Adventures in Sweden (2008)

When I first arrived I contacted the Swedish Equestrian Federation and asked them for introductions to local riders and riding schools that might be interested in being part of my research. The Swedish Equestrian Federation were very busy at the time that I contacted them, sorting out arrangements for the World Cup Show Jumping in Goteborg and so I didn't get an immediate response but later I did get referred to a local coach, Mari Zetterqvist. I contacted her and, of course, she was busy herself and so we didn't actually get to meet each other until several prompts later and by then it was almost the end of June and three months later. Mari is a well respected coach here in Sweden, as well as being a researcher and she has taught many of the local riding school coaches and so knows a large number of people.  Mari maintains a web site where she publishes news about advances in equestrian training. She put a brief reference to my work (in Swedish only) up on her web ...

What a great show! The Scandinavium venue seems almost perfect, it seats 12,000 for sporting events but is small enough to allow almost everyone to get up close. The Swedish crowd are also great, they really know how to support their own favourites but they are great sports and also know how to appreciate talent regardless of nationality. Here are some shots of the venue from up front, ringside. The corporate boxes are in the distance, up on the wall. I doubt they had as good a view as we had at ringside though. I was cheeky enough to score a VIP guest pass from the Show Director, this was especially good because tickets for Saturday and Sunday were sold out and I would have had to use the scalpers outside otherwise. There were quite a few scalpers wandering around outside trying to re-sell their tickets. I am not sure how successful they were and I never bothered asking them for a price. The Press were seated in the red seats up on the right and below them were riders and arena of...

Sourced a Panasonic video camera today from Gerald (thanks)! This was great but then I encountered the Swedish Red Tape when I went to open a bank account. The bank that I approached, obviously had no concept of customer service because there was a queue (a line for the USA readers) of people waiting to be served that took 45 minutes for me to navigate. You might think that my comments are unfair but this queue is built into the system of (non)service. When I entered the same bank several days earlier there was a similar long queue and on that date I mistook this to be an unusual occurrence but on returning I found it to be the norm. This was further supported by a system of issuing "tickets" from a ticket machine to enable one to see one of the tellers. This queue was obviously an inconvenience to business customers because the "ticket" machine allowed business customers to insert a special card with a readable strip that then put them into a shorter qu...