Stockholm Diary: Weekend #3 - Skargard

... But even if I had the idea of what I wanted to do on the third weekend, I didn't get the gap to put the idea in front of anyone. The week was crazy at work. And to add to the task, my previous project affairs were still being demanding. And by the time it was the magic day called Friday, the pressure cooker had started to blow its whistle.

At my hotel reception I inquired on how to get to the Stockholm Archipelago. (they call it Stockholms skärgård) From the reception, I got the website from where I could get more info. About an hour  long web browsing after that, I had decided to go out alone in the city on this little adventure [in case of failure, I had a plan B ready - Streets!].

Thankfully, the transportation system there is well integrated and is well understood by anyone, not just by the city dwellers. Two metros trains then a not-so-short walk, then a bus instead of an expected tram finally made me reach the port from where I had to catch the boat for my 3 hour long exploration. Thankfully, my penultimaterun towards the ticket counter and then the ultimate one towards the white, well maintained, 80 year old steam boat was good enough not make me loose on my adventure.

The place is called Nybroplan and it gives a nice view of the array of buildings and the water.

From the ticket counter I started running and finally stopped on the roof of our steamboat (from where I got the above picture). At 12pm we started. I was hoping for a sunny day, but it wasn't. Even though it was overcast, it at least didn't rain. The boat had lower and upper decks for people to sit and enjoy the view from the windows, but I wanted to get it without any glass colour tint on my shots.

It was a guided tour (in English) and was totally an enriching one for someone like me who was at zero potential as far as history and geography of the city is concerned. The history of the archipelago during the dark ages, early settlements, of merchants are quite treat to swallow.

Our tour concerned only a part of the inner archipelago. Houses like these were spread all over the scattered islands. Many of you have already seen it in my facebook album and... well... we all know what we start to think when we see a house like this (that too with the colours of the surrounding trees at their best)...

On the semi saline semi fresh Baltic waters, I clicked not much but only a zillion photographs. I guess, the couple sitting in front of me on the roof, had started to be judgmental about me clicking simply everything. But, I had my own things to pack inside the little memory card, so I could only ignore them... Upon reaching Vaxholm, the most populated place on the archipelago, the sun showed up from somewhere and the water again turned blue-er than before.

This is some kind of a fortress at Vaxholm that was never actually used by the Swedish to base their attacks on their enemies. Among the 10-15 photographs I had taken of this structure, this one was a little better than the rest. Our boat stopped here for 5 minutes before it started off for its journey back.

All the time (90 minutes of our up-the-sea tour) I was planning to take a shot of which I had a very particular picture in my mind. But didn't get it. Our boat took a little different way back and I found something that was close to my mental picture.

An island and the sea. Imagine a day coming to an end and you sitting on the last rock before the sea on this island. Gives me a very realistic feel of loneliness. I don't know if I have it in me to pull up anything like that, even for a day.

The most irritating thing that the 'big photographer' in me was observing was the changing mood of the sun. For a very short time it was 'the perfect light'. Rest... it was gray... or worse... gray with some strong shadow (I didn't dig into details on how is it possible!). But finally, the 'big photographer',stopped complaining and tried to make some lemonade with the lemons he had [relax guys... this is a metaphor!]

Knowing my weakness for black and white, he turned to the apparently 'undesirable' objects around him and created a shot. This is, as you know, from the roof of the boat. But trust me, it is not easy to just let yourself loose in this black and white memories. Three hours of freezing wind had my still gloveless hands frozen this time. I was unable to pull up the zipper of my jacket as I was not able to know if my fingers are successful in holding the zipper or not. My sense of touch had his resignation for quite some time.

When I could finally convince myself that the day had enough clicks, I went down to the lower deck and warmed my hands (and nose and ears and throat). As we reached the land and bid goodbye to the wonderful crew of the boat, a thing started to go through my mind and it made itself very prominent when I was walking towards the tram stand to catch my train from T-Central...

It was... today's plan-B. Thankfully, I had another weekend to use... my last one out there...