Borlänge and Nora

In the days between Christmas and New Year (mellandagarna - "the between days" - in Swedish) I went over to the House of a Thousand Wows to game. One of the game was played was about rail travel in Sweden. It's not the Ticket to Ride / Nordic countries version but an older game based on a hex map. I wanted to play it in part to get a better idea of city names in Sweden.

The northern-most city on the map was Mora. I joked about the "mines of Mo-ra", to some groans. (Geoff, you can groan as well.)

I was talking with Pär. He invited a few people over to his place for fika and tango, since there wasn't much going on over the holidays. I talked with him a bit about my difficulties of finding new clients, and my decision to expand and look for more general purpose programming work, rather than only in chemistry. My goal now is to live in Göteborg, as compared to being a chemistry software developer.

He called me the next day about doing some work for his company. They are a hardware company working on a project with a dozen other companies to get better data on road conditions. One of the things the project has done is instrument a number of cars to record things like speed, location (via GPS), direction, tire slip, hitting the brakes, shocks, etc. as well as set up weather stations next to the roads. This gets SMS'ed to the main computers, which processes the data, runs some weather prediction models, and puts the result on a map for visualization of the road conditions.

The idea is that this can help with "countermeasures" (salt and sand) and route planning. Pretty spiff.

He asked if I could go along to help with evaluating the web-based mapping visualization component, being developed by another group. The short version is he wanted someone with software experience because his company is a hardware company and doesn't know the right questions to ask, or at least the right way to ask the question. I joke that my job title for my Swedish business card will be "nördtolk" - nerd translator.

The meeting was at Vägverket - the Swedish Road Agency - at their main offices in Borlänge. The city wasn't established until the 1940s so I got to joke they they haven't "lived there for a long time". Bor länge means "living long", but the name comes from Borlængio "vägsträcka där man måste bära (båtar och) last" - stretch of road where one must carry (boats and) cargo. That is, portage.

There were no flights that week from Gothenburg to Borlänge so we drove. There were three of us going up and four coming down (the 4th came up a day later by train). It's about 6-7 hours away though coming down was longer because of snow. Swedes have a thing about "godis". Loose/bulk candy for the most part. You can get it in the shops. You can get it in the movie theaters, and more people get that than popcorn. And there's driving godis. Apparently an essential part of any Swedish road trip.

We stayed in Falun and went into Borlänge during the day. Falun has it's own knäckebröd, so of course I had to get some. Apparently it has its own sausages as well. My joke there was talking a walk in town is a Falun gång (gång=walk, and it sounds like Falun Gong).

On the second night we went to ... Nora! Yes, that place I learned about a few weeks ago- I went there. Pär and I went tango dancing there. He had looked them up on the web and made sure there was dancing that night. With the two of us there were 13 people. A couple of them I had even seen at Tangocamp. So, not many people, but it was fun.

These places were in Dalarna. A symbol of the province is the Dala horse. They are very fond of their horse and it shows up in a lot of places. One last word play joke for this blog. The Swedish word for horse is "häst". This rhymes with the word for west, which is "väst". (In American, sounds like "hest" and "vest"). The transit system in Gothenburg is called Västtrafik - "west traffic". Dalarna's is called Daltrafik. But I think it should be called Hästtrafik.

What to see where these places are? Here's the Google map route.

Only after I got back to Gothenburg did I realize that we passed very close to my ancestral home, as it were. My g'g'g'grandparents came from around Örebro, at least according to the research my mother's mother's cousin did some years back. And my niece and my g'g'g'g'g'g'grandmother share the name "Margaret." I may be off in the "g" count there. It was a long time back, going to the late 1700s.