Travels to Sweden & Holland

Last week I had to opportunity to travel to Stockholm, Sweden, and the Hague, the Netherlands, with my husband. What a study of contrasts when compared to Beijing.

Stockholm was a wonderful old city with an old city feel. It felt small and easy to get around. I ambled along cobblestone lanes; ate seafood and traditional Swedish food at a friend's home, at the Wallenburg's Villa Tacken Udden, and at the restaurant Wedholms Fisk; and sailed along the locks, archipelago and Baltic Sea along which Stockholm is built. As I've described before in other blogs, sometimes one has to seek out the ancient in Beijing as the modern constructions and development are ever more in evidence. Stockholm has kept a building height limit in order to let the old buildings shine, and they are careful in new construction. One of the interesting things I learned was that in Stockholm's bid for the 2004 Olympics, it developed one area of the city, formerly occupied by old shipyards, into a new, green, residential area, originally intended as the Olympic village. The buildings are built green, the recycling is formidable, the waste treatment is cutting edge, and the traffic is really eco-friendly.
See http://www.hammerbysjostad.se/ for more information (check the English setting to read it in English). Also, one Stockholm resident I spoke with opined that 1 out of 5 residents owns a boat. And in one part of the city, along the archipelago, there is a sandy beach for swimming -- the water is that unpolluted! Compared to the water in the Haihe River in Tianjin or in Houhai or Beihai in Beijing, this is REALLY something. (Of course, pollution doesn't deter people from swimming in these Chinese waters....)




As usual, I travel around the world and end up speaking Mandarin! I met a medical researcher from Beijing, now working at the Karolina Institute, a medical university founded in 1810. She had been in Stockholm for 1 year with her toddler daughter and her husband. While she found Swedish not too difficult to learn because she knew English, her husband was still studying the language before finding work and the cold, dark winters, she said, were quite difficult to adjust to. Another Chinese woman had been a Beijing Carrefours manager for 10 years before moving to Stockholm, but still travels back to China once a year. I also learned about one Swedish gaming company developing a new internet mahjong game. More on that later! At the Stockholm Public Library a display by photographers Karin and Martin Naucler illustrated the Paralympic sports and Swedish atheletes.

And then Holland. Green, clean, easy to get around. See the beautiful townhouses beside a canal in the old part of the Hague?The train between Amsterdam and the Hague runs about 30 minutes. Huge bicycle parking lots dot the city; we saw one KLM stewardess commuting to the airport from the Hague! Down the road, another 20 minutes, was Delft. Parking and gas is expensive, so not too many waste resources; drive when necessary, otherwise take public transport or bikes. Beijing is now back to normal with regard to traffic; that means, a lot, and crazy. Like in the US, gasoline in China is much lower here than in Europe where it is almost US$9/per gallon! And expat re-entry? Our Dutch friends who had returned to Holland after more than 10 years in Asia had the usual re-entry ups and downs, but we loved seeing them and their new home. (Our friendly cheese seller.)

And now, we are off again as a family, this time to the top of the world: Tibet. Will keep you posted.