On Sunday, after I finished the ENGI 355 midterm, I went out to explore Gothenburg more. I went to the Skansen Kronan Fortress. It is built up on a small hill within 10 minutes’ walk from our hostel. I climbed up the hill, and saw the fortress constructed with stones which has a golden crown on top of the roof. The fortress is the highest point in downtown Gothenburg. Viewing from the point, I got a great view of the city with buildings of white walls and red roofs. Later I went to a self-service Chinese cafeteria, and got some authentic Chinese food. This was my first time here to have some food from my home country.
The construction phase of Dare to Build officially started on Monday. We mainly focused on some preparations on this day. Together with several other students, I was tasked to build a sawhorse as a log cutting station. We came up with a rough design, and began construction. However, it was much more difficult then I thought when we moved to building. We had to make sure that the legs of supports of the sawhorse had equal lengths, and that the connection of two legs was wide enough for a bolt to secure the screw through the hole at the connections. We spent a long time to build the first support, and after we got more familiar with the construction, we sped up and adapted the pipeline technique. Specifically, a group of people cut the wood, and another group chiseled the cutting to create the connection. Finally, we succeeded to make four supports for two sawhorses, and we tested by cutting one log on them so that they were strong enough for the intense log cutting task in the following days.
On Tuesday, we worked on prototyping the woodpecker path next to the circle. In our design, there would be several logs of different heights connected together from the height up to 2 meters to the height of the center circle so as to create a descending path for woodpeckers to land from the trees to the circle. As a group, we cut logs of 1, 1.5, and 2 meters together and tried to connect them with rope. However, since the ground was not flat, even though we could fix the logs with rope, we were not able to stabilize the whole structure as it would fall to one side. After a group discussion, we figured out a solution that we would have several logs as the frame of our structure, and they would be connected with each other by sticks screwed onto them. Then, we would fill in the frame with other logs screwed to the sticks as well. By this way, we would have a stable frame with only a few logs which we could build on it afterwards.
Wednesday was an exhausting day. In the morning, we specified our design that we would have gravels underneath the structure to provide more support to it. In the afternoon all the groups except for the Wilderness stopped their construction and helped to unload the gravels to the site and dump them on the paths. I switched between roles of shoveling the gravels to wheel barrel and moving the wheel barrel to specified spots of the site. With doing the work all the afternoon, I estimated that I might have unloaded more than 200 kilograms of gravels myself. This was absolutely an intense workout.
On Thursday we were still playing with gravels. We unloaded more of them, and spread the rest of them evenly on the path down to the site. After we finished this, the whole circle and the paths except for the plants were covered with at least 5 cm of gravels. This was a really a tough task for us. After lunch we worked more on the woodpecker path. We screwed some shorter logs to the frame, and also added more support to the frame by screwing logs to some sticks placed deep in the ground. We had some interesting games to help know about each other better as our finishing of the week.
Friday was the midsummer holiday. However, the weather was not as great as I expected. In the afternoon I went to take a look at a huge sailing ship which I saw one day on my way to the site. I felt very disappointed that it was not a museum. I also passed a museum with several warships and a submarine on my way back. Unfortunately, it was closed as everyone was enjoying the holiday.
Saturday was the exciting day. We set off early to Copenhagen, Denmark. It took four hours and a half on a bus to get there. After lunch we went to explore Copenhagen. We went to freetown Chrstiania, which was a place with some weird things happening. We also had some drinks in a historical area not far from our hostel. There were much more tourists in Copenhagen than in Gothenburg, and many people were enjoying themselves on sailing boats along the complicated canal system there. After that we went to a place with many food trucks to have dinner. It was an awesome relaxation for all of us after the intense building week.
On Sunday morning I went to the famous Little Mermaid Statue, and it was one of the most disappointed and overrated places I have been to. The statue was much smaller, and there were much more people than I thought. It was kind of awkward when more than one hundred tourists were holding their phones and cameras against a statue of a girl’s size. Just next to the statue, there is a fortress called Kastellet with a shape of star and is separated with the land by a moat. I walked along the boundary of the fortress and got some nice pictures. Then I went to the Amalienborg, and watched the royal guards switching. There is a large square surrounded by several palaces and a magnificent statue stands in the middle. Watching the royal guards switching was fun experience. The guards were wearing traditional uniforms and swords, but were also carrying modern automatic rifle guns. Later on, we went to the Statens Museum for Kunst to see some European style art paintings, and went around a botanical garden nearby. We set off on the bus at 5 and arrived in Gothenburg at 9:30. Even though we only stayed in Copenhagen for one day and a half, we still had some awesome experiences here, and I love this city very much.
