Sweden: Trollhattan to Umea

Ann's Lecture

Saab Museum in Trollhattan

The next morning I had the honor of attending Ann's second lecture. She had been invited to speak at the annual conference of Swedish university information technologists. Sweden has 30 universities, and the conference rotates between the schools. This was University West in Trollhattan's turn. It was fascinating to listen to the host tooling along in Swedish to the audience, then pow, English - introducing Ann West to talk on federations. Ann then proceeded for with her talk and question/answer session in English, and pop, back to Swedish. She did a great job. And I can see why she had Tuesday off - she did not speak that day, so the entire proceedings would have been in Swedish - not much use to her.


The academic Swedes are especially good with English, and were fine hosts. They took us both out to lunch afterward at a beautiful small restaurant in an old house on the hill above the river, where we enjoyed superb local ingredients, fine service, and a great coffee and desert. We had a fine time with Walter and Roland.

The Very First Saab - Prototype 1, 1947

In the afternoon, Ann continued on with the conference while I walked down to the Saab museum near where we rented our bike the day before.

Historic Locks  below Trollhattan

Saab automotive was established in the late 1940's as an outgrowth of the Saab aerospace company. This was a pretty modern museum ensconced in a remodeled industrial building. It was nicely done, and I had it to myself. Definitely the off-season. It was interesting to walk through the physical timeline of production cars for a smaller manufacturer. In more detail than I often cared to know, you could follow their model development. There was even an engine timeline.

It was especially poignant to be doing this as Saab automobile was at that moment closed and awaiting yet another possible sale (later to fall through) and facing bankruptcy. Another of victim of the consolidation of auto worldwide auto manufacturing. Volvo is apparently still doing well, but you do have to wonder about a country of 9.5 million having two auto manufacturers.

I then hiked further down the canal to the locks. Here shipping leaves the river and traverses 8 locks to rise above Trollhattan falls and the hydroelectric plant there. There are actually 3 sets of locks here, two historic, each superseding the last as ships grew larger and traffic increased. The older locks are still preserved in a park surrounding the working lock zone. Folks used to come down form Trollhattan to picnic, marvel at the technology, and watch to see what the folks travelling up from the big city of Goteborg were wearing. They in turn watched their country cousins to see how they lived. How little has changed.

Downtown Trollhattan

That evening we went to an English pub in downtown Trollhattan with Roland (not be be confused with the Irish pub nearby, nor the 2 Thai and 1 Indian restaurants we'd eaten at on our stay). Most expensive burger and brew I've ever had, nearly 30 USD. But it was trivia night and they were packed. A live MC brought out a mic, handed out answer sheets, and began regaling the crowd with questions, with Roland providing a running translation for us. We did pretty good since a lot of the trivia was about the US and popular culture. There were a few that he could not reliably translate as they relied on plays-on-words in Swedish and Swedish cultural trivia. It was fascinating seeing both the penetration of American culture and history into a far European pub, as well as the cultural specificity of trivia when it was about what was for us a nearly unknown culture.

Freeway to Goteborg 

The next day, we left for Roland's home town of Umea, in far north eastern Sweden. This time instead of train and bus, we rode with him in his rental car directly to the Goteborg airport. It was fun to see another transportation mode in Sweden. Their freeways look remarkably like ours, located as they are away from the historic downtowns and cultural centers. The weather had turned, it was grey, and it began to drizzle, just as it had been when we first arrived. We had hit a beautiful, sunny break in the weather perfectly at Trollhattan.