Millesgarden (or Lost in Lidingo)

Friday I jumped on the bike to head for Millesgarden - the home and sculpture garden of the acclaimed Swedish artist Carl Milles. Millesgarden is on the island of Lidingo - and unfortunately I had a lot of trouble finding it! I made it to Lidingo in about 25 minutes - then spent an hour trying to get across/around major roads and railway lines.

When I finally made it, on of the first sculptures I saw illustrated how I felt while looking for the garden.

I did not know much about Carl Milles before, but having perused his work, I can confidently say that his main inspirations were nudity, angels, nudity, religion, nudity, greek mythology, nudity, christianity and nudity. Apparently many of his sculptures back in the day offended and many were 'modified' after completion (fig leaves, removal of offensively large male organs even though in scale with rest of sculture etc).

As well as walking around the sculture garden which had numerous statues and fountains, you could see inside his house including his studio. It was decorated through out with sculptures, mosaics, hand painted tiles and other artists work.

An unexpected bonus was being able to view his collection of ancient Roman marble carvings - some 2000 years old. Quite amazing.

It took 35 minutes to get home in the Fri arvo crazy traffic - in comparison to the 90 minutes it took for me to find it.

I've been riding on the railroads (and terrorising tourists, again)

I started yesterday with a bike ride - with the intention of extending out from yesterday's walking route. It didn't go quite to plan as I had difficultly reading the road signs - so I didn't make it out to the next island along. I did manage to ride along a few new areas of Swedish suburbia and coped quite well (especially for my first solo bike ride in Sweden). I am not used to riding with traffic, traffic lights or on that side of the road, so occasionally it was a bit of a challenge. I had decided that about 2 hours was the limit, so I headed for home - and I managed to further damage the American relations. I hit one of them with the bike. He was in the wrong place (ie the road) and I gave him fair warning (shouting "hey, hey, hey" - and braking sharply) but he didn't pay attention so I ran into him (not hard as I had almost stopped at the time I hit him, no one fell over). He apologised (American accent) and I took it like a Swede (didn't say anything, just rode on - to the pedestrian crossing 5m away where I think his fellow travelers were crossing). I think that the man knew that he was in the wrong place (threading his way through traffic) and I couldn't have done any further measures to avoid hitting him (no room to swerve due to parked cars and traffic).

After that incident I thought it best that I spend the rest of the day on public transport and decided to ride the trains to check out the art that is Stockholm train stations.

All stations are different, and a number of them are decorated quite elaborately. Some have murals, some are painted and some have sculptures throughout. To the left is one of the tiled murals decorating Akalla station - huge, about 7ft tall and quite wide - one of several depicting "life" (or something like that).  

Several of the underground stations are cavernous - massive cavelike tunnels. One of these was painted all in red and green - red skies and green fields - with scenes of foresty industry (trucks, loggers, people) plus some animals. The artist might have been making a statement about deforestation, or maybe they thought looked pretty!

Every part of the walls and roof were in the red/green - which with the size of the place the end result to me looked a little like a bloodbath in a cave. Or like a science fiction film where the characters have been swallowed by a giant monster.

Massive yes? (that's a triple set of escalators over there) So much red paint. You can't say it's boring.

Several of these stations have little scenes or similar in display windows (one of the stations was nautical themed and had a row boat in a window - others had little houses or tractors or three dimensional art). Worth a few hours of train hopping (and the longest you ever have to wait for a train is 10 minutes) although those big caves are pretty cold.

Cycle Sunday

I tested out my new bike yesterday with a group bike ride. This required a big effort - it was the first real exercise since my teeth came out. The new bike is the cheapest geared bike that Dr M could find - so it is functional, but nowhere near as comfortable as my bike at home (which has mountain bike tires, front shocks and comfort handle grips) - particularly over the cobblestone streets! I did go looking for some cycle gloves over the weekend, but as every shop was shut for midsommar, I was out of luck. (It is weird to have a city shut down completely for 3 days - DJs & Myer can barely cope with being shut for one day at Christmas!)

We rode out of the city and (like the locals) enjoyed the beautiful day with a picnic. I have no idea where we were, but we were on a lawn area between a manor house (built in 1775) and the water.

We ate our picnic on the grass, had a relax, then headed into the manor house for a hot chocolate (wrong weather for it, but it went well with the cake).

The house was beautiful and one of the staff brought us a photo album which showed the house as it used to be - not much had changed!




The ride home was a real struggle! I ran out of puff, my legs gave up and my hands cramped up. All up we did about 33km, so it was a reasonable ride after such a long period of inactivity/convalescence! No bike riding today - I'm going to rest and buy some cycling gloves to make tomorrow's ride more comfortable.