Countryside Street Art

We were actually a bit surprised that it was on Blidö, far from the hectic city, we were find this particular style of mailbox decoration:

5-day weekend

Today it was back to work after a looooooooooooooong weekend: Thursday it was Ascension Day (a holiday in Sweden) and lots of people found a way to take Friday off from work as well. On top of this yesterday was a very special day here in Sweden: the national day, the day of the Swedish flag and the name day of the king. This day is not the only day that Sweden is a nation (as suggested by a Basque friend of ours), rather it is the anniversary of the foundation of 'modern' Sweden: on June 6th 1523 Gustav Vasa became king of Sweden. However, it wasn't until 1916 that the day was officially recognised (as The day of the Swedish flag). In 1983 the day was renamed as national day of Sweden and only as late as 2005 was it made a public holiday - in return for which the Swedes gave up having Whit Monday as a holiday.


Even though this was our 3rd Swedish national day this was our first time getting a day off on account of it (as it was during the weekend for the 2 preceding years - a problem that never arises with Whit Monday as we'd like to point out). Fortunately for us it was a beautiful day and we were able to enjoy lunch on the balcony.

Snake's Head (Fritillary)

Our trip to Danmark actually started somewhere else in the vicinity of Uppsala: on Uppsala Kungsäng (Kungsängen in this context is read as Kungs-ängen, that is King-meadow - not to be confused with the Swedish bed stores Kung-sängen, 'the King bed'). We had read that in late May this meadow offers the view of lots of blooming snake's heads (in Swedish known as kungsängslilja, 'king-meadow-lily'). Truth be told the experience didn't have quite the grandeur we expected: the flowers are very pretty, but we had allowed ourselves to expect a virtually purple meadow...


As with everything else related to botany in this country we were able to find traces of this gentleman:

And then we went to Danmark

That is the village of Danmark^[1] just outside Uppsala. Danmark is close to freeway E4 so even though we only recently learned that the village there is called Danmark we had previously noticed the church ('Church of Danmark').


^[1] Yes, Danmark is the name for Denmark in both Danish and Swedish.