This blog entry has not been intended as a theme blog. But you may be excused if you think that it is because it looks like that we deliberately filled it with pictures of sculptures and art. But we promise that there are some other things in it as well. You just have to look closely to find it.
When we were in the city Ume we visited Umedalen sculpture park, which supposedly is the largest sculpture park in Sweden. There are maybe around 40 different sculptures and installations in the park. They are all very different in style. Some are quite interesting whereas some are less so. We have seen similar sculpture parks before and generally find them worth visiting. Even if the quality of the art works varies there are typically enough good ones to make it worth the trouble of going there and the time it takes to walk around.
In Vsterbotten District there is an art project called Seven Rivers. These works of art are typically displayed near major roads making them easily accessible if you travel by car. In this blog entry we have included pictures of two installations that are part of this project. One is of a man sitting in a Buddha position and the other can be described as a metal church placed in a bog.
Ratan is a small coastal village not far from the town Robertsfors. Robertsfors we have already mentioned in previous blog entry, because we visited a historical ironworks there. Ratan is something totally different though. There are several things that make Ratan worth visiting.
=> People who are interested in history might find Ratan interesting because some fights took place there in the end of the last war Sweden was engaged in.
=> People who are interested in nature science might find Ratan interesting because in mid 18th century scientists went there to study the rebound. That was one of the earliest studies of
this phenomenon. On a cliff the scientists marked where the water level was in 1749. That mark is now, 250 years later, nowhere near the water edge.
=> People who have their own boat might find Ratan interesting because there is a sheltered harbour there.
=> People to whom none of the above applies might still find Ratan interesting because it is a nice little village in a pretty setting.
John Rambo is a fictional character played by Sylvester Stallone in, as of 2021, a total of five movies. The first of those movies, First Blood, is based on a novel by David Morrell. When the author was writing the story he at first could up with a suitable name. He then noticed that his wife had bought apples of a cultivar named Rambo apple. He thought Rambo sounded perfect and he named the character John Rambo.
It is likely, but not known for sure, that the apple was named after the Rambo family. Because Rambo is a family name and there are plenty of Rambos living mainly in the US. The name from Peter Gunnarsson Rambo, an immigrant from
Sweden. His name was originally only Peter Gunnarsson. Either when he arrived in the US, or after he had lived there for a while, he added the name Rambo.
It is disputed why the name Rambo was chosen as the addition to his name. Most historians say that the name is a shortened and Americanised version of Ramberget, a hill in Gothenburg.
But we have also heard that the name Rambo was taken from the village Rambo in Vsterbotten. This might very well be totally wrong. But we dont care! We still had to go to the village Rambo, just because it is called Rambo. And going there gave us a reason to write how John Rambo got his name from an apple which in turn was named after a Swedish immigrant.
For those of you who havent seen any of the Rambo movies we can First Blood. That one was actually pretty good. The rest of them, to be polite we can say that there are better movies out there.
