A Week Old in Sweden
Loving it and looking forward to it…..
Well, it’s been a little more than a week here in Sweden, and I’m already in love with this place! Yes, everyone does warn me about the coming winter, but hey, such beautiful summers need to be balanced out somewhere. Coming from a tropical country, India, I look forward to the snowy winters.
The first two days here were more about settling down and cooling off after all the extra work done in the last few days back home. Raghu arrived on the 22nd of August, and since then we have been exploring the city — and my love for this place is ever increasing!
Some highlights as to why I have started loving this place:
Visuals: The first view of the rocky islands (archipelago) from up in the sky was sufficient to make me start loving this place. Since then, every visual of the city is as beautiful as the next. The light here is perfect for the camera, neither too hard nor too soft. The contrasts are brilliant, on and off the camera. But yes, I do miss the golden hour. Yet the beautiful sceneries compensate for it all.
Nature lovers! Being a nature lover, I am attracted to the importance given to nature in this part of the world, it definitely draws more respect from me.
Parks: This place is filled with parks, or at least the area where I live in. The parks here are huge and very well maintained. The parks have quite a number of small ponds, animals, eateries, and sometimes schools. We had been to the botanical gardens here in the city, and the variety of plants and flowers is a treasure chest for photographers like me, coupled with the terrain it was just exotic.
Pedestrian first seems to be the traffic motto here — any person on a motor vehicle stops to allow you to pass first, which for me has still not sunk in, and I tend to wait and let them pass before crossing the road.
Walkways: We have been exploring the city on foot, this has its own advantages as we find places inaccessible by public transport. This has been one of the best things we have done — the kind of sceneries encountered were breathtaking. This wouldn’t be possible if not for something which made me love this place even more: “no boundaries.” I have walked around schools, government buildings, hospitals, apartment regions, and so on, and so far never found any barricades stopping me from accessing these areas — giving us the advantage of cutting short a long trip by main road into taking smaller avenues with twists, turns, and some amazing scenes on the way to our destinations.
Apart from these, the work-family balance I have noticed in the past couple of days, added to my own experience during my work at NSN, makes me respect this place a lot more. Another thing I have experienced here is a second-hand market (I shall dedicate a blog to my cultural experience here in Göteborg soon), and how the summers add to the culture of this place.
Things I look forward to here:
Of course, my studies/work — the very reason I am here. With all the ideas still cluttered in my head waiting to burst out, I eagerly await what lies ahead.
The winter, everyone’s talking about it. Talk to people about the wonderful weather and the only reply you get is “wait till you taste the winter.” And here I am, waiting to experience 6 months of no sun and just cold (guess it will help me perfect night photography!).
The Northern Lights! Something I have been wanting to see ever since I got my hands on a camera. Hopefully, sometime in these 2 years, at least one picture of the Northern Lights from my camera.
PS: Glimpses of my exploration of Sweden will be available at ashfaqfarooqui.tumblr.com. You are free to download any of the images and use them by giving proper attribution — images are licensed under Creative Commons. If you want high-quality images (the quality stored on my HDD), drop me a mail.