Two days after Helsinki we landed in Stockholm for the second stage in our tour across Northern and Northwestern Europe. The venue was of a totally different style, in a modern hotel conveniently located next to the main railway station.
A unique opportunity that we could not pass up was the presence of an ice bar in the hotel. This is a smaller version of the ice bar that is part of the famous ice hotel, which opens every winter season in the far North of Sweden. The ice bar in the hotel is open all year round and is built from ice blocks that come from the same river that delivers the building materials for the ice hotel. Guests of the ice bar get insulating coats and gloves before they are allowed into the small bar. And where you would normally order some kind of drink on the rocks, you are getting treated with a drink IN the rocks here: large ice cubes with a cavity in the middle where the drink is poured in. Skol! Needless to say that the ice bar personnel is often asked to take group pictures and they never fail to call out “Say freeze”.
But there was also work to be done, so we got out of our insulating coats, slept off the vodka cocktails and got down to business. The room filled up nicely and there were very interesting presentations by various consulting companies that operate on the Scandinavian market. A fairly large portion of this day’s presenters were consulting companies and some of them proved to have an impressive list of clients with world-wide market leader positions in their respective business domains. One of these companies is Elekta and the department that presented their insights is market leader for devices that allow radiosurgery on brain cancer. Very impressive and with high demands on the correctness of their documentation and the speed with which translations can be created. They mentioned that my presentation on making a smooth transition from unstructured to structured and modular documentation should have come a couple of years earlier – it would have saved them a lot of problems and could have kept them within the FrameMaker arena.
