the bit in the middle

We’re home from Göteborg now, and have a couple of days downtime before we set off for Ireland.  I still haven’t figured out how to spell that city name in the previous sentence, as I have three of them available to me : English, Swedish and German.  Obviously the Swedish would be preferable, but that entails using an extended character which means opening another application.  The straight English “Gothenburg” is an option to counter that, but it doesn’t feel right either. I have the same problems with Munich and München too.

The day before yesterday we were in a theme park called Liseberg, which is apparently the oldest theme park in all of Scandinavia.  We didn’t go on all that many rides to be honest, in part because they were fairly old, and in part because they just didn’t look all that exciting.  I did take a trip on one awesome ride though, called Kanonen (The Cannon).  Its a roller coaster, where you accelerate very fast at first, and then stay there while it goes around the track.  Think about the fastest kick you’ve ever gotten from an airplane taking off.  That doesn’t come close to the acceleration of this ride, it was just incredible.  Zero to sixty in under two seconds.  For all that, it felt completely safe.  We were hurtling around these enormous metal girders in a car made of fibreglass, but the grip the car maintained on the track and the control exerted over the speed were uncanny.  I’ve never felt such a sense of completely in control / completely out of control before.  Awesome stuff indeed.

Anyway, I read earlier on the BBC that there was an accident on one of the rides yesterday. Nobody was killed, but twenty people were seriously injured.  Some were thrown out of a ride, and some were injured when that ride fell about three meters to the ground.  Not cool at all.

Our hotel wasn’t quite what I had been expecting.  It was lovely, and did have a splendid view over the city, but it was probably a luxury hotel ten years ago. Today it was more shabby-chic than luxurious. Still, a pretty good choice all in all.  If we had known we would have looked at staying in that four-masted floating pleasure palace in the harbour.  Its an old barque called the Barken Viking which we had a peek inside while we were there, and it was very nice indeed on the inside. There are only ten ships of this type left in the world.

The rest of Göteborg was really nice. We took a trip out to Elfsborg fortress, which is a small defensive island in the harbour.  The guides there were in period costume and played two characters who were closely linked with the fortress and its use as a defence against the Danes.  We also shopped a fair bit which probably isn’t that unusual for us on holiday, but the biggest shopping mall in all of Sweden was just there…

Our trip here was actually shorter than we had planned.  The airline pilots from Lufthansa City Line were on strike the day we were supposed to travel there.  We didn’t know this until we got to the airport (early in the morning!) and got shuttled to a desk where we could look for alternative transport.  Trains to Göteborg would have taken our whole holiday though, so we elected to fly out the next day instead.  This was the first time I have ever flown without travel insurance, and the damn airplane was delayed by a day.  If my Amex insurance was still active then that delay would have entitled us to take a shopping trip to the tune of about £4,000 to compensate us for the inconvenience.  ::sigh::