Swedish delight

It is as summery as it will get in Scandinavia, so with a balmy 23 degrees Celsius I have to praise the weather gods for this leniency on the part of my trip that I most need it: hitting a cold front this far North wouldn't be pretty.

Heading on its north/south axis for a while now, it is hard not to notice that Sweden is looooooong. It should be called Sweeden or maybe even Sweeeden, to emphasize how much Europe's Chile stretches out on the map. The population density, especially in the North, is very low, so even the big towns are with there several tens of tousands of inhabitants not your average metropolis. In between there is lots and lots of forest and some mean, big highways that you simply cannot escape.

The first time I met the E4 was just outside of Umea. I had done soem research priorly and found that, noted with a green line, the road was classified as a European highway. That tis minor fact didn't change the likelyhood of me encountering it again to a definite 0% was the most frightning of things. You can

look it up on the map yourself, even the official government's created bike route 'cykelsparet', a route that simply loves dirt tracks and detours, every now and again sends shivering cyclists for tens of kilometers along its haphazardly designed and narrow shoulder.

Now this isn't the first time I find myself on a highway, but one expects Sweden to be, well, better than that. You'd think that the friendly folk wouldn't like to find a squashed foreign cyclist on their plate, but clearly there are other priorities in traffic.

Like saying 'hi'. In Swedish it is actually a 'hei', a higher pitched sound that does simply not exist in English (correct me if I'm wrong), and is usually followed by a second one, resulting in the colloquial 'hei hei!', best answered with a 'hei hei' of your own. After the sturdy Balts and the fleshy Fins that would rather stare you down than usher even the slightest nod, going around the Swedish coast is a bloody wave-a-thon.

But not only the weather is surprisingly great, so are the roadside snacks (and I'm not talking about the flat rodents often encountered). The blueberries are great in number and taste, encountered in any random patch of wood entered and free of charge to be picked by all. But this was also the case in Finland, and the blueberry has ever been my favourite. That position has been held by the pretty pink raspberry, a rare delicacy in the Netherlands where it is grossly outnumbered by the blackberry, its evil thorny twin brother. In Finland I started running into bushes of my pretty pink favourite, where I wanted to describe the encounter as "there were almost too many to eat", but by now, my raspberry affair has gone through some quantity time and I cant even say that I could almost eat all of them. And being full because of eating raspberries, my dear reader, is the greatest sense of wealth one can achieve. Berry nice indeed.