Onsala

Hello all readers!

My name is Erik Westberg and I'm living in the Scandinavian country Sweden. I'm 15 years old and goes to a school called Kapareskolan (“skolan” means “the school”), in the ninth grade according to the Swedish school-system. This article is going to be about my, and everyone else in the class´s, hometown. Well, I wouldn't really call it a town, because it's just to small to earn that title, it's more of an area. Our homearea, now that makes sense. The name of this area is Onsala. I tried to find the reason to why the location has been given this name and this is what I found: Onsala was important for the vikings during the start of the 1000-century. They had a sacrificial grove where Onsala´s church today is located. This grove was called Odens hall, from there comes the name Onsala.

                 To easily and shortly describe Onsala I'll just say; fields, forests and farmers. Forests is what covers Onsala, except from some areas where you instead of forests will find fields. In the space between the forests and the fields you will find the farmers. That's how it looks in some parts of Onsala. In other parts you will find the not-farmers people, these are normal people. Normal people is the majority of the 14000 inhabitants in Onsala. That number has really been growing recently, as a result out of the new connections to larger cities that has been built lately, such as better roads. 20 years ago there only lived 600 people in Onsala (according to Wikipedia). 600 may sound as a very low number, but I can explain why: many people just had a smaller house on the Onsala-peninsula to stay in during the summer time. I assume that these people didn't count in the counting of the inhabitants in the area. When thinking about inhabitants, you probably really want me write a little about some well-known people from Onsala. You for sure won't know of them. Beda Hallberg and Lars Gathenhielm. I'll start of with Lars Gathenhielm, before he was knighted in 1715 his name was Lars Andersson Gathe, today mostly known as “Lasse i Gatan”. He was a commander, hijacker and a businessman. Under his very short lifetime he bought about fifth ships, with which he hijacked over 80 other ships. He had good connection with the Swedish king, which saved him several times when he was close to be punished for being a pirate. He died only 28 years old, with tuberculosis to blame. The next famous person, Beda Hallberg, did in 1907 invent a little small symbol called Majblomman (“blomman” means “the flower”, and  “Maj” means the month “May”). This flower has a diameter of 1-2 centimeters, and is placed on a small needle. The needle is there to let you stick the flower to your clothes. Children, at the age of 9-12, can choose to sell these flowers. For every flower that's sold money is given to poor people. That wasn't the main purpose, though. The main purpose was to defeat the disease tuberculosis, which Lars Gathenhielm died of, as I told earlier. So if he had bought one of this flowers he might have survived, well – it's easy to be “wise after the event”. Unluckily enough – Lars died 200 years before Beda invented the flower. The idea with this flower has spread into some other countries, and today it's sold in many of the Scandinavian countries. Okey, back to Onsala itself (before this essay gets to long). You probably realized that I earlier mentioned that Onsala is an peninsula. That's completely correct! There are water to the south, east and west – to the north goes a narrow connection to Kungsbacka. If you walk alongside the shore all the way around Onsala you will notice a lot of very small ports. Many of them with just one single bridge. We got one larger port, though – Gottskär. Among with all the ports you will find cliffs and beaches as you arrive new destinations on your eventful journey around the peninsula of Onsala.

Take in mind that the whole journey won't take more than five hours.

Let's put an end here …

The End!

Goodbyes from Erik Westberg, :).