Temka Vegtamchik'a

You're really off-key when you whistle.

Different notes require very different airflows. Especially for notes in different octaves.

By the way, you play the whistle by reading sheet music, right? How did you learn so quickly?

I started learning them with the guitar.

Continuing the Journey

Perhaps you thought that everything ended in Finland. But no. I finally returned home and found a free day to do all sorts of trivial things, including this.
The Norwegian Air Shuttle flight from Helsinki arrived in Stockholm. It's a short distance, only 40 minutes of flight. I spent the next four days in Sweden.

The first day was uneventful. Arrival, checking into the hotel, and so on. What I remember: a pizza named after the goddess of death, Ishtar. I met a Russian German who has lived in Germany for seventeen years and told me many interesting things.

The second day was about immersing myself in history. I walked through the narrow streets of the old town. I visited the royal palace and saw the solemn changing of the guard. I took a boat trip around Stockholm on a river tram. The most interesting thing was towards the end of the day - the Vasa Museum and Skansen.

The Vasa is one of the few surviving sailing ships. On August 10, 1628, it sank during its maiden voyage, having traveled about a mile. The reasons were poor stability and the shipbuilders' obsession with decoration - the ship was intended to be the flagship and carried seven hundred various sculptures and ornaments. In 1961, the ship was raised from the seabed, and in 1990, a museum was opened where you can see the ship itself and some of its fragments - parts of sails, masts, decorations, cannons; there you can also see skeletons of sailors and additional exhibits dedicated to the construction of the ship, life in the seventeenth century, and the stages of raising the ship and building the museum.

The Skansen open-air museum is the first ethnographic museum of its kind in the world. It covers an area of almost half a square kilometer. Many buildings from all over the country, built over the past three hundred years, have been moved there. You can go into an old bakery and buy pastries, into a grocery store from a century ago with corresponding goods, into a telephone booth from the 1930s... no, the phone didn't work. I walked through the park, touched real runestones, tried walking on stilts, and listened to a half-hour mini-concert of national music. Unfortunately, the folk dances were late, and I couldn't make it.

The third day was in Uppsala, the ancient capital of Sweden. Today, it is a small administrative center, rich in museums and attractions: the largest cathedral in Sweden, the first university in Sweden, the Carl Linnaeus Museum-Garden, where Linnaeus lived in Uppsala; ethnographic and historical museums - all this is located in a city with a population of 200,000.

The fourth day was in modern Stockholm. Walking through the streets and squares in the city center, you can see many wonderful performances: wherever you go, you will meet people who are eager to entertain you for a few coins that you throw into their hat or box. Here and there you come across mimes who will gladly take a picture with you. Ethnic shows are often found: descendants of Native Americans in feathers play wind instruments, people from the African continent beat drums and dance. In one of the alleys, two guys were playing on paint buckets, but they were hardly noticed until a ridiculously dressed transgender person with a tambourine joined them: together for ten minutes, they gathered a much larger audience.

Again, a plane, again a bus, again St. Petersburg.

For the next week in the city on the Neva, we, excuse the pun, rested from our vacation. In particular, I read books and practiced playing the newly acquired instruments. Another book and a board game were purchased. I visited "Divo-Ostrov" and rode the legendary "Catapult," considered one of the most exciting attractions in the world. For those who have never heard of it, the best illustration is this video:



And also, for the first time in my life, I walked a dog, the feelings were mixed. The object of the walk is a kind-hearted Labrador named Teddy, the first dog I befriended, considering my dislike of dogs. By the way, when he was still a puppy, two years ago, Teddy climbed the Gorely volcano with us and his owners.

On August 8, after a day of travel (plane to Moscow, transit, flight delay, plane to Petropavlovsk), I finally arrived home. All this week was a typical Vegtamovo summer: board games, basketball, relaxing in nature. And today, I finally got around to publishing this post.

By the way, I've updated the Finnish post a bit.