Gamla Stan stands for “Old Town” as it remains the original settlement that became Stockholm. It dates back to the 13th century and is a really enjoyable place to walk at any time of the day or night. I’ve visited Stockholm four times on business and have managed a lot of hours in the evenings and a few Saturdays (stay over one Saturday and you cut your air fare in half on Air Canada.)
I am going to show a single image from an evening a few weeks ago when it was raining. We took the subway from the suburb Kista and transgered at T-Centralen (Central Station Tunnelbana) to head southward one stop to Gamla Stan. We walked to a restaurant (C+C I think it is called) we had been wanting to try since I had seen it 6 weeks earlier on my 3rd visit to Stockholm. We eventually found it and I had an amazing plate of Swedish Meatballs with potatoes and lingonberry sauce. Anyway, it was still raining when we got out so everyone scattered to their hotels (four of us from Linköping, Malmö, Boston and Ottawa stayed in different hotels, but that’s not much of a hassle in Stockholm as the subway is excellent.) I stayed on Gamla Stan though and shot images for another hour or thereabouts …
So this is the image I like the best from that evening …
I liked it enough that I entered it at http://panachallenge.com, where it took second place in a challenge called “Wet” … garnering 6 first place votes, twice what the 1st place image managed. However, the winner gathered more seconds and thirds, and even though we had the same number of top ten votes, the weighting system was enough to boot my image from first place. Someone in the comments suggested that I don’t wait so long again before entering (it has been years), but this kind of result is exactly why I don’t enter contests very often. The winner is a nice enough image, but it’s just another flower with a few droplets on it … sigh.
Anyway … back to Stockholm. Sweden is the kind of place that a Canadian could find very homey … everything there feels somewhat familiar to me. The rugged landscape reminds one of the Canadian shield, which covers a good chunk of Ontario and nips into Manitoba too. Hilly with lots of lakes and trees, the two countries share an outdoor culture that really seems similar to me. They hunt and eat moose too :-)
I like this image enough that I did a somewhat high key black and white version to frame … it looks like this:
Not sure how it will turn out on matte paper, but if it looks nice enough I think I will try it as a canvas.
I’ll try to process my multi-thousand pending images over the next months and post a few more observations of Stockholm and Linköping … I certainly recommend Stockholm as a nice holiday destination. I would love to visit one day around the midsummer festival. It’s supposed to be quite something …
