![]() ![]() It’s like an MIT in the middle of Alaska or something.But miracles happen for the determined, and a few years of rabid vigilance and consistent applications to all the right places in Umeå, Östersund, and Sundsvall eventually landed me exactly the right position, and we made the jump, from England.I had already bought a house, years earlier, from the comfort of my office in Shanghai at the time. The Umeå Institute of Design is considered one of the leaders in the world. ![]() And I wanted to be a university lecturer in industrial design, as that had been my career for twenty years already! It was basically like saying “I’m going to be a design professor in Montana!”It sounded hopeless.Especially considering that the places where I wanted to work weren’t exactly mum & pop style jungle outfits grateful to have someone who could read and write, but absolute star performers in my field. Jobs aren’t exactly something found in abundance in that part of the world, which is the size of Germany, but only has about as many inhabitants as Montana. Which was a bit like saying “now I only need to win the lottery”. This is what I wanted! Half a year of snow paradise every year.Now I only needed to find a job. Powder snow, temperatures of minus thirty Celsius, clean blue skies, and snow on the ground solidly from November to April:The Canadian in me, who had been bored out of his skull by soggy, dark, lifeless winters in England, New Zealand, China, France, and all those places, really woke up then. Another perfectly pretty place along the Baltic coast:And between them, lots of this:Wide-open spaces, sleepy villages with comfortable houses with ridiculously low price tags, and people who were mellow even by Swedish standards.So I had found a place that had:Landscape dramaMellow peopleCheap homesDuring winter visits, I also noticed it had proper winters, like I had come to appreciate in Canada. ![]() A pure magic river city:Härnösand, gateway to the High Coast:Örnsköldsvik, another substantial city:Skellefteå. A beautiful, elegant city that immediately made me fall in love with it:Umeå. My focus shifted a little towards Norway then, but Norway’s precipitation data are a little frightening, and I already spoke good Swedish at that stage.Enter the chance realization that there is quite a lot of dramatic landscape in Sweden once you understand that the forests north of Filipstad are not denoting the edge of the world, from where onward you only find a few dragons and rainbows, and then you fall into space.Twenty years after first coming to Sweden, I finally decided to push the old Pontiac north of those forests, that had been my point of return up until then, and I found amazing things there.Quite unexpectedly, probably also to all my Swedish friends who, for years, had assured me that the only thing to expect up there was forest, mosquitos, and eternal night, I actually found this:Östersund - perfectly good civilisation, and it had a lake monster and mountains in the background!Sundsvall. I liked the country a lot, and made plans to live in Sweden eventually.But as the years went by, and I got to live in the Canadian Rockies, California, Arizona, and southern New Zealand, I began to realize I needed more landscape drama than southern Sweden has to offer. I’ve been coming to Sweden for nearly thirty years now, and initially explored only the southern half intensely. ![]()
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