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Tuesday, June 14, 2016

Library visits

The shopping trip to Copenhagen last Monday was intense. I managed to visit three malls and the main shopping street downtown. During the day I did a total of nine train rides, mostly by metro. It's the easiest way to get around there. All those malls are conveniently located at metro stations. I bought some small things and a dress. It was a nice trip.

Tuesday we arranged a picnic in the city park where we also had a boules tournament. About 20 colleagues participated. It was a great evening with wonderful weather. Just the next day it started to get colder again. It is now around 16-18 degrees and cloudy/rainy.

I worked Tuesday and Wednesday. Thursday morning I went to Linköping with seven colleagues. We all went by train and arrived at mid-day. We visited the university there. It's different from ours, as it has focus on medicine, technology and science subjects. It's a lot smaller but we still wanted to see the library. We asked about interlibrary loan strategies, staffing schedules, overdue fines, statistics, house rules, electronic services and much more. We talked most of the afternoon and also walked around in the building, taking photos of all sorts of things (barcodes, signs, carts, book cases etc). Later we continued on by train to Stockholm, where we spent the night at a hotel just across the street from the station. Rather nice place. We all went out for a meal at a restaurant and it was fun to meet the colleagues away from work. At the hotel, the breakfast buffet was worth mentioning. Very nice with i.e. herring, bacon, several kinds of eggs and cheeses.

Friday morning we walked across the street to catch a regional train to Uppsala. It took 30 minutes to get there. We walked up to the big university library called Carolina. It's a place more similar to ours, with an old building, the same compact shelves, the same database provider and the same problems. Here we asked a lot of the same questions as in Linköping. We covered many aspects of library work and it was interesting to see how they do it at other libraries. They treated us for lunch and the boss showed up and invited us to his stylish office with a view of the city. We got a guided tour of the oldest book collections and the fancy room with six 17th century globes. We don't have anything like this. After this informational visit (we took photos of just about everything) we returned to Stockholm, where we split up. Some were going back home and some were going on family-related visits over the weekend. I stayed in Stockholm to visit my relatives (my mother's cousin).

Saturday I was disappointed to notice that two of the plus size stores had gone out of business. Now there are only chain stores left. I went to a mall I had never been to before. It was rather nice there, I bought a pair of sandals. I returned to the city center by subway and went to the Hallwyl Museum. It's a unique museum in many ways. It's a palace-like building with 40 rooms built in the 1890s at a very expensive address. It was just for two people, a very rich couple named von Hallwyl. They had decided early on that their house would be handed over to the government and be opened to the public as a museum. The wife had catalogued everything in the house. Every single item. The catalogue consisted of about 80 bound volumes. They had collected a few things that were on display; china, 17th century Dutch paintings, old weapons and silver items. I joined a guided tour of a large part of the house. It was definitely an interesting place.

Sunday afternoon I went to visit my other relatives, who are related to my great grandfather (the one I wrote a book about). They had also invited their son, whom I had never met. We had a very good time sitting in the garden having coffee and cookies. We talked a lot about the ancestors, of course. Monday morning I did a very short shopping trip near the apartment and then walked to the train station. I arrived back home in the evening after a rather boring train ride.

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