hiidenkonttibeta

I took the morning flight to Stockholm on Tuesday, spent business hours with all things VoIP, evenings wandering around the Gamla Stan, and flew back on Thursday.

VON is a very business-oriented conference, in other words “boring”. They don’t fill your bags with useless toys like superballs with blinking LEDs, stuffed penguins and two years worth of T-shirts, like they do in Linux Expo (and in CeBIT, I guess). Instead they ask if you need to verify the QoS of the VoIP service in your 300,000 subscriber network and hand you a business card. I got a couple of T-shirts anyway, one of them after “blogging” by filling up some questionnaire. I never figured out how it was related to blogging.

After a tiresome day of conference I got to my hotel, found a map and figured out that the hotel was only a few blocks away from the Gamla Stan. On my way there someone asked me how to get to other side of the water to Gamla Stan. With five minutes of experience in walking in the city and I’m helping people to find their way.

The Old City is as nice as I remembered. My map only had a few of the streets named, there’s too many narrow alleys for all of them to fit in small map. I also didn’t know the addresses of any of the places I was looking for, so I put away the map and navigated by walking along a random street and taking a turn to left or right when the surroundings didn’t look interesting anymore. Luckily Gamla Stan isn’t very big.

I was there too late on both Tuesday and Wednesday, and some of the shops were already closed. One of them was Handfaste, a “viking shop”. Probably wouldn’t have bought anything, but at least it would have been fun to browse the shelves:

I didn’t find the prog CD shop I was looking for, but I did found Mellotronen. They had all the CD’s I had planned getting! Apparently the shop is owned by the bassist of Landberk. I also found a wonderful sci-fi bookshop.

One of the things I encountered during the navigation was a statue of St. George and the Dragon:

The artificial bird nest (at least I never saw a bird of that caliber around) was by the bridge going to Gamla Stan. Speaking of food, I tried some Swedish ones. The black thing on the plate is an entrecôte of an elk (with some lingonberry stuff, and not-so-good potatoes in the background). The Svenska LantChips weren’t a match for Kartanon perunalastut, but the Falcon ale wasn’t too bad. The Swedes don’t seem to master the art of making tasty potatoes.

There was a little garden in the front of my hotel, and it had cherry trees in full bloom. さくら! Sergels Torg was nearby, some store had an ad for Cosplay drop-in workshop. The sci-fi bookshop in Gamla Stan also had a lot of manga and anime.

Wednesday evening there was the “All Conference Party” with food, drink and live music. The band was Herding Cats, from Seattle. They started with some Dire Straits song. Huh? But it turned out to be some parody version. They played a lot of covers, I don’t know if they had any original songs, but they were a lot fun to watch, since they were rather .. lively. Especially the drummer. He played around all the time he wasn’t singing (he sang half of the songs), hiding behind the drums and playing from there, for example.

On the way back I was asked for directions again. This time it was two Asian guys in suits. They had a map, and were going to the direction I was coming from. I explained the way to the guy who was holding the map:

Me: We are here, it’s the street on the left, turn to that one and continue.
Guy1: You mean left? (scratches head, tries to figure out how it can be left)
Guy1 to Guy2: (points at map) ここですか?
Me to Guy2: 日本人ですか?
Guy2: You speak Japanese?!

At that point the map guy got it and they hurried on.

I could spend a few more days in Stockholm, with less business and more wandering.