Inspired by my friend Marie Breskic’s pictures from Brcko, I had to set out and create my own little presentation of the surroundings where I live – which I have repeatedly promised to a number of people on a number of occasions and not quite yet gotten around to. So, without further ado:
 This is the house where I presently live. It doesn’t look much to the world, but it’s much nicer inside than outside. I live on the second floor, and I occupy pretty much all of it with my three-room apartment. The main entrance is on the other side, and every morning I go out, and around the back and jump into my red car. Yes, it’s a bit rusty. Get over it.
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 If I just step outside through the door basically, I have the ocean right in front of me. The little harbor/bay where I live is the home of hundreds and hundreds of boats, some large, some small. Whenever summer comes around, the boats magically appear from wherever they’ve been standing over the winter, and they put to sea. On calm days like this, there’s bound to be boats all over the place, heading out toward open sea.
And yes, if you go through the narrowish strait away there in the distance, you’ll sooner or later end up in England. Sometimes, from the top of Tjörne huvud, you can see large oceanliners far off the in the distance. |
 If you climb up to the church, you’ll see most of town spread out like this. It’s a very rocky, hilly terrain around here, with not many trees or natural vegetation (most of the trees are in people’s back yards). Lots and lots of boats in the harbor, and further away you can see several larger structures. One of those, towards the right, is the watercolor painting musem, where they have an exhibition right now of 17th to 19th Century British watercolor painters and their works. I’ve been meaning to go there and look but haven’t found time yet.
The larger, greyish structure to the left is the fishery plant. There’s always a foul smell just around that building. |
 There’s a better view of the bay from the church as well. It only takes a minute to get up there, and offers a beautiful view of the bay.
Just imagine what it’s like in winter when the gale from the nortwest comes howling in over the North Sea and hits us head on. There’s not much snow that sticks; last year they had two weeks of snow, apparently… otherwise it’s just raining. Summer is much better. |
 Since there are all these rocky cliffs, it sometimes leads to buildings buing built in quite fanciful locations. Like this one.
Most of the town is built this way. At least the older part; all houses are wooden and painted nicely white. For a while it seems like everyone was going for those plates that cover the entire building (like on my building), but I’ve seen people putting back the white boards instead. And it does look much nicer. Beyond the old part of town, buildings look more conventional: brick houses, concrete buildings. But downtown all looks like this. It’s amazing. |
 When you go just up the side streets off main street, everything becomes really narrow and winding. Streets go at impossible angles relative to each other, they twist and turn ever which way and sometimes become so narrow that it seems impossible to squeeze a car through. And yet people do. They carve out little places in the rock to put their cars, and find places to build and improve on their little back yards.
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 Every morning from Monday to Friday, I travel 20 km to Stenungsund. I took this picture while out walking one day around downtown. Stenungsund is the major petrochemical center in Scandinavia. There are a couple of very sensitive industries that lie here; Akzo Nobel, Borealis, Hydro and a number of others, which leads to this fanciful view of the surroundings. When something goes wrong, for instance in the big petrochemical cracker, all the excess gases are burned off with a flame that lights up the entire city. And when chemical incidents happen elsewhere in the country, the response team comes from… Stenungsund.
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 So it’s nicer to cool off a bit in the evenings. Provided that you make it back over Tjörn bridge without a scratch and still mentally sane, a much nicer view opens up. This picture is from Toftenäs nature reserve just a mile from my house. You walk out over the cliffs, and sit down right on the edge of the ocean, and watch the sun set over the ocean. It’s a true miracle of nature every evening. And the only sounds you hear out there in the evening are from seagulls crying in the distance.
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 Apart from birds, this is about the only life that thrives out here. On this side of the island, there are hardly any trees, just little pretty flowers that cower in the cracks between the cliffs. It feels a little strange for me who grew up walking around in fields and forests. But the nice part is that you only have to drive some ten minutes to the north side of the island, and walk around in the nicest forest I’ve seen in a long while.
It really turns out that Tjörn has everything. *) |
*) Except for tundra, deserts, big rivers, tropical rainforests, prairies and a few other things, but who keeps track?
Im writing this without glasses. Baby Nikolina stole them and is holding them, bouncing up and down saying yeyeyeyey! How obn earth I will find the human beung-button I have no idea.
Anyway, what a beautiful place, your new home. I saw the pictures before I lost my glasses. The houses climbing on rocks like that reminds me of Bosnian mountain villages. But did you taste egg cheese yet?
I haven’t yet had the bravery to try egg cheese. But I’m sure that someday I will…