Favourite places in Örebro #1

      When you move to a new place - it's very important to find YOUR place. The place where you want to go again and again. A place where you feel comfortable and calm. For me a such place in Örebro is the lake Hjälmaren and the nature reservation areas around it.

      There are two of them next to aech other: Oset Nature Reserve and Rynningeviken Nature Reserve.

      Here you can find some historical facts and maps of those nature reserves.

Oset Nature Reserve

Oset Nature Reserve

Oset Nature Reserve

Oset Nature Reserve

Oset Nature Reserve, Erik Rosenberg’s Cottage

Rynningeviken Nature Reserve

Rynningeviken Nature Reserve

Rynningeviken Nature Reserve, Rävgången

Rynningeviken Nature Reserve

Ethiopian New Year in Sweden

      Is there a big holiday in the middle of September? Well…yeah! Actually, there is and a very big one! On 11 September, it’s an Ethiopian New Year! And probably Ethiopia is the best place to celebrate it. But I’m sure that the second best place to do that is Sweden! Of course if you have a company of Ethiopians around.
      I’m lucky to have Ethiopian friends who also study and live in Örebro. So, on 11 September we celebrated the new 2006 year. Exactly, in Ethiopia it’s 2006 now. The Ethiopian calendar is behind the one familiar to us for seven years and eight months. What’s more they have 13 months in a year, but the total number of days in a year is the same – 365…Well, it’s a bit complicated, just check this page if interested.
      The New Year’s day marks the approximate end of the rainy season. To celebrate it Ethiopians do the same thing as probably the majority of other people do during the New Year – they eat a lot! But the difference is that they eat Ethiopian food.
      The basis of Ethiopian food is a flat ‘pancake-like’ bread made of teff flour. It’s called Injera.

Injera

      It has a light beige-grey colour, sour taste and a bit spongy texture. Injera is eaten with meat gravies, which have very bright colours and an intensive taste.

meat sauce

meat sauces

     You eat like this. You put injera on your plate and pour several sauces on it. Then don’t be shy, use your hands and just pick a piece of injera together with some sauce and eat. Personally, I really like it, but should say that it’s quite spicy. The teff flour bread has a rather strange taste. So, if you are going to try injera for the first time, you may not understand the taste if you’ve never tried it before. But the more you eat – the more you like it!
      We were lucky eating the real injera and sauces that my friends brought directly from Ethiopia.
      But to eat without drinking – it’s not a holiday. Ethiopians drink alcohol. Some of my Ethiopian friends like to mix wine and Coke. It’s just a matter of taste and it’s really not a tradition.
      Plus, of course Ethiopian music! Some pieces of it you can find below.
      So, take a pancake if you don’t have injera, make some spicy meat-sauce, mix Coke with wine and switch on one of the songs below… But, maybe it’s just better to find some Ethiopians around!

Happy New 2006 year!

Pride parade by the eyes of a Russian

       
      This summer ended up in Örebro with a Pride-Parade. It started on Saturday, the 31-st of August, with a march from Scandic Hotel through the city centre and ended with a concert at Stadsparken. This was the first pride-parade I saw live.

Örebro, 31 August 2013

Örebro, 31 August 2013

      The atmosphere was very nice, people of all the ages were smiling wearing very bright clothes. Surprisingly, there were a lot of kids, even very small ones.

Örebro, 31 August 2013

      I didn’t notice a lot of police. On the roads car-drivers, who were waiting until the parade finish to cross the road, left their cars and were standing, observing. People on the balconies were waving and greeting the parade.
      I wonder how much time should pass that the citizens would react on pride-parade so peacefully and calmly. Well, there weren’t any big banners or billboards of kissing women or kissing men, nothing like that. Actually, I didn’t even see any of such couples expressing their feelings on the streets during the parade. All sorts of people took part in it, so actually you can’t differentiate between them. If you don’t know what that parade was dedicated to and if you don’t recognize the symbols – so you could hardly guess that it was pride parade.

Örebro, 31 August 2013

      The concert in the Stadsparken started with the song “Don't be ashamed, love is the same”…followed by some other songs about Jesus…

Örebro, Stadsparken, 31 August 2013

      During the whole event, I was thinking about one thing all the time – what if this parade was held somewhere in Russia. Actually they can very useful in very different ways. For example, for promotion of political parties. Secondly – it’s a good way to distribute the contraception and information about it, and actually it’s a good idea to do that on all such events that end late in the evening. =)) You could get the whole bunch of condoms of all the kinds and sizes for free in a candy paper bag.
      One more interesting detail was that during the whole concert a sign language interpreter was working on the stage, translating even the songs!
   
      Of course, Russia was mentioned from the stage by one of the Örebro authorities. Well, I really doubt if that person read the original document.

      I want to give just a short comment on this topic.

      1. There is no law against the homosexuality in Russia and it is not forbidden by law to be a gay or lesbian, or transgender. The original text of the law is here (in Russian).
      2. The original name of the law is – Federal law of Russian Federation from 29 June 2013, N 135-ФЗ Moscow. The law is aimed to protect children from information that promotes the denial of traditional family values.
      3. In this law such words as ‘gay’, ‘lesbian’, ‘transgender’, ‘bisexual’ – are not mentioned at all. The only wording used is – ‘non-traditional’.
      4. The law establishes responsibility for the propaganda of non-traditional sexual relations among non-adults.
      5. Under the word “propaganda” the law means the distribution of information in order to form non-traditional sexual settings among non-adults, the attractiveness of such relationship, a distorted picture of the social equivalence of traditional and non-traditional sexual relationships, as well as the intrusion of information on non-traditional sexual relationships, causing concern to them.
   
   
      I’m not going to translate the whole law here and to comment all the points of it. And I’m not a lawyer. The only thing I would recommend is – don’t follow the interpretations presented in the mainstream media, read the original documents, even translated with Google-translator they contain more truth and not just interpretations.

      So, the numerous calls in media to boycott the Winter Olympic Games in Sochi-2014 seem more than absurd to me.