Today, I learned that:

Every Sunday morning, Radio Sweden’s domestic channel P1 transmits a 2-hour news program named “Godmorgon, världen!”, which means ‘Good morning, world!’. It is supposed to be a radio alternative to the Sunday newspaper, and as such discusses hot issues from the preceding week, mixed with satire and chronicles. The big political discussion was an analysis which impact the Panama papers may have on the world in the short term. But what I remember most from today’s program was a chronicle by the Swedish journalist and author Göran Rosenberg, who declared his worries about what is happening to the majestic ash tree, formal name fraxinus excelsior, that he sees is slowly being deprived of its beauty, due to plagues.

Here is a translation into English of an excerpt from the chronicle: “The ash tree is not only a big tree in the cultural landscape, it is also a big tree in the cultural history. Yggdrasil, the world tree, which according to Nordic mythology carried the cosmos in its branches and from which Oden [the main god] created the first human being, was an ash tree. Only that fact alone tells us how long the ash tree has been together with us.”

The complete text, in Swedish, can be found in reference #1 below. The Wikipedia article in reference #2 below give more facts about fraxinus excelsior.

Exactly 11 years ago, I had the pleasure of circling the globe. My company, which previously had dealt with electronic production machines from the Western hemisphere, had decided to find new partners in Asia. So, therefore, I left São Paulo for a quick visit to my father in Sweden, before I boarded the SAS Airbus 343 in Copenhagen on 2005-04-08. The trip from Copenhagen to Pudong airport in Shanghai, China took some 10 hours, the business class cabin was wide and comfortable. In the chair to the the right was a German man, who was going for business in the chemical industry in Shanghai. But what I remember most from this leg was the in-flight WiFi provided aboard. 1,5 months before, I had joined Skype, and now I could call friends and family while looking down on the Siberian tundra, an interesting sensation.

When we arrived at immigration, for which I had a obtained a fresh visa in my passport and received a shot against yellow fever, they did not even look at those documents. No guide of mine was to be found, so the German man’s business contact dropped me off at my hotel hotel downtown Shanghai. After a relaxing nap, I went out in the afternoon and walked around the streets to feel the city. Since Saturday night was approaching, the streets got filled with people enjoying their weekend. See below some photos I took on Saturday, tomorrow I will show some more from the following day.

… That’s what I learned in school !

Refs.:

1: Det döende askträdet – ett järtecken i tiden

2: Fraxinus excelsior

+: What did you learn in school today ?