How would you call the following situation: a man who has never travelled alone and never been abroad suddenly appears in a foreign country. He does not know local language nor customs. And all that happens on 1st of April.
Well, sounds like a prank indeed but it were the best days of my life. I don’t remember whose idea it was but I quite suddenly decided to visit Sweden (okay, blame those subtitles in Monty Python and the Holy Grail ) and first half of April was the time when I could do that.
What’s a first thing any tourist should do in Stockholm? In my case it was wandering in Sundbyberg. I did a lot of things every tourist should do — visiting a dozen of museums (first two of them were Post Museum and Royal Coin Cabinet) and no art galleries,going to Skärholmen and not visiting any big shops there, not buying any elk toys or T-shirts with silly inscriptions, going to churches to listen to organ music, being at city centre and shopping only at two places there (Teknik Magasinet and Hemköp); as an extra I’ve been to Copenhagen for a day and have not seen any mermaids or castle interiors.
Also I’ve attended FFmpeg developers conference (Swedish branch). It was very nice to see all those people in person. One of them was very kind to give me a short tour on Stockholm (Odenplan – KTH – Stureplan – Norrmalmstorg).
I’ve lost my heart at Sweden. This country style is “simple, beautiful and effective” applied everywhere. And if you heard the saying “the way to a man’s heart is through his stomach”, it took place too (a sure sign is that when other developers’ commit messages start with “10l cola: …” mine start with “10l trocadero: …” and thinking of Emmentaler as “Swiss version of Grevé”).
And I can’t fully express my gratitude to Benjamin Larsson without whom all of this could not happen.
Enough with reminiscences, I’ll try to produce some codec material to write about.