In the morning I went back to Stockholm Central Station to meet a travel companion. What caught my interest there was the promotional space of a certain vocational school. It's easy to understand it as something like school promotion.
It may be a one-sided example, but basically the high-school curriculum that functions as a 'vocational school' run by an advanced European country seems to be treated with considerable respect. You know how, among the things we often talk about in Korean society, there's a great deal of talk about how the treatment of 'manual labor jobs' should be raised — and there are probably many people who cite European society's culture as the reason. In 'labor' there is no separate existence of wealth-and-nobility versus poverty-and-lowliness. Each has its own proper domain and its own expertise. Physical labor is done better by a skilled hand, an expert who has kept doing it, and teaching someone is also done better by an expert who has done it. The problem is that in Korea a consciousness of contempt for 'manual labor jobs' still remains. Even while people know that they too are experts and highly skilled technicians, they seldom try to pay high wages. Unless that atmosphere improves, the problem of income inequality doesn't look like it will be easily solved.
In that sense, that kind of 'vocational school promotion' is quite impressive. They say some learn in the high-school course and immediately open their own businesses, and there are also cases of going on to university to study further; in the case of that school, they had opened costume design, metal craft (Carving), bookbinding (binding), and the like as major fields. The sight of cultivating expertise already in the high-school course, that such promotion can be done at the biggest station in a country's capital, and that people show so much interest — it's just amazing and enviable. When will Korean culture change so that the perception of vocational schools changes? Though I suppose it's in the middle of changing even now. Because, for example, today's modern Korean society is no different from being bluntly a 'ready-made life'.. anyway, I came partly to see this kind of thing, and I succeeded.
After that I began a cathedral tour. But before that.. I went somewhere else first.
Of course, on the second day I decided to look around the streets a bit more. Not too 'downtown,' I had a strong desire to just go to ordinary streets, so I went to ordinary streets. The ordinary streets I'm talking about here aren't the 'bustling district' but just neighborhoods where people seem to live? What I discovered along the way was a school. Actually I wanted to take photos of the students playing too, but the companion I was walking around with said you'll get arrested if you carelessly take photos of students, so I couldn't. The kids were just playing outside early in the morning. It looked like an elementary school, and the 'teacher' with the students was of course wearing a high-visibility vest too.. anyway, the school is really pretty. How can an elementary school building be this wonderful.
The place where the cathedral in the first photo is located is at a slightly higher elevation than the surrounding areas, so when you climb up like this you can enjoy a view where you can see all the other buildings spread out. Hmm, what's impressive is that the skyline is generally uniform... but if you look closely, you can see one building sticking out on the left. From what I once glimpsed while researching, they said that in Stockholm's case, as real estate prices have recently risen, building density is going up, and that seems to be reflected like this. In cities like 'Cologne' before, regulations on the skyline were very strict (in Cologne's case, no building taller than the Cologne Dom (cathedral) is allowed. A media center was built to a similar height, but the Dom is still the tallest building, and generally the rest are low buildings of similar height). And yet Stockholm forms a kind of disharmony like this, which is why I found it curious..
A photo of the cathedral interior; for reference, a performance was apparently scheduled at that cathedral that day....
The next destination visible there in the center is yet another cathedral.... The stones laid in the street are impressive. This seemed to be near some kindergarten... well, anyway, the stones laid on the ground are good for 'looks' but have the downside that for walking, except in comfortable shoes with low heels like sneakers, your feet hurt.. I wore boots the whole time so my feet hurt a bit..
Personally, I think the church buildings I went to in Stockholm were rather pretty. The 'pretty' here is a 'pretty' in a different sense from the Sagrada Família in Barcelona, the Cologne Dom, or Notre-Dame. There are many somewhat unusual churches. For one, the basic 'colors' they use are really different, and it's hard to find enormously huge cathedrals. Apart from Helsinki Cathedral in Helsinki, I didn't see any enormously large cathedrals.. and even that one is on the small side compared to other cathedrals.. anyway, the atmosphere around this cathedral was like the atmosphere in a movie, and I still remember it vividly. I walked all the way through the cathedral park to that cathedral, and I don't know why my mood was so strange... the cathedral had a cemetery, an enormous number of trees, and grass laid out.
That distinctive atmosphere is hard to match even in Korea. Many cathedrals in Korea all have 'parking lots.' Right next to the cathedral isn't a park but, sadly, a parking lot. When will I get to encounter a Korean cathedral with a park right next door? If I find out where such a cathedral is, I'd like to go there someday.
This scenery is a place you reach if you come out from that cathedral nearby and walk for a good while. The building visible in the center there is also a cathedral. I don't know if I mentioned it last time, but within most European cities, if you see a 'spire' in the skyline, it's most likely a cathedral spire. The scenery here was really good — the weather was overcast but I was strangely in a good mood. This place too is a travel destination after all. Stockholm definitely has a different atmosphere from cities like Seoul. I wandered the subway stations that day too, but I'll have to write about the subway station tour separately.. they say it won't support more than 20 photos, so. At any rate, lunch that day was solved with a Pizza Hut lunch buffet. Sweden uses the Swedish krona, and I traveled when 1 Swedish krona was a little over 130 won in exchange rate. Hmm, so if you take Korean restaurant prices ×1.3, that's the food price. You might feel it's a bit expensive. So I thought I might have hardly any memory of eating proper meals, but actually I mostly cooked at the hostel so I ate well. Indeed, cooking costs only 1/3 of the price of eating out, so it's really great..
80 percent of the second day complete. The remaining 20 percent is the subway station tour. If you refer to the next post you can see about the subway stations.
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