About a year ago...

Originally posted Jul 1, 2006 4:57 am

Last week was the summer solstice, for you who live further south this doesn't matter much, but the further north you come the more you can tell it's there. In the most northern part of sweden you will get the midnight sun, a night or a few nights when the sun never sets, it will feel like noon 24 hours a day. Here where I live it's a little different, mostly the days grows longer and the sun doesn't set until close to midnight, and when it does set, you can still see it lighting up the sky from below, having some kind of long lasting sunset-sunrise. There is something more that I never thought of before, but that I realized last week, the night after the solstice.

It was the evening before my chinese friend who has been staying here for a week or so would go back to china, I'm interested in her and we have been having something going on, very subtle though. So when I got back from work in the afternoon I asked her if she wanted to do something with me in the evening, and we decided to cook dinner together and then do some other things, some for preparation for her departure. But only 5 minutes or something after we had made this plan she got a phone-call from a friend that wanted to see her before she left, so she kinda canceled on me. I got quite upset, and instead of changing the plans to something simpler (which could easily been done) I totally ditched her, and some dinner with another friend and didn't even help her with her preparations. I still regret this very much. But as she came back from meeting her friend it was already late and there was nothing we could do to save our plans. But we were both quite sad about what had happened and reconciled. After that I decided to do at least one of the thing I had planned, but not told her about before, to drive out to my former hometown, a little town about 15-20 minutes drive from here, and visit the beach where I grew up.

The beach there has a bridge, actually the longest bridge in Sweden and maybe even europe, it is longer than the Eiffel tower, almost 500 meters straight out to the water, ending at a small restaurant and a bathhouse. It was almost midnight when we got there, the wind was blowing hard against us when we walked out, but the setting was still kinda romantic in a way. The sky was "back-lit" from the north, and totally dark to the south, and the bridge has small soft light posts set every 2 meters or so. Walking there and holding her hand for the first time I realized how special that night was, the sky was perfectly clear, and looking to the north you could see as far as the horizon, and the clouds that looked like mountains because they seemed to be so low, and just turing around to the south to the pitch black which was only broken by the city of Malmö and the bridge connecting Sweden and Denmark.

It's the contrast in these two things that felt unique, if you go further north the whole sky will be either lit up or have the sun risen, if you go further south you will not get the "back-lit" sky at all. And also because we were out on the water, on a bridge that goes from the east to the west so we only had water far to the north and south.
I've lived here all my life, and never seen it like this, and I'm happy to have seen it now, and shared it with a close friend.

If it would have been possible I would have taken a picture of it, but as the view was 360 degrees in angle, and the light condition were both very bad and very different in different angles, it would just have looked stupid.