Ex-nuclear reactor research facility and the pull of Atlas Obscura

A friend recommended to me this website; Atlas Obscura

There are some interesting stories that they run.  There are not many sites marked for either Tasmania or Stockholm. Well, actually a lot has been added recently for Tasmania, but they are the same places you can find in any tourist guide.  Stockholm has two that took a bit of searching.  A nuclear reactor in the middle of the city, and a monument to a plane crash (also in a central area) that had no casualties.

I have a friend that lost a family member and our summer has been coloured by her grief.  She helped me a lot the week I found out via Facebook that my Dad had died. I was happy that she felt spending time with us could help her through the process, and I am grateful for all the time we have spent together.  We are also not over the violation that was the house robbery. While it is true that Stockholm is going through a large population increase, and building of infrastructure and housing, improvements and extensions of local train lines.  We have new buildings going up on our block, and a school just feet away from the other side of our apartment building.  The trains are crowded, the streets are crowded.  All this has impacted us in ways that we are not in the same mood for exploring or loving where we live.  We had never planned on staying here forever- yet I think we were open to the possibility that work might keep us here until we could retire.  I say, we but...

Anyway-

Perhaps we are both emotionally distancing ourselves and we prepare to try and live on the island full time.  

Meanwhile, not each day has been grey.  We have had nice dinners and excellent company.  Because of one of these dinners I found out I knew a guy that knew a girl that could get us into the Nuclear Reactor, which via Atlas Obscura I had found the building, but not even the actual entrance.

The whole event was satisfyingly cloak and dagger.

Although, I do realize I could have gone to see a performance there, but I couldn't find a date, and I probably would have just gotten lost.

Besides, we had a tour guide with insider information.

The reactor was for research, when Sweden decided not have nuclear reactors, and the research showed that having even a research facility in the city, was not in the peoples best interest, they shut it all down.  Removing the waste- although I don't know what they did with that waste, but whatever they did, it can't be as ill advised as the U.S. attempts. This was in the late 1970s, early 80s.

The coolest thing is that the space is used by the media department of the KTH University for art, dance, music performances.  There is a really, really cool Wurlitzer organ that when powered up, a slated wall opens to reveal glimpses of a room full of instruments, drugs, horns, various sound makers.  

Somehow that all ended up on my instagram feed and 'stories' by not saved to my phone.  Such is progress.

While we were there an architect student was setting up her dissertation in visual form.

 

 

 

When you are completely incorrect in a belief

This year and last year, there is a lot of English on the signs around Stockholm, the official signs- also tourist pamphlets.  There are apps that allow you to download audio in English to your smart phone.  There is a noticeable difference in the fluency of younger people moving from Swedish to English in the same sentence.  Years ago there was also English on signs, but about fifty words to every two-hundred words of Swedish.  The signs about subway art are all in Swedish, and when I first tried to learn about the art, there were Swedish only tours, and all the available brochures and books were in Swedish, this was the same year that I started listening to Podcasts.  Before iTunes took over the aggregation of them, the shows were found through sites called 'podder'.  Every podcast I listened to was some guy (almost all male) in a small room somewhere, just talking into a microphone, but I was a bit starved to hear English and alone in Stockholm, so I listened to them while I roamed a world that was mostly incomprehensible to me.  

All this new addition of English (and perhaps a bit of my improved Swedish)- I keep realizing that some idea that I had- was completely incorrect.

I am a chatty person and going so many days without conversation was shocking to my system.  But I have always moved around a lot- and often I am a stranger- which is why I think that characters from books occupy such a large part of my brain, from my earliest memories I have merged these characters to a place where I think of them and their adventures as if they were friends who told me what their lives were like first hand.  The same went for D.Js on the radio and later podcasts.  This meant most of my thinking was down silently in my head- without anyone to correct or corroborate my ideas and beliefs. 

Another aspect or product of this is when I find out I was completely wrong in my beliefs about something- even when it is trivial- I did not grow up with an Internet to fact check what I believed, and perhaps I am in the last generation (living with read access to computers) that will grow up with beliefs that do not get challenged until years later.

I just found a pamphlet on the Moderna Museet 'Utomhussamlingen' aka 'The Outdoor Collection'.  Sometime in the 1990s there was a toy called 'Zolo' which is what a group of statues outside the Moderna Museet reminded me of.  They are in part mechanical but they do not run during Winter, and I was only here in Winter the first couple of visits.  Finally I saw them running, but until this year, never all at once.  I think I mentioned them to our roommate who said 'Oh yes the Picasso garden'.  Who was I to think I knew all of Picasso's artwork?  So I also started to call this area the Picasso garden.

Two years ago, I was on another side of the museum where I found a piece that did look like sometime I had seen by Picasso, but this also turned out to be incorrect, the piece is done by a Norwegian artist Carl Nesjar based on Picasso's cardboard models.

 From my new information I now know what I thought of as the Picasso garden, or the Zolo garden (no one I ever mentioned this to remembered the toy I referred too).

is in fact called 'Paradiset' or The Fantastic Paradise by Niki de Saint Phalle and Jean Tinguelly, I couldn't find many photos- I think I wrote about this place but maybe ten years ago.  These are not comprehensive but lately I have been uploading to Instagram stories more than anything else.  I do not know why I feel such a strong sense of embarrassment that I misconstrue facts, or perhaps told a guest incorrectly about some place I took them to visit but I really do.

I now know that this was created for the World Fair in Montreal in 1967 (Interesting!) and that in the "warm season, hte figures are set in motion, spurting water that trickles here and there".

I uploaded most of the mechanical ones in motion to the 'stories' for my friend M. and here I will add an apology as when he came to visit I was excited to show him this small park, which at that time was not in motion and whatever I told him about the place was apparently made up information. 

 

Same as it ever was...the good and the bad

 

Very dear friends came to visit us for two weeks, and now looking back- the time we spent seems like a blink of an eye.

Even though during their stay Stockholm went from a bright colourful Autumn scene to getting record breaking snow fall.  The local paper said that Stockholm got more snow in one day, (November making this a rarer occurrence) for 111 years.

We went from lovely wide open skies, to glittering snow.

Not every visitor gets perfect weather of course, and our next visitor has arrived to treacherous, icy paths which we both fell (get it? fell?) prey too, during our long walk around Stockholm.

Also, as I sit here, I realize the year is coming to a close, and my partner is saying things like "We go home in six weeks!"- which I am not ready to hear.

I have two trips coming up, and I am still struggling through SFI most days.

I am, however really missing my exercise routine- which is the activity that got lost among, entertaining, running for trains, SFI and what I dimly remember as 'summertime'.

At this moment most people I know connected with the united states either by origin, or living there now are stuck under a very, dark cloud.

Having grown up through the 1980s, I think I always had this view-

The 'one step forward, two steps back' view.

I really know little about the candidate that won, I gave up hope when the party put him forth, the first nominee with no experience or qualifications.

I spent some time thinking about the time and energy I put into volunteering...escorting women through crowds of people shouting hateful things as we went into health clinics, all the people I registered by hand for 'Rock the Vote', the campaigning for voter registration, the hours postering, watching friends die and medications were held up by bureaucracy, politics, fear and profits just to dredge up a few memories...

I am grateful to not be there, and I am not sure how I would be feeling if I was there but since I have the luxury of not being there- I feel that embracing negative emotions would be truly losing so I am going the other way.

 

Autumn in the Northern Hemisphere

SFI class has meant leaving for the train while the moon is still in the sky.

I am enjoying Autumn in its (to my mind) rightful place...October.

The low grey skies do make me feel a little closed in.

 The view from the front of our apartment should remain unchanged, but the back of the building is undergoing huge changes, as they pull out a park, to put in a new school, here:

This gym and the adjoining play park are being pulled out, and our street which now is a fairly calm dead end road, will the extended through to Farsta.

I brought some outdoor furniture inside to make myself some extra space, so the apartment will feel larger.

 

Tantolunden, a small sanctum in the center of the city.

This September has been quite warm, and bright.

I had a day alone, with no immediate tasks, so I walked from my class to my subway line instead of taking an sort of transport to connect to my line.

As the trains do not run much 'across' our side of town, one can almost walk easier than transfer.

I almost skipped going through the Tantolunden Park allotment houses, but I turned around when I realized less people would be there and I could take some photos without feeling rude.

I believe these to be the oldest allotments but there are many more set around and in neighborhoods.  The more recent ones tend to be either all garden plots (no structures) or like the one we got to stay over in a couple of years back, larger homes that families can more easily stay over.  The one we stayed in had 'facilities' in a sort of large container style...located in a corner of all the plots, for all to use.

We have both in our area, small houses near the lake, and at the edge of our neighborhood a set of garden plots.  It does feel a bit like a Christmas miracle, to be on a huge busy road, notice a small woodland path, and as you walk down it, the city noise recedes.  Finding yourself in this amazing area, with its contrast to the urban and the realization of how much nature, however small can have transformative powers. 

Skogskyrkogården aka The Forest Cemetery - "Today me, Tomorrow you".

I walk in this cemetery often, I always seem to discover a new aspect to appreciate.  Some might say this is because I have no sense of direction, so I can retread a path and think I am somewhere new.  I choose to believe that I am adding layers of understanding.

This walk however, I had enough time and battery to listen to the guided walk that was put up in 2015 I believe.  I listened to the first two in Swedish to see if I could understand anything, but as soon as they sped up (conversationally) I couldn't follow along.  I did okay with the introduction.

This cemetery is actually only the second largest in Sweden with over 100,000 graves, and they hold about 2,000 funerals each year.  

I was happy that my impressions of this place were actually what was intended by the architects; Gunnar Asplund (who also did the lovely city museum) and Sigurd Lewerentz.

I thought that the cemetery was unique to any I had been too, and I credited Sweden for this fact- the cemetery feels modern but there were aspects (like skull and crossbones) that I had only seen in ancient sites- 
The feeling of a 'circle of life', of drawing you in, and then releasing you back into the world.  All of this was intended, and the idea being radical at the time in the Western world.
I am always too busy to go on the tour, but now I know that visitors are not allowed in any of the chapels (which would be my only reason to go along) unless one is attending a funeral.  This is indeed a high price to pay.

The above is the Resurrection Chapel, the second Chapel built after (my favorite) the Woodland Chapel.
Surprisingly the controversy on this one is that Lewerentz wanted to build North to South. The city insisted on East to West (apparently this is a Christian tradition - strange as this cemetery strives to be non-denominational in its architecture)
A compromise was struck, the chapel is East to West and the Portico is North to South.

I also learned that the wall surrounding the cemetery is 3.4 kilometres, taking 10 years to complete.  The pine trees were there originally, as this cemetery was once all part of a larger forest that was on the edge of 'Stockholm city'.
The great wars and economy delayed the completion, by decades.
The trees are maintained, by care and re-planting of seedlings from the trees standing now. The trees are between 150 and 200 years old.
 

    

Yayoi Kusama: Moderna Museet 2016

I have been nearby (maybe the same country) tos public art installed by Kusama, but this is the first time I have been able to actually make it to an exhibit.

The exhibit was crowded, and her artwork is ready made for selfies, so often people were hogging an area of artwork trying to get the very best photo they could get.  I am happy to be happy, and not let this type of action bother me, but I do notice when someone is on their fifth try...at a photo op.

I also wished that the entry ticket included more than one day, so that I could easily go back a few times in hopes of getting some of the rooms to myself.  I will likely do this anyway...and nice Tuesday mid-morning perhaps.

I was really pleased to find artifacts of her life included in this exhibit.

Early works-

and a new work!

"So you have someone new I don't blame you We would all do the same as you If ever we had the nerve to..."

I think a lot about what I would call 'wasted chances', I suppose this line of thinking is as close as I get to the idea of regret.

Perhaps as I am fortunate to keep accumulating years, I strive to refine who I am, and how to express who I am- and what I think is important.

Another quality to getting older, is when I think back on a time period, I have to line up the person I was with the person I am now.

Even, if this is something circumstantial.

I often wonder why I did not spend all my time with my friends, especially when I was lucky enough to end up living in the same city as them-but of course, at that time, I worked more than one job, or I had a job that was always the priority, and quite honestly there were no boundaries, not even a set lunch hour.

I suppose these days I might try and over-compensate for that (read: overwhelm, smother, talk to incessantly until they try to run)

Luckily, they seem to survive- and I get to store up happiness.

Even though I talk more than I listen I get a lot of information, I fill in blanks, I get an idea of what their lives are like so I feel I can more 'authentically' use social media.

 

*Some photos 'borrowed' from K.

"...sing me to sleep...sing me to sleep...I'm tired and I want to go to bed..."

There is a free tattoo exhibit on at the Maritime Museum (sjöhistoriska museet- sjö is actually the word for lake while havet means sea- yet sometime the word sjö means larger bodies of water- or here what we would call maritime...I can't explain maritime so I guess I have to let go of the fact no one can tell my the word for lake and sea and ocean can sometimes be different...or the same...)

 I have to say the best bit of the museum was the gift shop, super cute nautical themed china and stuff for kids.  There were no information in English, so I missed a lot of what was going on- the exhibit seems to center on the maritime-sailor tattoos and the times when sailors were the most likely person to have a tattoo.  As I may have mentioned, in Stockholm, it is not unusual for your personal banker to have a neck tattoo.  Tattooing is incredibly widespread here.

There was only a couple of pieces of older equipment- a few guns, one of the wooden ones that were powered by a foot pedal.

Mostly I was happy that the day was cool enough for me to go out.  I made my way through the first three days of 30c low of 24c- but then I had three days where really I sort of hid in the only shady corner in my apartment.

Even when I am out- I think "Oh I could do this or that" but a voice answers "Wouldn't that be nicer to do when Autumn comes?".