Northern Hemi Season Trip Report thingy - Sälen, Sweden
Just a quick post with a few new pics from today.
Went out for a shred but only lasted an hour or so. Visibility was bad. Still enjoyed ourselves though. Pink Park has shifted to the slope that is its proper home. There is two lines up, one of boxes, one of rails. No jumps yet but they should be there tomorrow or the next day, for all the New Years tourists.
Checking it out at the top
Freddy tail pressing the rainbow box
Freddy backside boardsliding the mini rainbow.
We had a few runs through, then did the parallel slalom course on our last run down. Was pretty fun but it was super icy on the turns so sketchy as! Would be super fun to do it if it was in good nick, though.
Massive day of work tomorrow!
P.S. Every day I’m shoveling
That park looks hella fun!
Making me real jealous i tells ya, although i am enjoying the sun, heat and beaches. I wouldnt mind going for a board right about now
Wicked cords! Stupid question time: It always looks late arvo in your pics, quite dark! Is it like that all day?
Winter in Sweden = lots of darkness.
When I was in Uppsala, we had light from 10am till 2pm. They are further north so it would be likely to be even less. (11 till 1 or so). And even then, it’s not full sun like you see in Aus, it gets light enough to not need lights and then quickly sun-sets.
update soon. too tired and hangry to write much, now 
Stupid question time: It always looks late arvo in your pics, quite dark! Is it like that all day?
Not a stupid question at all, Billy. The basic answer is that if it is cloudy, then yes, it is like that alllll day.
If there aren’t clouds, then the light can be the same as any other daylight, but there are not so many hours available for it to be bright and sunny. I have put a few pics up before showing some bright and sunny scenes.
The more nerdy answer about swedish daylight
To give you a bit more of a picture of why and how, where we are in Sweden is at roughly 60 deg North in latitude. A long way further north than New York, further north than Vancouver, way further north than the northern tip of Japan.
Where we are in Sweden is on pretty much the same latitude as the southern tip of Greenland and also lines up with central siberia.
To compare with Australia & Sydney in particular, last year the shortest day was the 21st of June and the sun came up at 7am and set again at 4.54pm.
That meant the least amount of daylight that Sydney-ites got last year was 9 hours and 53 minutes.
Where we are, the shortest day for 2012 was just the other week on Dec 21. The sun came up at 9am and set again at 2.40pm.
Which meant the least amount of daylight that Sälen got was 5 hours and 38 minutes.
It seems pretty awful for Sydney to always get around 4 more hours of daylight in winter than where we are in sweden can ever get, but the Swedes exact their revenge with their amazing summers, with super long, bright and sunny days, much longer than even our daylight savings awesome summer nights that we think of!
So here in winter, if the sun happens to be out from the clouds, it doesn’t ever have time to climb high enough in the sky to keep things bright and sunny for very long, before it heads back out of sight again. So most of the time when its cloudy, you get that super flat light that is in all my pics
The upshot of all this, that I can gather, is that you really notice all four seasons here, and very distinctly….and swedes are obsessed with the weather. They survive the long, dark, cold winters dreaming of the amazing summer nights that await them in June/July which are then gone again all-too-soon.
Anyway, I hope that explains it all bit for you. I enjoyed doing a bit of research on it myself so I was actually giving facts. I found an awesome graph which shows pictorially the path of the sun throughout the year, but it was all in Swedish, so a bit useless to stick up on here.
Been an interesting and fun few days. I’ll try to wrap up as succinctly as possible…more photos, less words!
New Years Eve
We slept in a bit on new years eve morning, as we’d worked like dogs the day before. Got out for a shred in the afternoon and was stoked to see the pink park set up, complete with jumps - some blue, some red. Its really cool, but not even half finished yet.
My fave is the ‘easy’ line, (far left of photo) which consists of a long, flat box followed by a blue jump, a wooshka box (a flat box with an upward turn just at the end, feel free to tell me the real name of this sort of box), another blue jump and then a flat/down/flat box to finish….the flat/down/flat is the one in my Happy New Year photo. It is a super, super fun line. I haven’t managed to hit the wooshka box yet, as I come with too much speed out of the jump to be confident that I’m lining it up correctly, and its been a bit too icy to try to burn off too much speed before it.
We went to shops after and grabbed some supplies for our new years plans - namely some drinks (Cider for me, beer for freddy), grillkorv (sort of like frankfurts but better and for bbqing), hotdog bread, potato salad, marshmallows, wood for our fire and
FIREWORKS!
Even though I grew up in Canberra when they were legal, my mum was far too terrified of us blowing our hands off/eyes out etc so that I never ever got to have any. We spent about $15 on the ones pictured, plus another kind that was like a mini version of the stereotypical bombs you see in cartoons. You light the wick, hold on to it as long as you dare, and then peg it like a grenade!
I was keen to get some big ones, but they were mega expensive & freddy assured me that we wouldn’t need to, as everyone else buys them and we get to watch theirs. He was SO RIGHT!
Around midnight we got about half an hours worth of everyone in the neighbourhood letting off enormous crackers. We live at the top of the hill and there are hundreds of holiday let rental places all around us and there was fireworks and flashes in the sky everywhere. It honestly sounded like world war 3.
Here is a 20 second vid from when our neighbours let off their fireworks. That is me giggling in the background like an idiot. I just couldn’t believe how right Freddy was, when he said we didn’t need to buy any of the big, expensive ones ourselves!
Our house has a little bbq/picnic area out the back, but it had been buried in snow. We dug it out and managed to get a fire going quite quickly.
We let off some rockets
and then we BBQed our sausages on sticks (with marshmallows for dessert)
At 6.30pm on NYE, the boss called and asked me to work at 6.30am New Years Day. I knew he had zero chance of anyone else saying yes, so thought I’d do him a favour and say yes, albeit reluctantly…I was thinking of the penalty rates! So the Jagermeisters and Red Bulls that I’d found in one of the apartments we cleaned and had been saving for NYE are still in the fridge!
I went to bed at about 12.30, set my alarm for 5.30 and managed to wake up at 3.30 because I was terrifed that I’d sleep through my alarm. I went back to sleep and then woke up again at 4.15, 4.30, 5.15 etc. It was ridiculous.
Work was pretty much a disaster, through no fault of my own, purely through the astounding lack of organisation in the company we work for….but that is another story!
Overall, was probably my favourite New Years Eve, ever. It was just so different to anything else I’ve done, very simple though and super enjoyable!
Very nice post Cords. Sounds like an epic way to spend new years. Apart from waking up early and cleaning of course…
I was once told what makes the Swedes such a horny bunch is because of the depleted sunlit hours during winter and the extended amount during summer, that most of them are born in the same few months and that the age limit for clubs is 14.
How true is this Cords?
Awesome cords! That park looks sick!
Cool video. Looks like you guys are having a ball.
Happy new year to you and Freddy! 
I was once told what makes the Swedes such a horny bunch is because of the depleted sunlit hours during winter and the extended amount during summer, that most of them are born in the same few months and that the age limit for clubs is 14.
How true is this Cords?
lol that is a funny question….it is about as true as that all aussies bbq shrimps, ride kangaroos to school and drink fosters.
Pub/club/drinking rules are stricter in Sweden. You can buy a beer in a pub or go into a club when you’re 18, but you can’t buy alcohol from the government owned and controlled bottle shops until you’re 20. Also, children are allowed in pubs in bistro areas etc in Aus, but kids aren’t allowed in pubs/clubs in any circumstances in Sweden.
I would not say that Swedes are any ‘hornier’ than australians, its just that sex isn’t as taboo a subject here as it is in Aus. I think that is because there has been a clear separation of church and state for a long time. Even the swedish church (lutheran) is traditional but super liberal compared to anything I’ve seen in aus. Gay marriage is legal & allowed in swedish churces, female priests are allowed, gay priests are allowed - heck - the head of the swedish church is a lesbian.
There is also (in my opinion) much more equality between the sexes & a lot less macho bravado here. Girls are just as likely as guys are to initiate anything in relationships or sex here. Young guys can have an honest conversation about what girl they like, what they’ve done together etc without feeling the need to embellish the story or have fear of saying the wrong thing or being teased or laughed at because they didn’t get far enough. Sex is just sex, it isn’t a competition or a measure of how manly you are.
Freddy said one of the first things him and his friend noticed when he arrived to go traveling in Australia was how all the young guys they talked to, talked crap about sex all the time & obviously didn’t have the slightest clue what they were talking about, revealing themselves to be extremely insecure - about most things, but especially on that subject.
Freddy’s observation is that Australian men seem to do stuff because all the other men do the same thing & they want to fit in. None of Freddy’s work mates can get their head around the fact that he doesn’t like, nor is he remotely interested in sport. No, he really does not care who wins the grand final, no he doesn’t know who won on the weekend & no he doesn’t know who the Knights are, and no he can’t tell the difference between League, Union & AFL & nor does he have any interest in knowing the difference!
In Sweden the conversation goes ‘you don’t like sport?’ ‘No I don’t like sport’ - The End….move on to talking about some other interests.
In regards to loads of babies being conceived in winter, if anything, it is actually the other way around…More are probably conceived in the summer.
As an analogy, have you ever seen footage (or in real life) a cow that has been locked up in a barn all winter when it gets let out in the spring? Its runs and jumps around like crazy, all in pure joy!
All these people have been mostly inside, its dark, cold, they walk around like marshmallows in all their layers of clothes in order to keep warm and they are tired….Then the spring/summer comes & all of a sudden people are out and about doing stuff and having fun til all hours, then its midsummer’s eve and the boys are wearing just boardies or shorts and the girls are in white dresses with flowers in their hair dancing around a maypole (read - giant phallic symbol! ancient fertility tradition!) and I think you get the picture!
Hope that explains things a bit
Awesome cords! That park looks sick!
Cool video. Looks like you guys are having a ball.
Happy new year to you and Freddy!
Thanks, mate!
The park situation here just keeps getting better and better. Today we were in Lindvallen and they’ve opened the family park next to pink park, which has two lines: one of easy boxes, one of 5 green jumps.
Its great because it keeps lots of the little kids out of the pink park.
Wednesday we were at the local hill, Tandådalen & there they have opened the Junior Park. This is what it looks like:
Five really fun blue jumps in a row, and a variety of other rails, boxes and jibs (including a picnic table of death, so named after the one I axed myself on in Snow Park, NZ.)
They are also around 1 week from opening the Tandådalen Super Park, which is a red & black line of heaps of jumps, rails and jibs. All these places are serviced by good t-bar setups, that don’t require ludicrous long laps and steep inclines (like leichardt in perisher!) Northern Beaches Guy if you read this, you would be frothing!
Also in Tandådalen is the Big Air Arena, which consists of one enormous jump. From the top of the in-run, it looks like you are going to hit an enormous brick wall.
Here is freddy being dwarfed by the kick
and another, but it shows the view a lot better!
and another just for good measure and extra perspective.
The landing of the jump is the steepest I’ve ever seen & I get no joy from riding down it!
Boss rang while I was writing this. We’re working tomorrow (Saturday) now, which is good for the coin. Was dead keen to try out our new gopro though - so we might try and get some park laps in after we finish work!
Those blue jumps look like the best thing ever.
You and Tom should make dreamy stay in Sweden. He is a fool if he comes home straight away.
I did my part. Talked to my boss who said the opportunity for a job is there if he wants it (pretty sure season pass is included - it was for us) as well as a place to live in the staff housing (2800kr/mth) & all the skistar staff discounts on stuff.
Also said to dec he could live with us for 1750kr/mth if he didn’t feel keen or ready to live with 7 other swedish strangers & might feel more ready to live with two old farts.
Work would be 3 days a week, maybe with some other shifts thrown in every now and then. He could ride every single other day pretty much.
Told all this and more on the phone to dec and then told it to tom later. Dec said he might need to come home to sort stuff out (he mentioned this a few times) and tom said it is something to do with his teeth. he talked about doing it next year instead & I said he’d have to defer uni again…he said he might go home just before uni starts (e.g. just when the good part of the season begins??!?!?)
I tried! I think he’s too dreamy to see how good an opportunity for an amazing experience he has in front of him (but I don’t know the ins and outs of how important or re-arrangeable the teeth thing is)
and yes, those jumps are fun, very, very fun.
5 jumps, one run, happy in pants looking at that!. The other jump looks intimidating to say the least. Interesting rundown on the horndog swede situation too ha ha ha!