Software Business in the Middle East

This is a translation from Swedish in free style. The original post can be found here.

All posts about the trip from Sweden to China by bicycle can be found on this link.

After the beautiful day spent in Karlskrona, the guys went to the seaport to board on the ferry Stena Line. The sea trip went smoothly and all three travellers landed in Poland for the first time in their lives. The first city in Poland was Gdynia.

The map of the passed distance described in this post might be found here.

Day 7. Gdynia – Gdansk. 20 km.

The first morning in Poland was sunny. First, the guys went to the centre of Gdynia. Since all three were pretty hungry, they visited one of the restaurants in the fast food chain Bar Mleczny that is translated from Polish as Milk Bar. The restaurants are subsidized by the government to make it affordable for the people with low income. The look and feel inside was far away from being luxury, but food was very good.

After the lunch, the guys went towards Swedish Seaman Church looking for the place to stay overnight, but they found out that place was closed for about one year ago. They had nothing to do than just take their bikes and go further towards large city Gdansk.

Day 8. Gdansk – Ulkowy. 30 km.

In Gdansk the guys went to the Old Town where they had couple beers and a tradition food called “Zapikanka” that was impressively 50 cm long.

From Gdansk the travellers took Euro Road 75 to leave the city. After some time it became darker and darker so the guys started looking for a camping to stay over night. It was not so easy to do because there was no forest around. Finally they knocked one of the houses in the village Urkowy asking the permission to stay in the yard for a night. (RK: One of the guys speaks fluent Russian, and I would say that you can understand Polish a little if you speak Russian – it’s not easy, but possible, especially if you are looking for a place to sleep).

They got the permission to put the tent so the night went well.

Day 9. Ulkowy – Skorz. 70 km.

Next morning the guys went further on the road E75 towards city Tczew. The traffic was pretty heavy, so they decided to take a smaller road towards Pelplin city. The road was not good at all having large holes in it.

In Pelplin the guys visited the local tavern. The prices in this small town was even less then in a large city – for pretty good beer Lech you would pay about $1,5 for a pint.

Landscape was pretty poor. Grey weather and smell of the manure and coal in the air – people over there use coal to heat their houses.

Soon the bikers came to the forest where they made a camp to stay over night and then made a fire.

Day 10. Skorz – Chelmno. 50 km.

In the morning it started to drizzle and guys got a good change to test their Gore-Text equipment.

After the breakfast with bread and sausages, at around 9 in the morning, they got neighbors – the company of young men who had already got their morning beer. These young men stared at our guys, probably because of the Gore-Tex cloth that looked kind of the spacemen stuff.

The road became even worse than before and finally the asphalt was over. The bikers would not be able to keep the good speed because of this. Аlso, the road became slippery because of the rain.

Anyway, the travellers finally came to the town Osie where they got a warm pizza for the lunch. Then they got interesting conversation with a man who knew 7 languages including Arabic, but English was not among them, excepting such sentences as “Swedish beautiful heavy metal bands”. This man invited the bikers to stay over night at his place, but they decided to ride further towards city Scouweicze.

For the night they stayed in the camping next to the city Chelmno where they got couple glass of wine.

Day 11. Chelmno – Torun. 80 km.

The guys took the wrong roads several times from Chelmno (RK: Well, I guess it was a little bit more than just couple glass of wine the night before ), but finally they arrived at Torun. It is pretty famous city as it’s a home town of Nicolaus Copernicus – the first European astronomer (RK: Hello to Kopernik! ).

It was again not easy to find a place to sleep – all hotels were fully booked. But they were lucky to find a city camping near to the river Vistula. They got a nice small house to live in. Due to the low season, the price was excellent – just $4 per night for this little house. The place was very good especially considering the good sunny weather.

As a conclusion, Nino, Erik and Tim say that so far they have a lot of fun with their trip. Going by bicycles become better and better. Poland is very interesting country, but sometimes you get shocked when you see the houses that seems to be about to get destroyed at any moment. But those houses normally are very good looking and comfortable inside.

The small shops look very often as very old-fashion village grocery. The goods are left on the shelves and you can see the seller behind the counter with uncertain smile. Sometimes you can see the people that use horse and a cart for transportation. The majority of house yards are guided by large dogs. As said, the roads are not always good, but very often you can see beautiful tree-alleys along the roads for many kilometers.

Currently the trip is going further towards the next goal – Krakow.

All posts about the trip from Sweden to China by bicycle can be found here.

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Once I met with my buddy and heard Arabic text read from his computer – it was a program that reads certain parts of Qur’an when screen-saver starts on the computer. Later I saw another program that calculates timing of the prayers, which are also known as “Five Muslim Salah” (In Islam you’re supposed to pray 5 times a day – these 5 prayers are called as Fajr, Dhuhr, Asr, Maghrib and Isha’a). The time of prayers vary from city to city and from day to day.

Both programs are very good examples of the niche the software is developed for. Religion plays very important role in the Middle East, and it’s clear that every Muslim would have such programs – either on their computers, phone or PDA. These programs are normally free. This way software company supports and contributes to Islam, and also attracts new visitors to come and visit company web site. Users might be attracted to get another software the company develops.

I’ve never thought that this religious software exists – but it does and it’s very popular. I just wonder how many niches exist around us that we do not yet see?

This is a translation from Swedish in free style. The original posts can be found here and here.

While I was writing this post, I got an e-mail from one of the travellers, Tim, telling they had changed their plans for the trip route – now they plan riding through Syria, Israel, Saudi Arabia and United Arab Emirates. From UAE they would take a ferry or boat and go to either Iran or India. When they come to Dubai, it will be very interesting – I’ll get a chance to meet guys face to face. What is not clear for me now is how they get visa to Saudi Arabia – tourists are not very welcome in the country. But we’ll see how the trip will go, I think guys will find out the way.

The trip was planned to start on October 1st, but preparations took slightly more time than it was planned. Finally, the bikes were equipped and bags were packed and nothing else stopped guys from starting the ride.

From the city Alingsas (Alingsås) the travellers went towards Boras (Borås). The map of the passed distance in Sweden might be found here.

Day One. Alingsas – Sexdrega. 70 km.

The first day of the trip was sunny. The travellers got used to the bicycles – I guess riding for entire day is not something you do very often. They also found they’d forgotten the burning liquid for their portable kitchen (RK: I guess they mean here mini-cooker).

The road was not easy because it went up and down all the time. As planned, the guys arrived to Sexdrega by evening time and made a camp.

Day Two. Sexdrega – Anderstorp. 70 km.

The route went through countless number of cosy villages. There were a lot of memories from the Middle Ages around – the riding on bikes has its advantage that you can see more things around the places you go through.

The lunch went in a company of small pigs close to the city Gislved (RK: The city also has a tyre factory – some time back in Sweden I used to drive having the famous Nord Frost 3 on my car).

The night was spend under the open sky sleeping on the floating wooden landing stage taken to the coast for the winter time. Everything started just fine until 2 am when all three started to turn around swearing – the brand new down sleeping bags were designed for -25 C, and it was too hot to sleep in them.

Day Three. Anderstorp - Sicklinge. 100 km.

Early morning the guys started to move forward on the local road 27 coming to the place called Forsxeda. One good guy Valentino lives there, who sponsored travellers with the phone credit of 200 Swedish Krone (about $30). The live around got the new fresh breath when people knew the final goal of this bicycle trip – China. Somebody called to the local newspapers that was very fast and arranged the interview with all three guys – Nino, Erik and Tim.

After the interview they went further by the old route E4 that has a lot of historical places around.

Day Four. Sicklinge – Sirkon (Sirkön). 60 km.

Started to ride at 8 am. This day the guys went through Ljungby county – this county is ruthful known as the place where storm Gudrun came from (RK: in English this storm is also known as storm Erwin which hit both Sweden and Denmark on January 8, 2005 having sustained wind speed of 126 km/h and wind gusts of 165 km/h).

Day Five. Sirkon – Karlskrona. 100 km.

That was the final day of the trip through Sweden. Guys would take a ferry to go to Gdynia, Poland the next day.

As the guys wrote on their own blog, during this trip over Sweden they changed their opinion about their own country. One thing is when you drive a car and another – when you go by bicycle riding through the fields, forests, and villages and passing by the beautiful Swedish lakes. But the most interesting part of the trip is coming – there are pretty many miles left to Peking.