Baltic Cities, Part I: Stockholm & Oslo
BY DERYA SONER (MBG/IV)
a_soner@ug.bilkent.edu.tr
If you are lucky enough to approach the beautiful city of Stockholm by boat on a beautiful mid-summer day, you will see one of the most beautiful landscapes on Earth. Since the city is surrounded by hundreds of islands of various sizes, some the size of a table, the ocean is smooth like a silky, calm lake. Most of the islands accommodate a tiny hut which is surrounded by dark green pine trees, and has a tiny fishing boat docked out front. If you ever wish to pay a visit to Stockholm, try and get one of the ferries available from the nearby capitals on a mid-summer day - I guarantee you, the experience will be a lot more amazing than landing by plane.
Once you reach the city of Stockholm, you will be greeted by a beautiful skyline of churches and historical buildings lined up beautifully across the cove. As you walk into the city center to approach the city square and the shopping district, you will see that it kind of looks like Kızılay with the overpasses and four to five floor apartments, but of course, it is much more spacious, organized, and clean, and everyone around you is blonde and slim!
I didn't have much time to observe the people myself, but the impressions of a friend of mine who went to Sweden as an exchange student were interesting. She said that since the people are taken care of by the government even if they are unemployed, and since they have a very good health insurance system, the people have no worries about the future, which can sometimes make them unmotivated. In Turkey, people base their lives on getting an education that will guarantee them a good job with a good pay, and since the economy is never really good, people are usually quite critical of the government. But in Sweden, people feel secure; they are content. And this sometimes makes them a little indifferent, especially in comparison to Turkish people who are usually aware of what is going on in the world and in their countries, and who are usually opinionated. Whether this is good or bad is for you to decide.
The same may be true for the people of Norway; as you walk around Oslo, everyone you see seems to be happy. Well, who wouldn't be happy in a country with an average yearly income of $55,000 per person? The people of Norway are definitely in high spirits, and you can understand why they have rejected becoming part of the European Union in the referendums - they don't need the EU; they have oil!
The city of Oslo seems very "livable," at least in the summer, with the beautiful ocean right there by the city center and a very fine city planning with lots of beautiful gardens and picturesque bits of architecture with crimson bricks. And the city seems to have one of the best Hard Rock Cafés I have seen, with collections of items from The Rolling Stones, U2, Kurt Cobain, Madonna, Van Halen, Chris Isaak, Billy Idol, and more.
Hope to see you again in my next column, "Baltic Cities, Part II," where we can take a walk around St. Petersburg, Copenhagen, and Tallinn.