Stockholm
Life in Sweden continues. Saturday was a slow day. I had lunch at Upplands Nation and studied there until they kicked me out at 3:30. I have a plan to study at all the nations. Then I wandered about the city, not wanting to go home yet. The city shuts down for the weekend so keeping my wandering interesting was difficult. I went to the main university library, the Carolina Library. Like most things in Uppsala, it is the oldest something-or-other in Scandinavia. The inside was a grand European library like you might expect Indiana Jones to do some research in the middle of an adventure. The ceilings were vaulted, and you see three stories worth of balconies with bookshelves connected via a spiral staircase. The library also had a little museum which housed The Silver Bible. This is a copy of the new testament written around 600 (I think). What makes it both cool and still around is that it was written on super-study purple parchment and inked with gold and silver.
When I got back to Ekeby i ate some dinner and a bunch of us watched Office Space. Many of the non-Americans were confused and/or bemused.
Today we went to Stockholm! We took the bus because it was cheaper, and took about an hour. Phillip from Greece came which is good because he has previously been pretty shy. He, Steffen (Netherlands), and I had a good talk about ancient Greece and its relative level of rocking. Stockholm itself was very big, old, and impressive. We walked down snow covered streets between huge stone buildings. Gamle Stan (old town) was less imposing and more quaint and inviting. The streets were narrow and winding and lined with souvenir shops. I wanted to dally longer at such shops, but the girls of the group wanted to do some 'real' shopping. So we went to many malls for a long time and it was boring.
Let me take this opportunity to tell you about Scandinavian commerce. The Scandies are all about the little, long mall, called a gallerian. There's actually a place called the Galleria in Minnesota, and it copies the Scandinavian model well. Good news from all this shopping is that I finally got a plug adaptor, and am now typing on my own computer again.
Enjoy your Sunday,
-The Wandering Norseman-
2 comments:
Crappy comment: There is a galleria in Houston as well. Can you tell me what a galleria is supposed to look like so i know whether it copies that model as well? Love reading about your adventures! --megan
Well researced answer: Galleria is Italian for "gallery" or "arcade". Galleria, or The Galleria, is a common name for a shopping mall, ultimately deriving from the 19th-century Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II in Milan. As I said this is changed slightly in Swedish to "Gallerian." The building type is long and narrow. This seems to be done so the mall can fit into buildings between regualr city streets without interupting them. So a given gallerian will only be a block long and one of those short blocks wide. It's funny because in the downtown you will have one Gallerian, say the "Thomas Gallerian" which goes for a block, and the next building will be a new gallerian, say the "Ålles Gallerian"
So, in summery, it literally just means mall, but is smaller and fits into the city, not like those big suburban malls I'm used to.
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