Hey! This time in advance to my English speaking friends - an article about my travel in foreign language. :) So, in 2017 I spent the Latvian celebration weekend of May in Sweden, under the sign of #BoschNordicExperience. Why? Because I was "the chosen one". Well, actually 1 of 10 "chosen ones" from Scandinavia and Baltic that had this wonderful chance to become the Bosch Nordic Explorers of 2017. 4th of May - Let the journey begin. After lunch I have my flight to Umeå in Sweden, through Arlanda, Stockholm. During the flight I notice still frozen lakes of Sweden and it makes me thinking, whether I should have taken my warm socks with me, because it seems that here's still winterland. When the time is 19:00, finally I have the chance to meet the rest of 10 explorers and altogether we are heading to one quite small Swedish High Coast city - Örnsköldsvik. Here I will spend the next 4 days of my life. City looks really calm and only the next evening I found out that some very famous hockey players were born in this city. This is the North-most place of Sweden, I have been to till now. Already from the beginning everybody seems so friendly, talkative and opened. After 1 hour of going by bus, we finally can leave our bags in the First Hotel and altogether we are going to have a nice dinner. Oh, yeah, I almost had forgotten that normal meal for Scandinavians can easily be cold sandwiches. Ha ha...a salad for me, please! 5th of May - Lets get educated. The day comes with the sun shining outside of our hotel window. It should be even +20 degrees outside. Cannot wait! The plan for today is the Bosch plant visit. That is why right after the breakfast we are heading to the Mellansel town where the Bosch Rexroth Mellansel plant is located. Some presentations about Bosch, a guided tour through the plant and a case study about the future of Bosch. Actually I found out some quite new things for me today. For example, that Bosch is not producing only power tools and household technique (as I was thinking all my life), but has highly developed R&D department, creates plenty of patents per day and wants to focus on the Internet of Things in the future. Amazing! A little bit tired but happy we're going back to Övik (a short version for Örnsköldsvik). Tonight we are having a traditional Swedish dinner together with some of Bosch representatives. Tasty reindeer meat, delicious seafood, song quiz and nice conversations in a good company were only few of all the amazing things this evening. Even more wonderful day is waiting for us tomorrow! 6th of May - Adventures, here we come! A little rain shower outside the window in the morning cannot lower our mood. Because it is going to be an awesome day! Right after breakfast, we are grabbing our warm hiking clothes and swimsuits and heading to Skuleskogen National Park in Hoga Kusten (in english High Coast). Our first stop is the open air village FriluftsByn positioned near Skuleberget hill. Because of the morning rain, our plan to climb the Via Ferrata to Skuleberget was cancelled and replaced by hiking the hill after the lunch. Well, still not bad. :) So, the first activity today - working with Bosch Power Tools and building something on our own. We spent really good time and it worked as a very good team building activity. The first task was to blow a beach ball through the defined path using the Bosch leaf blower. The next one was a screwing competition using amazing Bosch IXO screwdriver. By the way, I was the fastest to finish the task. :) For the third task we used the Bosch circular saw table and this time we were working on precision. Who will cut the piece of wood 20 cm long without measuring? Well, small engineering life hack and again I cut the most precise piece of wood. It looks like today is my lucky day! And the final task is to make a cutting board. Here I can put my creativity and all the skills of working with the wood that my dad taught me when I was a child. I'm very excited about the task! The first thing that came to my mind is the plastic cutting board in the shape of fish that my mom likes a lot, so this became my idea for drawing a board. Bosch jigsaw helped me to cut it out almost perfectly in the shape as I wanted and using sanding machine I made the wood feel so smooth like a skin of a baby. I was surprised as my fish-board won the competition and as the prize I got Bosch IXO screwdriver and it looks like made for women - haha, it is compact, looks nice and is easy-to-use (just hoping I will have enough place in my luggage for all the Bosch goods). After nice lunch of reindeer meet in combination with cranberry jam (claimed to be traditional Swedish meal - actually it is tasty!), we are finally going for a hiking tour up the Skuleberget. More than I hour and we are already at the top of the mountain. I guess my luck is always with me as on the way to the top I saw even two black poisonous snakes that can be seen so rarely. We spent some nice time up the mountain. After a rest we can head down via the other side of mountain. Our next stop is Lappudden Friluftscenter, where we will spend the rest of our evening. At the end of the day I was one of those brave persons to go kayaking on the cold lake, amazing experience. After this long day full of impressions, we had very tasty dinner. After that we had a chance to give feedback to the organizers and to say very big Thank You for these perfectly planned 3 days and wonderful experience! We even wrote a poem dedicated to them. The evening continued with going to a hot Swedish sauna with an amazing view to the lake and mountains, jumping in the cold lake water and warming our bodies in the heated outdoor bath overlooking the lake and having good conversations. 7th of May. The last day of Experience Today is the day when this experience has come to an end. An hour delay of the first flight to Oslo and for the first time in my life I have missed the plane (not by my fault luckily)! Nevertheless I'm having a good way home, seeing a snow storm and thinking over this amazing weekend I had! I am very happy for this chance given to me as this experience has opened my eyes for how bigger companies work and that there's always the unseen part of it that you might get to see if you're lucky. I've also met wonderful people from other countries and even continents, shared experiences, explored the wildness of Sweden, had fun in many ways, learned and simply widened my view of the world. This is the experience worth having! Lastly I want to say a big thank you to Bosch for giving this chance all of us to explore what they have to offer, for this wonderful experience in Sweden and to photograph Alekzandra Granath for wonderful photos. :) For the end a bonus for you - take a look on our experience in the video made by Bosch (Youtube) Thanks for reading! I hope you enjoyed it!
- Robotic girl, Anete
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