Karin and I visited Sundvik about a half year ago, it was in December. It’s rather unique in Sweden, with its coast line of steep sand banks, and a beach full of weathered and washed bricks. Might it have been a brick maker in the area, gone since long, from which all the remaining bricks were dumped along the shore in an effort to stop the erosion? Who knows, it’s a beautiful sight, though.
This time, we went there in company with a bunch of other people from her work. It was sort of a photowalk combined with dinner at a castle that is located nearby. But no, it didn’t look as in the fairytales, rather as one of those mansions I’ve seen on movies from the Beverly hills. Later I learnt that it was built in the beginning of the last century, which explains it all. I didn’t honoured it a single photo, was that very impolite?
The walk went throug an area with lots of postcard views, of which I photographed quite a few. Pretty photos that are now uploaded to flickr, for everybody’s pleasure, or not.
I walked also into this scene:
A stranded boat, it has been battered by the sea until nothing else but the hull remains. Beside it, a beach ball.
The events that caused the boat and the ball to end up at this place are of course not the same. The wind will have moved the ball to another beach tomorrow, perhaps to the share joy for a new kid. The boat looked like it has been stranded there for a while. Quite probably a storm tore it loose from its anchoring. I happened to coincide when their paths met. As this scene was presented to me, my imagination went away in another direction than the logical. I tried to capture that in the composition and the later b+w processing.
La Strada
If you leave Lund on the road to Odarslöv, you’ll pass by a place that has been forgotten since many years. It is not more than a kilometre away, actually on the same road as the windmill I wrote about a few months ago. The road was long ago part of the main road between Malmö and Stockholm. This was before the fifties, and even if the traffic not can be compared with today, it must have been more busy than it is now. The road has since then been straightened up and also widened. That is, except right outside this forgotten about place, where the original road and its concrete surface is still more or less intact. You have to get off the ordinary route to drive on it, though. During many decades, there were a roadhouse here. La Strada. That was its name. If you know some Italian, you know this means ‘The road’. It gives an idea how important this road once were. You could stay over the night, and also eat or just having a cup of coffee. Many from Lund went there too, since it was also a dance place in the evenings. All this changed over the night in 1954, when the new motorway – the first one in Sweden, in fact – opened up for traffic. The new motorway passed by just a few hundreds of meters away, but no one would ever get off to drive on this road any more. There are thousands of such stories, all over Europe. When the motorways were built, whole villages were forgotten about. La Strada didn’t die, though, probably since many from Lund continued to visit the place. The business managed to carry on as a dance place for some twenty more years, and the hostel survived even until the early 2000s, when it eventually had to close down due to a fire. La Strada wont stay for much longer, because a giant particle accelerator is planned to be built on this place in a few years from now. If La Strada would be a good representative for the old and much slower life than we live today, the particle accelerator and everything that comes around it must be quite the opposite. I think it would be good if La Strada didn’t have to stay and see also this grow up.