I guess I have a love-hate relationship with the light in Sweden. Its annoyingly short and that can make you a little bit upset, but on the other hand, it can also be quite wonderful. A lot of my abstracts I’ve taken lately are taken in that light.

Here’s sunrise at 7am over Akalla:

Really interesting and again, the reason I travel. To see sunrises over ugly office buildings. No, but that is also a sunrise you probably wouldn’t see anywhere else.

Photography can sometimes be about transposing from your mind what you see onto film. Sometimes this includes photographing things people would absolutely never take a second look at:

Its a bench, but under the lights with the snow flakes on it, the bench struck me as interesting. Of course I did some post-production editing:

And these, that I kind of thought not only made interesting abstract shapes in my mind, but also illustrated that the light around here can be beautiful or annoyingly short:

And of course, I couldn’t help myself. I had to tinker:

Who says Akalla isn’t beautiful. Oh wait, everyone.

The Swedes have the best name for Santa Claus. Ok, in some countries its Father Christmas or Jule man, as in Christmas man. The Swedes call him Tomte, which always makes me giggle because my place of work is supposed to be where he lives. Really, there is a mail station there, which must make the Swedish children sad when they find that out.

Anyway, apparently the Tomte is lost:

And fear in his eyes, oh, its pretty obvious:

I mean he did end up in Northeast DC after all. That’s pretty terrifying. No, he’s in some goblin infested forest looking not really happy. I wouldn’t be either:

But how could our Tomte get out of this situation. How? How? Oh, with his brand new Nokia phone equipped with GPS, of course:

Will our hero make it out? We don’t know, but we can only hope that he’ll be rescued and next time he’ll remember his Nokia phone with the GPS.

If he makes it out of the forest, he can wash down his hot cocoa with some scum:

Ok, this was cheap, because scum, I mean skum means foam in Swedish. Still, its kinda funny, I think.

I mean sure, it looks like any other Ikea on the planet:

Well, this one was a little bit different:

Ikea in Sweden. Kind of weird. Of course it was in the middle of this ugly strip mall place called Barkarby. And there was course the fact that most of the furniture is named after locations in Scandinavia and all the details about the actual furniture were in, you guessed it, Swedish. Kind of a little bit weird.

Do he actually come with the jacket?

I mean that would totally make it worth it.

Older ladies, axes, Central Stockholm organized by the city’s Dance Museum:

Huh? Well, this answered the question about the other ax wielding old lady. Today there were more of them:

I asked one of the people around and she said that this was a piece one of the Dance Museum’s choreographers came up with. The point was to reclaim Sergel’s Torg, a square in the middle of Stockholm. It is supposed to be all about showing that the ladies (the youngest one was 49 years old) were still vital members of society. The women were so into it when it came to the chopping. The sound of the chopping was of course amplified:

Of course it was in the middle of the city, next to what I refer to as “The Stick”:

Oh and at the end of all of it, they went back to their knitting. No, I’m just kidding. They did this:

This is why you travel, to see things like that, that are so interesting and unique. And it of course reminded me of another important thing. Getting out of the house at some reasonable time — always a good thing.

I understand. Yes. Understood. No, this is not scenic Sweden, though it was taken here. I do love the abstract and I saw this and of course whipped out the trusty digital camera.

The light here is unique and sometimes amazing. I thought this was an example of it being amazing. Anyway, photos yeah here well:

That’s it. No final comment.

Oh no wait. I’d did a little post production editing. Improvement? I don’t know, but maybe more interesting?

I saw the exposed butt and I thought — it is cold as, well, it is pretty damn cold out. I honestly hope this was a depiction of a guy actually trying to wear the eagle, but anything else wouldn’t be advisable.

Why is the old lady wielding the ax? Well, its not for us to know until November 15:

Waiting around for who or what?

This is a:

a. sunset
b. sunrise

If you guessed sunrise, you have been quite right. “Sunrise” taken out of the bus on the way to Karolinska.

An entry aimed at one reader and one reader alone:

The trains on the T-Bana all have names. They are all ones like Kjell and Bjorn, but here they have picked Jenny. Now you will a reason to visit the blog.

Over with. I’ll learn to love it somehow.

But before I do that, I’d like to show everyone what I mean:

However, that also enables you to see this:

And of course, ever the tinkerer, I had to punch this one up, at least a little:

If you look up close, you see just the smallest hint of daytime sky, like the city isn’t ready yet to turn the lights off. I kind of love that about these early nights. I’ll have to learn to love the other stuff.

Oh and again:

August Strindberg, Scandinavian author and playwright and as you can see, fan of smiling. Among his works are Alone, an autobiography and plays entitled Inferno and Swan Blood. Not to mention “A Dance with Death,” which according to a friend of mine should be required reading before you slit your wrists.

Me, I am now the proud of owner of this t-shirt:

Apparently, there is a website where Strindberg is an “intern” and somehow makes predictions about the fate of the Washington Lizards, I mean Wizards from beyond the grave. That does not worry me. What worries me is that someone who is alive or dead cares enough to make predictions about the Lizards.