The countryside is gorgeous right now, with bright yellow rapeseed in bloom. I didn’t know until recently that raps oil, which is very popular in Sweden, is just canola oil!

The best views seem to be in places that are difficult to access from the highways along the coast, but even around Lund there are some impressive vistas.

American friend, Brandie, and I stopped by an orchard to try traditional äggakaka, a sweet and savory egg bake with bacon and apple. She says sometimes it’s more like a baked pancake, but I didn’t like this version much because it was a sweet quiche. “Lemonade” means juice, and grape lemonade is grapefruit flavored juice.

The photos above are from Råby, just to the east of Lund, bird sanctuary in the foreground.

Brandie and I explored up the coast a bit to a town called Barsebäck and found some places to revisit. Most of the villages are very seasonal. Only open in summer, so I might miss them entirely this year since we’ll be back in MN by then!

We decided to spend our Easter holiday doing something. In Sweden, Easter (or Påsk, pronounced “poask”) is a very secular holiday, and Holy Friday and Easter Monday are national holidays (so, no work!), and the schools are out for Easter week. So, we took a trip to Kiruna, Sweden.

Kiruna is a city of 30k people in Swedish Lapland, and lies north of the arctic circle. The arctic circle is the latitude (66.3 deg north) at which there are days of 24 hour sun in the summer, and 24 hour dark in the winter. Kiruna is far enough north that there is almost 100 days of full sun in the summer. Here is a little map of where we were (in context of the rest of Sweden)

Kiruna is at 67.8 deg north. Fairbanks AK is 64.8 deg north. The Twin Cities are about 45 deg north, and International Falls MN is 48.6 deg north. So, Kiruna is NORTH, and sits in the heart of the Swedish part of Fennoscandia – that horseshoe-shaped region that wraps around from Finland over to Norway. Kiruna is also the centre of what the Saami people call Sapmi – their lands. The word Kiruna comes from the Saami giron, which is the ptarmigan.

We flew from the Malmö airport to Stockholm, and thence to Kiruna. Malmö’s airport has one terminal, and about 10 gates (we usually fly out of Copenhagen for international stuff). Kiruna’s airport has one “gate” and you get to the plane via mobile stairs. And it has one runway, so when you land, the plane overshoots the gate, goes to the end of the runway, and then turns around and taxis back to the gate. No worry of traffic, however, as there is only one flight in and out per day. There is a lot of tourism, however, so the plane was an A320 a mid-sized regional jet. Flights from Malmö to Stockholm were a little under an hour, and the flight from Stockholm to Kiruna was about 90 min.

The weather in Kiruna was a lot more like northern Minnesota than the Pacific Northwest-iness of Skåne. At the beginning of April, daytime highs were around freezing and overnight lows were around 18-20 deg F (-7 or -8C). We had some cloudy days and nights, and also some brilliantly clear days.

Along with tourism, Kiruna’s big industry is iron mining. Most of it is freighted out as pellets on rail to Narvik Norway, where it is shipped off. A bunch is also freighted around the Nordics and Baltics. A fun fact about Kiruna is that the mine is so productive that they are following veins under the town. So, they are moving the town to make way for the mine. There is a nice new city centre that is being built right now, and people are figuring out if they want to move their houses, or take a buy-out. The mine is footing most of the bill, so it is clearly making a LOT of money!

Jen and I will cover a bunch more on the trip itself in different posts on the particular events, but this will set the stage for a wintery, colder, arctic setting for the adventures.