Neil Hopcroft

I’m pretty sure this wasn’t a factory fitted engine for the Ford Anglia?
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It was never my intention to write a travel guide to Stockholm, more to give some impression of what it is like to live there as a foreigner. Maybe I’ll pick that up again at some point, for now, though, I’ve got a bit of a breathing space so figured I’d update here. Of course, give me a shout if you are heading there and I can give you some ideas of things to do.

The breathing spaces are still few and far between, so there still won’t be any consistent updates for a while, I aim to take advantage of those few moments.

Stockholm itself is made up of a number of islands, with mainland to the north and south, the Baltic to the east and lake Malaren to the west. There is an archipelago constisting of some 26000 islands of various sizes stretching out into the sea toward Finland.

A trip on the Waxholmsbolaget boat up to the small town of Vaxholm, 45 minutes away, is one of the best ways to understand the city. You get to see some of the pivotal sights and understand how the city is both divided and held together by the water.

The boat itself is a fairly small foot passenger ferry, although it does have a cafe, and the journey a little confusing if you’re not acquainted with the Swedish way of doing things – you board the boat and once on buy a ticket any time during your journey to your destination, as long as you have a ticket they will let you off again.

Return boats don’t run very frequently, so make sure you don’t miss the one you intend to catch, Vaxholm, while a pleasant little town, *is* a little town and cannot provide much in the way of entertainments for a four hour stretch between boats. There are plenty of cafes and restaurants overlooking the harbour, though, so if you’re worried you can just take a coffee in one of those and watch out for the boat.

Assistant: “Can I help you sir?”
Me: “I was wondering if you had any more books?”
He proudly leads me back to the aisle full of ‘Computing for seniors’ books that I’ve just visited.
“What are you looking for sir?”
“I’m after a book on C#, I found this one but the topic I’m interested in is mentioned only in a line of a table on page 658, I’d really like a book that covers the topic in more depth. Do you have any other books on C#?”
“That is all we have, what is the topic you need such information about?”
“Recommendations for linkage between managed and unmanaged code for third party distributable libraries, ideally packaging of both into a single DLL, but I realise that is probably a little ambitious.”
“Oh”

Its been a while, I know, and I’ve been up to a few things that I’ve not really written about here. The most significant of which is becoming a father, more on that later but lets take a little look further back than that first.

Maybe I should pick up where I left off, the last proper entries I made here I was just heading off for a new life in Sweden, to be joined shortly by my new (at that time) partner. Things got off to a shaky start staying in the Kista Ibis, but we eventually got an apartment at the Memory Hotel, then in the nearby suburb of Sollentuna.

Sweden is a fantastic country, the people are pragmatic and not afraid of real work, the history is extensively documented and binds the country together, it is a part of Europe without losing the things that make it Sweden. Travel is endemic in the culture, but so is a sense of identity with home community, many people travel, living abroad for months or years, only to return to their home town later in life.

Less fantastic (albeit fantasy) was the Sony Ericsson approach to project planning, they seemed like a company running to keep up without having any idea which direction they should be running in.

I posted many of the pictures from our adventures in Stockholm, so I’m not going to repeat what I said there – nearly 600 entries all already available for your browsing pleasure – instead, I’m aiming to talk a little about some of the things about these places which cannot be captured by the camera.