you push a 40lb stone across the ice toward a target. It's kind of like bowling crossed with darts and bocce ball, but on ice. You have one shoe with traction, and one shoe that is really slippery that you use to slide around the ice. You sweep in front of the stone to affect its speed and trajectory. We had an awesome time, and team Janice/Paul tied team Peter/David after three matches. The following day, everyone was sore from curling, so it does seem to be an actual sport!

Curlinghall is the Swedish word for Curling Hall. We'll never learn this language!

Bird's eye view

This is about 3 minutes after David first got on the ice. It pretty much sets the stage for the entire trip.

Chim-Chimney Chim-Chimney! Sweepers!

One point for the red team

Next we went to the Vasterbottan Museum. Vasterbottan is the state/province/region that Umeå is in. The museum has the world's oldest ski and an exhibit on local history and culture. It also has a popular cafe. We noticed this in every museum we went to - busy cafes, often with full lunch options and a variety of drinks and snacks. They're expensive, but very popular with Swedish families. You might expect cafes like this at big museums in New York, DC, or Chicago, but in Sweden even small museums had sizable cafes. After the museum, we had a quick snack at Peter and Janice's apartment, then went to tour the Beer Studio brewery. Janice's acquaintance owns the place, and he showed us around and offered us some samples of beer. Craft beer culture in Sweden is new but growing swiftly.

All I see in this picture are two moose!

A bit of local culture and history

Ha! Swedish kids in the 1920's were horrible. Look at those bangs!

Surprise! Paul found something to crawl into!

Huh!?

The Beer Studio

The next day we got up bright and early for a road trip to far northern Sweden. Along the way we stopped in Luleå, home to a UNESCO world heritage site called Gammelstad, which is a preserved medieval church town. The church occupies the central square and there are hundreds of little cottages surrounding it, dating back to the 15th century. The cottages are where people would stay when they came into the town for church and business on Sundays. They didn't offer much more than shelter, with little furniture or comfort.

The church itself was originally Catholic. It is really far from medieval Rome, so you can see that it wasn't the most well adorned church in Europe, but was still quaint. A nice woman gave us a tour of the church. After we asked about a series of porthole windows on the north side of the church, we learned from our guide a key fact that was often repeated during the trip: "evil always comes from the north." This is actually a quote from Jeremiah 1:14. Janice, the Canadian, was particularly "fond" of this quote, and we often reminded her of it. Repeatedly.