Now, what can I say about Sweden. It was a pretty cool trip. It started off sort of bad but just got better and better.

I was here to try and finalize a deal with a company called Bonnier Digital. Bonnier is a huge publishing empire, and a few years ago they set out to centralize all of their IT into one place, and they named the subsidiary responsible for that “Bonnier Digital”. They want us to build on OpenNMS to create a state of the art network management solution for them.

I flew from Heathrow to Gothenberg airport, which is in the southwest of Sweden. From there I had to drive about two hours north to the little town of Ã…senbruck. If you look at a map of Sweden, you’ll see two huge lakes in the south. The western one looks a little like a figure eight on its side or an infinity sign, but if you treat the whole thing like it was a face of a clock, Ã…senbruck is near eight o’clock.

There is no (easy) public transportation way to get there, so I had to rent a car. This would mark the fourth country outside of the US in which I have driven, and at least the Swedes drive on the proper side of the road. I didn’t want to tackle this without some sort of GPS, so I had brought along my old iPhone 3GS with Tom Tom maps. These work even without a data connection, which can be expensive overseas. But I had issues with the GPS sync on that phone in the past, so I loaded offline Google maps into my current phone. The area I needed to cover was twice as large as the maximum offline map size, so I saved two of them that should cover my trip. Finally, I had printed out Google Map directions at the hotel as a last resort.

Good thing I did.

But first, the car. I walked up to the Avis counter and asked for a Swedish car, seeing as how I’m in Sweden ‘n all. I had checked the Volvo S60 box when I ordered, so I was ready to tackle this country in all its Scandinavian glory (I stopped short of putting ABBA in my music collection).

They rented me a Peugeot. A Peugeot 508.

Not only was it a French car, it was a diesel hybrid French car. When I first got into biodiesel I thought a diesel hybrid would be a great idea. When diesel cars idle they don’t use much fuel, so a hybrid wouldn’t need to always turn off the engine in order to save fuel when the electric motor was running. But it was pointed out to me that diesel’s peak power is at low RPMs, just like with an electric motor, and it was questionable whether they would benefit each other. Considering the extra weight, cost and the production of rare earth metals that goes into an electric hybrid, it probably won’t be a great idea either for the car or for the environment.

That didn’t keep the French from trying. But we’ll come back to that.

I threw my bags into the car and went out to a clear area (out of the parking garage) to start up the iPhone. After waiting outside in 20F weather with no GPS lock, I decided to try my phone with Google Maps.

In a stroke of genius, you can’t search on Google Maps without a data connection. There also doesn’t seem to be any way to save a route. So while I could see where I was, I couldn’t see where I needed to go.

Then I thought – hey, maybe the iPhone needs an active cellular connection to help out the GPS. I had planned to get a SIM card for it in any case (since it is off contract and unlocked) and I had even brought the little tool I needed to pop the SIM card out of the phone. I figured I could just put the SIM card from my other phone into the iPhone, especially since I was so smart to bring the tool thingie.

I was smart enough to do that, but I forgot the other thingie to convert the little 4G SIM card I use now to the bigger 3G SIM card format used by the three GS. This after my frozen hands did their best to nearly break the new phone trying to get the SIM card out.

(sigh)

I put everything back together and decided to try getting a GPS sync one more time. I set aside 5 minutes, and at 4.5 minutes the iPhone started working. Yay!

Now we get back to the car. The 508 was nicely equipped and comfortable, but it had the worst transmission of any car, bar none, that I have driven. I should have know something was up when the lady at the Avis counter asked “can you drive an automatic?”

Well, I thought I could. I have driven a Prius so I wasn’t thrown by the little shifter thingie that only had two directions, forward and back. When I finally got moving I thought something must be wrong, since every shift felt like the car momentarily stopped, throwing me toward the windshield and then slamming me back as it shot forward.

It had six speeds.

In all fairness, it did have a manual mode and paddle shifters, so maybe it was supposed to be driven like a manual car. In any case, it did well enough at highway speeds that I didn’t mess with it any more, and the fact that I was trying to drive smoothly and not react quickly came in handy as the iPhone would occasionally shout “Make a right turn now!” while I was doing 110 kph on the E6. I’d look down at the map and the car would be some 300 meters to the left or right of the highway, or on some other road parallel to the one I was on. It was an adventure. The route is actually quite simple, take the E6 north, get on the E44 briefly and then continue on the E45. It was changing from one main road to another that was confusing, and the GPS did actually manage to help once I go over it lying to me on occasion.

My instructions from the client were to make my way to Mellerud. Just as you enter the town, there would be a turn off with an “information” sign. I was to meet Malin there and she would show me to the hotel.

Sweden was not at all what I expected. I have been to Norway a couple of times and I expected more of the same, sort of like one might expect Arizona and New Mexico to be two sides of the same coin. However, this part of Sweden was very flat. So flat that there were huge windmills (the make energy kind and not the Don Quixote kind) everywhere. It was kinda cool.

Once I got to Mellerud we started getting into the hills. It reminded me of home, actually. The area is lightly populated with just enough hills to make it interesting. One difference was while there was little snow most places, you could see small drifts piled up in shady spots.

I found Malin with no trouble (she was in a Volvo, ‘natch) and she raced up the hill to the Kroppefjall resort where I would be staying. It was in a complex of buildings, and I was glad she was with me as we had to walk to another building to register and get the key and she helped figure that out.

The room was enormous. It was more like an apartment than a room. Great views out of numerous windows and a huge whirlpool tub. The bath had heated floors, but was missing a shower.

I’ve stayed in places like this a few times in my life where there was just a tub but no shower. The “shower” function was provided with a sprayer attached to a hose, but I have never fully figured out how to use it. In one case there was a hook on the wall for the sprayer which turned the tub into a shower without doors (and the bathroom into a pond) but in the other cases there was no such hook.

I was determined to figure this out.

On the first morning I just kind of crouched in the tub to wash. That went okay, but I found myself getting cold whenever I had to put the sprayer down to wash my hair, etc. The second morning I filled the tub with about 8 inches of warm water, and that seemed to be the best solution. I didn’t like sitting in a bunch of soapy water but at least I got clean and wasn’t freezing.

The room/apartment also had a distinctly Swedish touch – every window boasted a little lamp. When you drive through Sweden at night, people tend to place a light in every window, sort of like Christmas time when we put “candles” there. I’ve been told it is because it gets so dark in the winter, but I think people probably just like the way it looks.

Anyway, Malin left and I got settled in, and then I took a nap (I had been up since about 5am). That night Lena contacted me to go out to dinner. She had come to North Carolina for training once in the past and that is one of the things that put all of this in motion. Her mother is ill (age) and so she wasn’t available earlier in the day, but that was fine by me.

We drove off in search of a restaurant (in another Volvo of course) but Mellerud is a small town and the one place she wanted to take me was shut. We ended up at a somewhat Greek centric restaurant, and although it was only about 8pm on a Saturday night, the place was empty. The hostess said it was due to the televised qualifying round for Sweden’s entry into the Eurovision Song Contest (look it up) but Lena said that in small town Sweden people just didn’t eat out much. I had some local fish and vegetables as well as a local beer and everything was very good. Lena and I talked both business and philosophy, and I had a great time.

She told me that they were having some issues and she wanted to know if I would mind going in to the office in the morning. We settled on 10am. So I went in and addressed those issues for a couple of hours before heading south for our afternoon event.

Lena had arranged for a group of us to attend a game of “Bandy” while I was in Sweden. When she sent me the URL, the website was in Swedish and I just assumed that it was hockey. Turns out I was wrong.

She managed to score tickets, on the ice, not only to Bandy but to the Bandy 2013 World Championship game between Russia and Sweden.

When we arrived, we entered the area and went to a “members only” type restaurant on the second floor that looked out over the ice. The place had a bar and a buffet, and we had a table right over one of the goals. It was packed, but we got four seats next to the window (in addition to myself and Lena, Malin and Anil joined us).

The first thing that made me think “this ain’t hockey” was the rink – it was huge. We’re talking soccer field huge, which is appropriate since I figured out later that Bandy seems to be more “soccer on ice” than hockey. While we ate, the teams came out to warm up and that’s when I noticed another major difference. Instead of a flat puck Bandy is played with a pink plastic ball. The ball is smaller than a baseball but bigger than a golf ball, and part of the game is to get it in the air.

The sticks are also different. They are much more curved, and the goals are much larger than in hockey. They are taller and wider, with a height about that of a man. The goalie, by the way, has two large, round padded gloves but no stick.

We finished eating before the game started. The place had filled up as we made our way to our seats in the front row near center ice. When the game started I tried to understand how it was played. This is where the soccer analogy came into play. There was no icing, no body checks, and no plastic wall protecting the fans from the ball (although that really didn’t matter). It was a physical game nonetheless, and fast. Like soccer, it consisted of two 45 minute halves and the clock never stopped – they simply added time as needed for penalties and other issues.

They did have penalties and a penalty box like hockey, although the times were pretty severe. Of the four penalties I remember, one was for 5 minutes but the others were for 10. When a team was playing light, the penalty did not end when the other teamed scored.

Speaking of scoring, Russia pretty much dominated. Their first two points came after the Bandy equivalent of a corner kick: The Swedes would all line up in front of the goal while one Russian player passed in the ball from a corner. Then three or four Swedes would shoot out and try to break up the play before they could score.

They didn’t do so well on the first two.

At halftime it was 2-1 Russia, and in the second half Russia scored its first “real” (non-corner kick) goal to make it 3-1, but the Swedes managed to score again late in the game to make it 3-2. Unfortunately, Russia scored another corner kick thingie with only 10 or so minutes left, and even though Sweden scored again they couldn’t pull off the tie in time.

I say “10 minutes or so” since you couldn’t really tell when the game was going to end. Just before the 45 minute mark in the second half, a referee took a huge fall and wasn’t getting up. I didn’t see him get hit (that did happen a couple of times throughout the game) but he must of hit the ice hard because as they helped him off the ice you could tell that his legs weren’t quite working (not that they were broken but that it was having trouble keeping them under him). We ended up waiting about ten minutes for them to find a replacement and get him suited up, which I thought was a little weird for such an important game. Most soccer games have a alternate referee dressed and ready to go, and since this game is much faster than soccer I would assume refs get hurt more frequently in Bandy.

I really enjoyed myself. While the Russians would cheer “Ruuus-See-Ah Ruuus-See-Ah” the Swedes would shout something like “Ya Ya Men-sah, Fah Tosh Bor-ah” and I struggled to learn it. I was sad to see the Swedes lose.

Anyway, I’ve chalked this one up under my “weird international sports” along with Australian Rules Football and perhaps I can see another game some other time.

On Monday I got to meet with the boss, Lars-Olov. We hit it off immediately, and he shared with me his plan for Bonnier Digital. The idea is to fill up the old paper factory where they are headquartered with servers and to make Ã…senbruck a data center to rival anything in existence today. Not only will this help Bonnier deliver content better, it will revitalize a section of Sweden that was hard hit when the paper mill closed. My company will be building the network surveillance solution and while I thought our meeting would last less than an hour, three and a half hours later we were still talking. He finally had to leave for a meeting, but invited me over for dinner that night. While I had planned to leave in the early afternoon to return to Gothenberg, I had just taken our largest single order and wasn’t about to snub the boss.

I went to lunch with Anil and when I returned I was told supper would be at 7pm. After getting directions, I decided to drive about an hour away to buy some jewelry for Andrea (Sweden was a new country, so she gets jewelry). I also stopped off to buy a bottle of scotch (the best they had was 12 y.o. Macallan) as a gift, and then I drove the hour back to Ã…senbruck. I got there early, so I sat for about 15 minutes at the little information stand where I started my trip and tried to get the bluetooth working in the Peugeot POS before heading on to Lars’s house.

I picked out his place on the way out (it has lots of lights) but made one mistake when I turned into a snow covered field instead of the snow covered driveway. I’ll say one thing about the Peugeot – it didn’t get stuck.

When I got to the house, I was greeted by his dogs. He’s an avid hunter, and I lost count after six. Four of them are a breed known as Caucasian Ovcharka, and this is the picture of the oldest “puppy” at 18 months.

and here is the size of that dog’s paw in comparison to mine:

and he is not yet full grown.

Hunting in Sweden is usually done with dogs, and the Ovcharka are known to go up against bears. There is a huge problem in this area of Sweden with wolves – huge, vicious, Doctor Zhivago wolves, to the point that most dog owners will not let their animals out with a lead since if they run off they are almost always killed. The Ovcharka is the only breed that can go up against a wolf in the area and win.

Once I made it through the puppy gauntlet, I found myself in the kitchen where I met Linda, Lars’s fiancé. She was making a simple meal consisting of moose and reindeer, with a gravy made using local chantrelle mushrooms, as well as potatoes and ligonberry jam.

It was amazing. Moose is now my favorite meat. Other than salt and pepper, it really doesn’t need any extra preparation, unlike, say venison which can taste gamey.

We then retired to the living room and had some coffee, before I got in the car and drove the two hours to the airport. I checked in to my little airport hotel room, got some sleep, and prepared to head back to the UK the next morning.

I am convinced that if anyone can pull this off, it will be Lars-Olov, so much so that I’m thinking of investing in a house in Ã…senbruck. You can find a nice small house for about US$30K, and Lars told me that his gorgeous house on 37 acres was only around US$100K.

Of course, [this is the place I want][12], but still … I think if this area takes off so will housing prices and it would be a good investment.