22:32 Wed.
14 Aug, 2013

Can't feel my legs (again)!

Day 6 , 141 remain
Lulea , Sweden
17 °C
Fair
4:06 am
9:01 pm

I don’t know why, but last few days I’ve been waking up around 5 am. Maybe because at this time sun starts to shine right on to my bed. Usually I’m too tired to think about this so I just turn around and sleep some more. Today was a bit different as I actually managed to drag myself to the window and to my surprise there was a lot of mists in surrounding forests. I will try to take some better pictures of this event, maybe from that hill I mentioned in previous post if I’ll manage to get up there in the middle of the night.

Misty morning
Misty morning Luleå

When I finally woke up around 10 AM, I decided to go for a long walk alongside beaches, through centre of the city and back home. I departed at around 11 AM. First I went south-west to the seaside and then south-east toward town centre. I took quite a lot of pictures as I walked. There were lots of benches and small piers, with picnic areas, all the way alongside beach.

Picnic area
Picnic area

When I reached bench for single person I couldn’t but help to think about “Forever alone” image and how people say that Swedes are shy. Here is the bench:

Forever alone bench
Forever alone bench, where else but Sweden? 🙂

As I continued my journey I decided to skip centre first and go around nearby forest. Grounds of the forest were filled with blueberry bushes and some of them still had berries on them. I think I was at those bushes for about an hour, eating I’d say almost 0.5kg of blueberries before continuing.

Blueberries in the forest.
Blueberries in the forest.

 

As I was preparing to continue to walk again I heard strange pecking noise in the trees. I looked up and found woodpecker at work. I don’t think I ever saw woodpecker in nature yet. I quickly changed current photo lens with a zoom one and tried to take some photos. The trees were quite tall and this lens is not as good as it could be so the picture is not as sharp as I would want it to be.

Woodpecker
Woodpecker

 

After taking a few shots I went on my way again, shortly to arrive to the beach with sand, volleyball court and again some people swimming. I really don’t know if these Swedes don’t feel cold or what but I was wearing jeans and long t-shirt and was a bit cold. They were in those swimming suits swimming in ice cold (I checked) sea like it was the warmest day of the year.
I forgot to mention that after this people were looking at me even stranger than usually, I later found out that I was all purple around my lips from blueberries, thankfully no one knows me in this town. 🙂

Luleå from sea
Luleå from sea
Luleå from sea
Luleå from sea

Not long after that I was on the main street of Lulea. I’ve been here twice and it has always been packed with people. Over the street there were hanging flags from all over the world, sadly I couldn’t find Slovenian. I took some more pictures of centre and went home.

Luleå city center - main road
Luleå city center – main road

At the end my legs were really starting to hurt, next time I will have to wear my running shoes and not this casual summer shoes I had today. Here is a map I recreated, it looks like I walked for bit over 20km, in about 6.5 hours.

MAP

Now that I finally have internet I can start working on my blog again. Firstly I need to create edit option so I can correct some mistakes from previous posts. After that I have to figure out what to do with scrolling, first post is quite long way down now.