A Busy Day

The day started with a trip to the regional archive building. That doesn't sound so exciting but they were celebrating their 400th birthday and that doesn't happen so often. Yes, the Swedish national archive system, and by extension Swedish bureaucracy, started officially in 1618.  We celebrated with coffee and cake and a look around an exhibition.
Bureaucracy is often seen as something negative but a functioning bureaucracy is vital to modern society. When I applied for Swedish citizenship the bureaucracy could say exactly when I came to live in Sweden, all the addresses I'd lived at since then, and of course all my employers and how much money I earned. So I only needed to send in a short form (2 pages I believe) and three weeks later I was a Swedish citizen. So I am both fascinated and horrified by all the problems facing people applying for British citizenship after living nearly all their lives in the UK, and the state claims to have no idea who they are!
Anyway, enough of that slight rant! This is the view from the archive building, showing one of the residential areas of Härnösand.
Then it was on to lunch followed by a walk along the edge of the still frozen South Sound to the bicycle shop. I checked out an electric bike I am thinking of buying and then walked back into town, met up with Jan and headed home.
Later we were out again, looking at old photographs of the village we live in, but Jan blipped that so you can read about it there.