Back from Sweden

Posted in: Travel

Fantastic time in Stockholm. The conference was a great success, I learnt plenty of bits & bobs that'll improve my work. Nothing drastic but a collection of little tweaks. I'll write the conference up from a techie perspective elsewhere (actually I did already and lost an hour's work doing so in a website bug, argh).

Saturday night's party was the social highlight of the trip - Helén, my fabulous host, took me and another Swedish guy to a fetish party. They initially wouldn't let me in owing to my excessively "clubby" pants. Rather than just boot me onto the street one of the guys in the club went off and brought back some PVC he had lying around and made me a sarong out of that and some duct tape. Astonishing. And cool.

Unfortunately I had to work quite a bit so didn't get out in Stockholm that much. Probably as well as with all the walking about my feet were absolutely killing me. Last day I scooted to the Vasamuseet, a museum that's entirely about a 1628 warship that was dredged up between 1957 and 1961. The scale of the operation both in terms of getting the thing out of the sea and then restoring and rebuilding is awesome in every sense. 14,000 loose pieces catalogued and refitted, the entire ship sprayed in preservative continously for days. Well, well worth seeing. Had a hard time leaving resulting in an efficient 15min gap before my plane left...

Posted by Paul Makepeace at October 25, 2005 18:27 | TrackBack