The Inn

Mellby Ör is the name of a place on Öland, where I live. Öland is an island on the eastcoast of Sweden, 450 km south of Stockholm. Every region usually has its poor/rich relation, even a small island like Öland. The southeast is the poor place, the mid west, with the main city of the region, Borgholm is the richest. Of course this is just a matter of perspective, what you value in life. The people who choose to live here are mainly farmers struggling with the rocky soil, or people who like the desolate landscape and who find inner peace here. Another category are birdlovers who come here for the wildlife. This region is one of the best in Sweden if you are interested in studying migratory birds. For those people, this is one of the richest regions of the entire country. 

If you love this place and want to make money here, your target groups are the people I described. Canadian Chris and Swedish Agneta moved here many years ago, bought a farm and transformed it into a Bed and Breakfast place with a pub that serves as a meeting place for the locals during autumn and wintertime. They are both Jack of all trades, which you have to be if you are going to make it here. She is also a Yoga instructor so she runs courses parts of the year. He is interested in music so he invites bands to play in the pub during the period from the end of September to the end of March Spring and  Autumn is mostly spent with the ornithologists and nature lovers and all of the year there is a lot to see to on a farm like this.

This evening I was invited to Mellby Ör Inn, to help out as a sound technician, something I do on an amateur level to help friends out with mixing the sound for the band. Todays group is called Tuesday stickers and they play their own music, influenced by the seventies and eighties. One of the extras shows them in action. We had a great evening.

The other extra is taken straight eastwards from Mellby over the fields. On the other side of the water is Lithuania, some 550 km away. During the second world war quite a few boat refugees crossed the water and ended up on Öland. The photo gives you a good picture of the kind of landscape we meet here, there is an awful lot of sky and an abundance of fresh air. Welcome!