29 april...

... the day before The Day.

"The Day" is April 30, also known as sista april. From what I hear, it is the day when Uppsala goes insane. It sounds like a combination of Venetian Festival (back when it was cool) and a UM-OSU game (from our old vantage point of right next to the stadium), with elements of Halloween (bonfires at night to keep the witches away) and Mardi Gras (public drunkenness and general excess).

Here's the official schedule of what you are supposed to do tomorrow if you are a student:

08.00 champagnefrukost (you should have porridge with your champagne, to follow tradition)
10.00 forsränning på Fyrisån (foam rafts mostly made by student groups with some theme or another; there are 93 entrants this year, for a "river" not much bigger than Hickory Creek, which is much smaller than the Mighty Mighty Huron)
12.00 silllunch (the city has official tasters, and their guide for the best canned herring just cam out in yesterday's paper)
15.00 mösspåtagning utanför universitetsbiblioteket (the president waves his official hat, and all the students wave their hats back)
efter 15.00 champagnegalopp
på kvällen majbrasa (check the newspaper's webpage to find the bonfire nearest you)

The city is ready, from what I can tell. Last weekend they dredged the river for bicycles, to keep people in the raft race from getting impaled when they fall off of their rafts (they brought up nearly 100 bikes). Lots of public toilets have been brought in, and they are being run by a charity, which is going to charge 10SEK per use. Wood for bonfires has been piled up out at Gamla Uppsala, and in many other suburban locations, each one sponsored by a charity or a team or company or municipal employees or some group like that.

People have been talking about it since last week, of course. Everyone (professors, staff, other post-docs, current graduate students) reminisce about their favorite sista april, although some confess that they only managed to do the whole official day once or twice. People pick the events they want, but they always do one thing: they drink a lot. Here's one illustrative story, told by G., a graduate student in my department (in typical terse Swedish style):

"We went in a group. Then we lost one in the champagne race. We just lost him, and we never found him. But he was okay—at night, a group of volunteers come around, and they found him asleep at the castle wall [which is in the opposite direction of the race]. He couldn't remember how he got there. But he was fine."

G. and staff member L. also told me that this is the one day in Uppsala when you can drink alcohol in public, without getting in trouble with the police (who will be everywhere). "For lots of teenagers this will be their first drunk," said L., "and you will see them just lying on the ground in town." He and G. laughed. "You will see lots of drunk Swedes, which you will never see at other times," said G. They laughed again. "Yes, you will certainly see some bad behavior," said L. They both laughed proudly.

What are we doing tomorrow? For the night, we've decided we would like to go out to the Gamla Uppsala bonfire, because that's the biggest, most traditional, and the most pagan, held by the old burial mounds. There will also be a choir singing, presumably to help keep the witches away. For the day, we'll get up early and head into town, and see what happens. I hope to take lots of pictures. Happy Walpurgis Night Eve!

A soccer game

The week before last, we went to a Damallsvenskan match. Our local team is technically headquartered not in Uppsala, but rather in Bälinge, which is a small suburb to the north of town. Their home stadium is Studenternas IP, just across the street from the University hospital and not too far from where I work. It's also right on the river, which means that you can see moored sailboats from the front entrance. It's actually a whole complex that includes a bandy field (where the bandy finals were held) and another track used most recently for ice racing (the national studded-tire motorcycle finals were held here).

Continuing a tradition that we started when going to Michigan home games, Joe made sandwiches for us to eat during the game (salami, fresh mozzarella, sprouts, and red pepper on a baguette—yum!). This tradition started mostly because the food at UM games was pretty bad (boiled hot dogs—yuck!). This stadium, however, has a cafe in one corner, and I am pretty sure they grill their dogs, so we might have to try their food at least once. Other menu items included godis, cafe, bulle, and cans of various flavors of läsk (a can of Coke costs 25SEK, while a hot dog is only 15SEK).

Joe is practicing his grammar, in preparation for the day when we do order something. After yesterday's experience of getting schooled by the tiny child, I think "två korvar" is one plural he'll remember.

(See some pictures of the game at my new soccer-specific blog, Damallsvenskan Soapbox. Don't worry, I'll confine all my soccer commentary over there.)

Out for a Rugger

At her conference a few weeks back, Jennifer met a fellow researcher who plays rugby for the local women's side, Uppsala RFC. As today was a particularly pleasant day, we decided to get out in the sunlight and air a bit by going to today's match, versus Attila RG of Älvsjö (a particularly unpronounceable suburb to the south of Stockholm). Uppsala RFC's field is part of Fyrsihov, a large rec facility on the north side of town. Most of the place is taken up by the large building with the indoor pools and the bowling alley, with the rugby field and a number of football pitches lying to the north on Badmintonstigen.

We missed most of the first half, but the admission was only 40 SEK for the two of us, and we found quite unexpectedly that they had rough-hewn stands (despite their made-by-a-lumberjack appearance, they were still much more comfortable than the seats at Studenternas, but more on that in another post). So we paid the seven year old girl at the gate, and grabbed a semi-comfortable spot. At the half, we decided we could each do with a korv med bred, so I tromped back over to the little tent where the fellow was cooking sausages on a grill. Apparently he only handles the cooking part, though, as after smiling at me he simply nodded, and waited for the seven year old to come charging back over to take my order. My plans for ordering a couple of hot dogs in English momentarily dashed, I sucked it up and said to her, "Två korv, " to which she patiently (and slowly) replied, "Två korvar," before turning to the guy at the grill and merrily belting out my order. Was having my grammar corrected by a second-grader humiliation enough for one afternoon? It was not. A moment later, the gentleman asked me something incomprehensible in Swedish, and on hearing my "Jag förstår inte svenska" he immediately turned to the little girl and said something to her about me being an Englishman. She replied, "OK," and then turned back to me to say in perfect English, "My father is Richard, if you know who that is." I confessed that I did not (it turned out later he's the coach); she handed me the mustard, took my 20 SEK, and watched me slink away to hang my head (and eat my hot dog).

Forty-five minutes later I had learned two things: (a) Attila may be the oldest Rugby team in Sweden, but Uppsala is way better, as reflected in both the run of play and the final score of 29–5, and (b) jag förstår inte rugby. Still and all, it was a nice afternoon in the fresh air, with a pleasant view of some apartment blocks. Oh, and the Tuna Allotment… which is just going to require another post, on another day, I'm afraid.

A Spring Weekend

It's a lovely Saturday morning. The sun is shining, the birds are singing, and the buds on the trees are finally big enough to be seen from our apartment. It seems like we've made several posts now that say "Spring is here," but this is the first week that has really, truly felt like it to me. Oddly, it feels a little more like spring in Tucson than spring in Ann Arbor just at the moment, because it's quite dry out, and the sun is very high in the sky for morning. The air coming in the open window is still cool, although the sunshine on my back is warm. And for breakfast we had a special treat: steel-cut oats! We got these in a care package sent from home—they just don't appear to be available here. Absence makes the heart grow fonder, as they say. Now if only we could find brown sugar and buttermilk...

Last night, my department had a "Pub Night," much like BioBeer BioBeverage of UM, in which the grad students buy beer in bulk, then sell it at a slight loss, with the department picking up the rest of the tab. Another department was also having a pub night, so we combined forces and had large gathering on the EBC lawn. Drinking alcohol in public is technically illegal here, but apparently UU is a bit more laid back about these things than UM was (we couldn't even call it "BioBeer" by the time I left), and nobody questioned the wisdom or legality of taking the party outside.

It wasn't too long before long the frisbees came out, as I would expect in the US, and then a soccer ball too (not unknown in US ivory tower circles, but not common either). People fooled about with these and various other lawn/beach toys, taking care not to trample VP.'s two-year-old, who had never seen frisbees before, and was fascinated. Less care was taken with the group of us sitting and talking, however, and the frisbee came winging into our midst several times.

Everyone is hoping that this weather holds for next week, which will be short, with only two working days. Wednesday April 30 is Valborgmässoafton (close enough to the end of the term that it's the big student holiday here), Thursday is May 1 (International Workers Day, a national holiday), and then Friday is what's known as a klämdag, a general term used to describe a Monday or Friday that falls between official days off. More on these festivities later...

Send the Clones Away

A few weeks ago, when I left work, I was greeted by the following scene:



Ahhhgh! Someone had cut down all the apple trees lining the EBC lawn, and just before they ought to have blossomed. They looked fine this morning! Why has this happened?

Close inspection of the downed trees revealed that many of them were in fact in bad shape, with bark coming off, and cores that were becoming hollow. Many of them were also covered in lichens, which is very attractive but probably not good for the tree. And the final straw, apparently, was the proliferation of this red stuff on the bark (some kind of fungus?), which is said to be Bad, and capable of spreading to other trees.

I think some people in EBC must have been even more startled than I was, and had written emails to whoever is in charge of facilities, demanding an explanation. Later in the afternoon we got a slightly defensive mass email saying, among other things, that

"Originally the plan was to use clones taken from the old trees, but the quality of the clones was not sufficient. The clones will though be planted in other parts of EBC."

Our botany department traces its heritage back to Linnaeus himself, but our clones weren't good enough? Oh the shame of it.

Watching the installation of the saplings has been sort of surreal, because I have never seen any of it actually happening. I go in in the morning, and things are one way; I come out at night, and things have changed. For all I know, the work is being done by tree elves imported from Finland. One day, the old trees were lying on the ground, cut off at ground level, then they disappeared. Next day, holes appeared where the stumps had been (although the old roots weren't dug up so much as cut off). Sometime thereafter the holes were filled in with dirt.

After that, more dirt was piled up so that each hole now had a four-sided pyramid of dirt poking up out of it. This last Wednesday, the pyramids were leveled off. Yesterday, small holes were dug in the pyramids, and between morning fika and afternoon fika, the 3m high saplings arrived. When I arrived this morning they had been planted; by afternoon, they were trussed to supports on either side.

So I mourn the loss of the old trees, but I look forward to seeing the new trees take root, and many years from now, if I ever come back, I can say that I was here when these trees were planted. By unseen Finnish tree elves.

Consumerism in Sweden

Today, by special request, a quick post about Consumerism in Sweden.

Consumerism appears to be alive and well in Sweden. In town, it seems like everyone has a shopping bag full of something. I have not yet been to Ikea when it wasn't full of people, and most of them are actually buying stuff. (The man in the picture to the left, for instance, has just bought a couple of really bored sons.) Busses have extra bins for things so that you don't have to take up two seats with all your stuff (people do sometimes anyway).

For some reason the concept of the mid-life crisis came up at fika last week. I asked what a mid-life crisis looks like in Sweden, thinking the answer might be something like going on a year-long vacation in Thailand, but no: everyone agreed that most mid-life crises take the form of buying even more stuff. (Up until very recently, getting a motorcycle was very common among people of a certain age, men more than women. Then the government started making people get a motorcycle endorsement on their driving license, and going to safety classes and so forth, with the result that motorcycles are not nearly as popular as once they were.)

Mind you, younger people also seem to have plenty of things and stuff. Post-doc K. has recently bought a house. She is excited to have a place to call her own, and to be closer to work, but she also confessed that she and her man need more space for all their stuff, having filled three storage rooms in their apartment building in Stockholm.

The dollar has sunk so low against the Swedish crown that the idea of flying to the U.S. just to go shopping was proposed at fika. "Yes, but if you 're going to do that, you really need to buy a lot of stuff, to make it worthwhile," said someone, and he looked rather gleeful at the prospect.

So there's one stereotype debunked—that of the penny-pinching Scandinavian. My feeling is that it's true that they don't like like to waste money, but they appear to be perfectly willing to spend it on the things they really want.

Disturbing Landmark

Last night we crossed a threshold of our sojourn in Sweden: the end of darkness. Last night, for the first time this year, true darkness never came to Uppsala, leaving us instead with a night-long astronomical twilight. Astronomical twilight is the darkest of the three degrees of twilight, the lightest being civil twilight, with nautical twilight falling between the two. What does this mean for us? Well, it's still getting pretty dark at night, although the nights are getting shorter fast. But in a few weeks we'll see the end of astronomical twilight for the spring, and then by June, with the sun rising at 3:30, we'll see only 3 hours of nautical twilight in the middle of the night, culminating in a week where a few hours of civil twilight will have to pass for "night".

I think I'm glad I finished sewing the bedroom curtains this week. Between the blinds and two layers of curtains, the bedroom is pretty dark at night now, and can be made tolerably dim at mid-day. So with sleep masks, it may be enough to see us through the summer. Oh, and a heavy cloth to cover Jennifer's latest acquisition: the world's brightest alarm clock.

I'll put a chart of our sunrise times on this page in the next couple of days, but if you're curious in the meantime I wrote a little web sun rise and set graphing page. It still needs a bit of polish, but it's functional as is.

The Swedish word for the day is gardiner.

Cultural Notes Part 1: Enjoy the Silence

In the last post, I mentioned that the stereotype of the singing Swede has perhaps some basis in reality. Here's another one: the taciturn Swede.

Swedes apparently don't like to say any more than necessary. A business transaction, say buying a hot dog on the street, takes the following words: "En värmkorv." "Tolv." (hand over the money, receive hot dog and change if appropriate). That's it. No words like "please" or "thank you" are required or expected. If you say "Tack" to the vendor, you may startle them.

While this taciturnity does not generally hold in social situations, it can happen there too. In my second week at work, I finally got up the courage to go out to the lunch room, joining five other people there at a table that comfortably holds six. Some conversation had been going on when I first got into the room, but then it petered out and was replaced with... nothing. Silence. I sat there, feeling this silence growing and growing, and I am fairly sure my face was getting redder and redder. I ate my lunch as fast as I could and scurried away. I did go to the break room for lunch the next day, but I waited until I was sure there wasn't anybody else there. Five minutes later, of course, someone came in to eat their lunch... and sat down across from me without saying a word, or even looking at me. Once again, I fled for my office at the earliest possible moment.

I have since figured out that there are two things going on here. First, unlike fika, lunch is not necessarily considered a time for socializing; many of my co-workers use lunch to catch up on the news (our department has a subscription to the local daily), and anyway, you're busy eating, so why would you talk? The second thing is that Swedes seem to be completely comfortable as part of a silent group. It can feel quite unfriendly at first, but it really isn't. Even at fika, in which social interaction is expected, sometimes a silence falls that is simply not broken for minutes, if ever. Such a prolonged silence can herald the end of a particular fika, but it doesn't have to—sometimes some people get up and leave, while others remain seated, and continue to sit in silence.

The silence is a little strange, from the perspective of a chatty American like myself, but I have come to appreciate and enjoy it. I no longer have to fight the instinct to break a silence, and honestly it's a relief to not have to come up with small talk or a new topic every time the conversation runs out. If you don't want to talk, you simply don't talk. Feel free, however, to sit back, relax, and enjoy the silence.

A choir concert

A couple of weeks ago, Joe and I went to a concert in a church in downtown Uppsala. My office mate S. sings in the Uppsala Kammarkör, and he sold me a couple of tickets to their performance on 6 April.

The church is an Uppsala landmark, appearing on tourist maps and brochures. It is not, however, one of the classic old churches that are found here and there in town. The first time we saw the building, we both assumed that it was built by communists some time in the early 1960s, and we dubbed it "Our Lady of the Secret Police." There's just something vaguely East German about it, to my eyes.

The 30-voice choir was joined by an 18-piece orchestra for the concert, in which they sang Mozart's Sparvmässan and Kröningsmassan, both i C-dur. I don't think I have ever heard (or even heard of) the Sparvmässan before hearing it at this concert (S. told me he had never heard of it either, until they were handed the sheet music). The program says that not much is known about this piece other than that it was first performed on Easter in 1776 in Salzburg's cathedral. It is a fine piece with some interesting tempo changes, not Mozart's best, perhaps, but perfectly lovely to listen to.

The second piece I have heard before, of course, and the choir did a wonderful job with it. Their female soloist is excellent (S. later told me that she is also a scientist by day, working in the biomedical research center), and their voices filled the church so that you felt you could almost float on it. This feeling, of the air being saturated with sound, is something recorded music can never reproduce, no matter how good your speakers are.

S. and I talked a little about the concert the following Monday, and about signing and music more generally. S. is a music buff, of course, and he also enjoys all types of music, and especially going to concerts. He is of the opinion that current technology makes the traditional recording industry obsolete, and he thinks that musicians are going to have to go back to earning their money the way they did in the old days—that is, from live performances.

One popular stereotype about Swedes is that they all sing a lot, and I have no evidence to dispute this stereotype. I have been told that big parties like Disputationsfests almost always include some singing, both set performances and sing-alongs that include everyone, and I have the impression that the more formal the party, the more singing is expected. Fika talk has included discussions (and sometimes nearly arguments, which are not common here) about the Eurovision song contest (last mentioned here). And when music is discussed at fika, people do not hesitate to sing a bar or two of something aloud, to jog someone else's memory.

S. even asked me if I were interested in singing in the choir, as they need some more people for their spring and summer concert plans. I, err, demurred. I will need to spend a lot more time breathing the air of Sweden before my voice is anything close to those that I've heard so far!

Spring is here

Yes, it's definitely feeling like spring time. The banks of the river are lined with office workers on fika, and students who appear to be studying how to be on fika, presumably as part of some local version of a high school civics class. Out here in Flogsta, the lawns are filled with cats hunting leaves and tiny insects which may or may not actually be there, as well as Swedish girls playing lawn games which seem to involve making elaborate arrangements of various sized wooden blocks and then occasionally picking one of them up and throwing it at some of the others, no doubt governed by some advanced heuristic beyond my ken. And, of course, the "Puck" has returned, or so the extremely colorful signs at virtually every bus stop in the city inform me.



Being a higher primate, my attention is of course immediately attracted by colorful, not to mention shiny, things, so naturally I've been curious about this hockey-puck-like ice cream confection which has, apparently, made it's much anticipated return to the quickie marts of Sweden. So it was that today, on my way home from the grocery store, carrying my canvas sacks full of fresh vegetables1, I decided that such a lovely spring day called for an icy treat, and I got myself a Puck. Mmm, I thought, I haven't had a nice chocolate covered ice cream popsicle in years.

Well, I still haven't. If I'd paid more attention to the words on the brightly colored advertising, I might have noticed what I instead discovered to my horror at the first bite: that's not a tasty chocolate shell, it's lakrits. That's right, lovely vanilla ice cream encased in a thin, crunchy shell of salty, salty licorice. I still shudder to think of it.

Oh well. At least it isn't actually warm out, yet, seeing as how all of our spring clothes are sitting on a wharf in Jersey.

1 I keep forgetting to talk about the fresh vegetables. Yes, in fact, there is plenty of fresh produce. In the winter it seems to come mainly from Spain, with some other Mediterranean locales thrown in for good measure. Just this week, though, local produce is starting to show up in street stands downtown. Hopefully we'll report back from a Farmer's Market soon.

I'm an Idiot

Ever since my first trip to a grocery store in Sweden, I've been muttering (mostly to myself, but occasionally to those around me), "Chervil. Where's the chervil? I need some chervil." You see, I like a nice bit of egg salad—eggs are cheap and easy protein, and with some fresh chives and chervil (sometimes I use sage instead, which is a little odd, but I like it), a little lemon juice and some nice dijon1, egg salad is a tasty way to eat them.

Most grocery stores here sell a small selection of live herbs. In fact, live seems to be the only way to get fresh herbs here. In our last place this was not ideal, as I struggled to keep the little guys alive, but now we have a window shelf and a southern exposure, so it's much easier. Right now I've got some persilja, some basilika, and some gräslök2. But Sweden does not appear to believe in chervil.

Well, after grousing about it for months, I finally got around to doing a little research this morning. In Sweden, it's called körvel, which I'm pretty sure would be pronounced "chervil," but it isn't common (doesn't tolerate the cold). Swedes usually substitute spansk körvel which has a stronger anise flavor. Well, that's not going to cut it for my egg salad, I mean, I don't want more anise flavor… er, wait, anise flavor? And why do all of the pictures of chervil look like parsley? That's not what chervil looks like, it's got slender, paired leaves. Related to parsley?

I don't put chervil in my egg salad. I put tarragon in my egg salad. Tarragon is called dragon here, and it's only available in pretty much every grocery store I've been in.

I may be an idiot, but tonight I'm an idiot with tasty egg salad. So that's something.

1 This is silly, but may I just add that the Grey Poupon here is outstanding mustard? I got a small jar our first week here, and we've been amazed at how much more flavorful it is. Maybe it's just fresher—America's Test Kitchen says that dijon loses heat rapidly even when unopened. Anyway, it's good stuff.

2 The chives took some searching—for some reason, chives and dill are sold in smaller pots, and placed next to the fennel in the fresh produce section, instead of off next to the potatoes and onions where the rest of the live herbs go. It's not just a single chain doing it, either, it seems to be everyone.

Apoteket, Eventually

This week I finally ran out of my US prescription medicine, so today I went back to Apoteket, the state-run pharmacy monopoly here. You may recall from a while back that we were waiting to make doctor's appointments until we had gotten our registration from Försäkringskassan. This is because the documentation we had been given said we should register with Försäkringskassan as soon as we arrived, and the helpful (seeming) man at the local Försäkringskassan office said, "You fill out these forms, then we send you a card, and then you can go to the doctor." Well, after three weeks of waiting for a Social Insurance card to arrive, a couple of phone calls revealed that we needn't have waited: Försäkringskassan covers things like pensions, long-term disablility, and worker's comp, but it is unrelated to the national medical insurance scheme (which, I guess, is just so ubiquitous that Swedes don't even think to mention it). All this is a Good Thing, because as non-taxpayers (Jennifer's stipend is tax exempt) we aren't eligible for Försäkringskassan benefits.

So, that's three weeks wasted. We then set out to make appointments to see a doctor, which took another 5 weeks or so. One of the ways in which the Swedish health care system is different than that of the US is that every neighborhood in Sweden has a Vårdcentral, which is not a hospital so much as a clinic. When you need any kind of non-emergency medical care, you start with your local vårdcentral. There you are assigned a doctor, who is essentially your primary care physician, who writes your prescriptions and refers you to other doctors. The vårdcentral also serves as your local urgent care clinic, where you can get a same-day appointment for non-emergency-but-still-urgent stuff.

OK, so after two months I finally had an appointment, and somewhat anticlimactically, it lasted for all of five minutes. My doctor looked at the prescription bottles I brought in, typed on the computer a bit, and then we were done. I expected to be poked and prodded a bit, maybe get a bloodwork order, or at least a request for medical records, but instead he seemed quite happy to just fill my (admittedly innocuous) prescriptions and be done with it. Here's the cool part though: no written prescriptions. He wasn't just typing up a scrip to print out, he was actually putting a prescription in a database. Once they're in there, you can go to any pharmacy ("In Sweden," he hastened to add) and they just look it up and fill it. Here we go, I thought, finally we begin to see the benefits of living in a socialist paradise, where everything is centralized and standardized. No transferring prescriptions from one pharmacy to another, no waiting a few weeks to fill a new one then realizing you've lost that critical little piece of paper in the meantime.

Fast forward to today. I went to the Apoteket branch downtown, and this time I took a queue number for the recept line. After a few minutes, my number was called, and I went up to the appropriate counter. We haggled for a few minutes about my legal status:

You have ID?

Yes, here you are.

But you do not have a personal number?

Yes, I do.

[Some typing] But you do not have the last four numbers.

Yes, they are xxxx.

[More typing] But you do not have a personal number.

No, I really do.

But this is not you.

No, that's someone else. But that's not my personal number.

Because you do not have a personal number.

Because I do have a personal number, and that isn't it.

…and so forth. Eventually, we reached an agreement: I exist, and have a personal number. And, incidentally, prescriptions. Hooray. So the pharmacist filled my prescriptions, printed a bunch of stickers which then got attached to the pill boxes, the bag she put them in, and then to multiple copies of little yellow forms, two of which got handed to me. She told me I could pay the 600 SEK I owed up at the front, and that was that. As I turned to go, I happened to ask about the yellow forms, and she said, "You must bring those back when you refill the prescriptions." I allowed that I was confused, because I thought all that was in the computer. Well, it turns out it was in the computer, but no more. Now that it had been filled, I had to hang on to those pieces of paper and bring them back every time I got a refill, otherwise I could never get any more pills.

So I've traded a piece of paper I have to not lose for two weeks for a piece of paper I have to not lose for a year. Perfect.

Incidentally, if 600 SEK seems a little high for two prescriptions, well, it sort of is. But it is for three months, and you only have to pay the first 1800 SEK of your prescription costs per year, with the government picking up the tab for everything beyond that. So it's not so bad, really.

Now, to find a place to stash these little pieces of paper for the next three months. If only someone in Sweden sold hanging file folders with which to fill the hanging file cabinet we bought…

Cult of My Nemesis

New place, new set of washing machines to beat my head against. Actually, the machines themselves haven't changed that much this time, but the washing machine culture out here in Flogsta, well, that's something different. The fancy booking system back on Dragarbrunnsgatan meant that one could book the laundry room a week in advance, and then have it completely to yourself for a three hour block. Not the most efficient system, from a washing machine usage point of view, but awfully convenient—no trudging down to the laundry room with a full hamper just to find that there's no room at the inn.

Now we're washin' it Flogsta style, though. What does that mean? This is a pretty big complex, so there are four laundry buildings, each with 6 washers and four or five high-capacity dryers (plus and ironing board, and an electric mangle, just in case you decide you don't like having fingers anymore). That's one tvättstuga to just under 200 apartments, or if you prefer, one washing machine per 281 tennants. Nevertheless, it seems to work out pretty well; they are mostly students, after all, so they can't be doing laundry as often as they should. The first time I went, I tried the middle of a weekday afternoon, which up to now has guaranteed me a pretty empty laundry room. Again, though, students now, so naturally 15:00 Tuesday is a prime laundry doing time. There was an empty machine, and I proceeded to load into it, but then I encountered something you don't come across that often here: a chatty Swede. This fellow helpfully pointed out that the machine I was about to use "hadn't been working so well today," (indeed, upon closer inspection, I think it was completely broken), but that there was another one that was "on zero" (all the machines have countdown timers, so this was just a machine that had finished its load) which would probably be a better bet. It's a good thing he was there, actually, or I would have felt a little tentative about the procedure: apparently, when someone's wash is done you just take it out and put it in one of the dozen or so white wire laundry carts scattered around the room. The Swede said, "It's a very un-Swedish system actually, but it works. You just put the clothes in a basket, and no one gets mad that you moved their clothes." He then went on to detail his long standing feud with the crazy girl who uses all six machines at once to wash her equestrian gear and saddle(!?), which he doesn't think is allowed, never mind that you just can't take all the machines. He said that once she was using five machines, and when he started to load the sixth she said he couldn't because she was going to need that one, too, but he explained, "Look, I'm sure that works in southern Stockholm or wherever you're from, but you just can't do that here, even if you do use that tone you just tried on me that I'm sure used to work on your mother." I'm telling you, once you find something they're interested in, the floodgates they do open.

Oh yeah, almost forgot: see the little blue bag on the floor? The virtually ubiquitous laundry bag of Flogsta, better known as an Ikea shopping bag.

Well, many loads of laundry later, we're all clean here again. It's been a long and sort of trying week for a variety of annoying little reasons (such as Jennifer's recently contracted head cold), some of which we'll try to cover over the course of our quiet and restful (fingers crossed) weekend. In any case, we decided we deserved a treat, so tonight we ordered pizza from Luna, the little pizza place in the apartment complex. We've hesitated to do it, as the menu has some oddities, but tonight we figured we should just try it. We ordered a Mexico (ground nut, pepperoni, and bacon?) and a Tropikana (ham, bananas, and curry—verdad!).



OK, so by pepperoni I think they meant banana pepper, but the "ground nut" must have been a mistranslation, because it was Italian sausage! The bacon was in three inch long strips, odd but tasty. Oh, yes, the bananas and curry with ham? Well, it tasted like bananas and curry with ham, which really was pretty good. Live and learn, I guess.

By the way, Jennifer informs me that since this post is about infernal gadgets and our relationship to them, I am morally obligated to relate the final word on the little Husqvarna dishwasher. After the first week, it functioned only as the most expensive, awkward and inefficient dish drying rack we've ever had. Sigh. Farewell, little Husqvarna. Maybe someday you'll grow up to be a sewing machine, or if you work very hard, a chainsaw.

The "Lille Lennart Lottery"

Swedish names came up as a topic of discussion last week at some fika or another, as V.'s sambo is due to deliver their baby on May 5, and they haven't chosen a name yet. V. said he was thinking of the name "Lennart," which caused both K. and P., a female graduate student of a different professor, to make yucky faces and simultaneously say "Lennart?!" in the exact same tone of disbelief and disgust. I ventured my opinion that "Lennart" sounded okay to me, on the face of it, but apparently the name "Lennart" makes a Swede think of nothing as much as a 70 year old man who is both fat and disreputable.

So we discussed names for a while, and apparently shortening "Lennart" to "Lenny" is no good either, because for some reason Swedish jails are disproportionately filled with men whose names end in the letter "y." "You might as well just have the baby in jail, if you name him Jonny or Conny [which is a male name here]," said V.

At some point the conversation lulled, and into the silence I asked who was in charge of the baby betting pool. The what? said everyone. You know, when you bet on the date of the birth, I explained. No, no one here has ever heard of such a thing, they said. What a strange custom! How very American! Let's do it!

So yesterday I officially started the baby betting pool, which I have named the "Lille Lennart Lottery" because the poor child will always be Lennart to me now, I'm afraid. I asked around to get an idea of an appropriate amount of money for a friendly bet, and have settled on 20SEK to buy a day, which conveniently comes in a note. I have to say, for people who have never heard of the custom, they are throwing themselves into it with gusto. People are closely questioning V. as to whether he has any inside information that he's willing to share, and this of course is also generating some slightly bawdy humor at his expense. For his part, V. has announced that he could be bribed into slipping the mother various labor-inducing substances (pineapple is the food of choice in these parts) at the appropriate time. He himself is betting on a date a few days before May 5.

Running the pool is fun, but I am going to miss V., who intends to take his full 8 months of paternity leave at 90% of his salary (80% from the state with a 10% bonus from the University). Yes, you read that right: after the baby is born, he will be gone until January 2009, during which time he will earn 90% of what he is making now. Furthermore, the graduate school "clock" stops for child care (otherwise, you have five years to finish your degree). Isn't that civilized?

Meanwhile, here's another important lesson in cultural expectations: if you propose a course of action, such as a baby betting pool, you had better be ready to follow through. I will try to remember this before I suggest anything more onerous.

Ladies' Night Out

A graduate student in my department decided that it was high time the womenfolk of MolEvol went out on the town, in part, she said "to cheer us up after the fire." And so this past Friday the seven of us (two technicians, two graduate students, and three postdocs—the boss was invited but couldn't make it) went out to Katalin, a restaurant and jazz bar located in part of the old train station warehouse.

We sat at a table immediately, but was a good ten minutes before anyone deigned to give us menus, and another half hour after that before someone else came to take our order. As has been mentioned in previous posts, being "at your service" is not a high priority in Sweden, even for people whose job it is to serve you. The two bottles of wine we ordered came out first, and poor VP., a postdoc who is seven months pregnant, was nearly driven to eat the candle, as she had been hungry before we even sat down and her Pepsi didn't make it out for another ten minutes.

But the food, when it arrived, was tasty (I had a kyckling och baconsmacka, which came tastefully but oddly presented with the bacon on top of the bread, a handful of fresh oregano stalks for garnish, and a tiny scoop of coleslaw in a tiny square dish) and meanwhile conversation flowed very comfortably. This was the first time I'd seen these co-workers away from work, and we had a very good time indeed. Horror stories of previous labs were swapped (I told the BioBeer "Danger: Ebola" story, to great acclaim—that one's always popular with fellow scientists), as well as stories of previous departmental parties (VP. met her husband at one, finding out only much later that they had been set up with each other), and other various mishaps (the third postdoc, K., has a series of scars on one arm that look remarkably like a shark bite, but are not).

We also talked some about our family backgrounds. Z., a Polish graduate student, has some hard-line communist relatives who continue to rail against the modern times; VP., who is Latvian, is half-Jewish with some anti-semitic Russian nobility on the other side ("How my parents got together I never know," she said); I told tales of Irish criminals and dubious Germans. K. confessed to being entirely Swedish and said almost wistfully "... so I don't have any good stories like you do, they're all just normal people."

After dinner we all had dessert (I had the rababerpannacotta med apelsinsorbet), and I thought again, not for the first time, how lovely it is to be with people who always have dessert. No "Oh, no, I shouldn't" protests here! After dessert it was nearing 10pm, and so we started to think about breaking up. VP. and K. declared that we should not leave a tip at all, because the service had not been particularly good. A service charge is always included in the bill, and I know this, but tipping is a remarkably hard habit to break. We discussed this point for a few minutes, and Z. said that it is even harder to tip when you are not used to doing it. VP. and K. confirmed that tipping in a restaurant is entirely voluntary, and really only done if the service was exceptional, or if you've been difficult customers (such as when VP.'s two year old dumped a whole glass of juice onto a leather couch). "What about more personal things, like, oh, say, the person who cuts your hair?" I asked, thinking of Joe's recent experience and my eventual need for such a service. VP. and K. both laughed. "No, never!" Why not? "Have you gotten a haircut here? Do you know how expensive it is? Never tip a haircutter!"

So among the seven of us, with the inevitable confusion resulting from three people paying in cash and four paying by credit card, our server ended up with 10SEK extra, an amount so insignificant as to be perhaps more even more insulting than nothing at all. At an American restaurant, we might have been blacklisted forever. Here, no one gave it a second thought. And it must be said that the waiter sealed his own doom when he saw all the credit cards come out, and actually rolled his eyes and sighed out loud.

So our tjejmiddagen was a success, and I hope that we can do it again soon. Maybe somewhere else. A place where the servers will recognize a Ladies' Night Out for what it is, and flirt with us a little more (or at least not treat us like a nuisance). But most importantly, somewhere that will bring us our food a whole lot quicker.

Work Resumes

Work resumed this past week on the second floor of Building 18C, for the most part. The hallway still smells of smoke, the big lab has been gutted, and our break room has been taken over by the clean-up crew, so everyone is eating in the large room downstairs ("We must all make sacrifices, in times like these," one student sighed at lunch last Wednesday). On the other hand, "the stuff" seems to be out of the air now, after they ran large air filters continuously for more than a week. We are still keeping our office doors closed, due to the noise from the cleaning, but time marches on and the situation improves day by day.

The technicians are not too happy, as they are now crammed into a lab space about a fifth of the size that they are used to. The clean-up crew ended up tearing everything out of the lab that did not have a stainless steel surface, as "the stuff" would not come off of other surfaces, even with industrial-strength solvents. Gel rigs, chairs, cabinets, glassware, my never-used lab coat, any reagents or kits that were left out... all are now in the trash (and the kits, being consumables, were not insured).

Enough time has passed that people now seem to feel that awkward questions like "who's going to pay for all this?" can be discussed at fika. Some think that it may be quite a legal mess for quite a long time, and that the University (or its insurers) may sue the building contractors, because it turns out that there are no smoke detectors in the lab or offices in our building at all, only in the corridors (where a fire is least likely to start). If things here are at all like they are back home, I will be long gone from here before the situation is fully resolved.

Long Morning

When Jennifer left for work this morning, I tagged along down to Stora Torget, and then hopped a bus of my own to go to Uppsala Science Park, home of Humac, the sole Apple Authorized Service Center in Uppsala. Yup, our MacBook Pro, Surtr (better known as the hub of our digital lifestyle) went under the knife this morning. He's been having problems with DVD-R and DVD+R discs for a few weeks—burning them fine, but not reading them anymore after a while, even though they continue to work on other computers. This week it finally got to the point where the poor fellow just couldn't read recorded media at all. Obviously this is not an acceptable situation, as Surtr is not only our television but also our DVR (thanks to a wonderful little gadget called the eyeTV 250 Plus (or the Magic Dingus, as jennifer prefers to call it)), and it's no good trying to record Swedish television for posterity when your hard drive is getting full.

Fortunately, AppleCare includes global service, so all I had to do was look up my nearest service provider and head over there. After some 'hmm'ing and a few 'That's very strange's, plus a bit of Swedish techie humor (I told him that resetting the SMC had caused it to read a burned disc once before reverting to it's previous state, and he replied , "Ah yes, the solution is very simple then. Just Reset the SMC any time you need to read a disc" —since the SMC is reset by shutting down, removing the battery, and holding down the power button for five seconds, this was obviously not a genuine suggestion; we chuckled briefly, then moved on), he proceeded to try a few discs and had to agree that it shouldn't be doing that. Anyway, it took a day to get a replacement drive, and his morning I took the little fellow in for his operation.

I wasn't sure how long it would take, and Ikea wasn't open yet, so I decided to take care of some errands downtown. Most importantly, it was time for my quarterly haircut. Actually, a little past time. OK, I looked like a crazy person. Anyway, after window shopping salons downtown for a while, I settled on a nice, quiet frisör with no one waiting. Despite the lack of customers, I was told that 11 am was the earliest they could take me (perhaps I was interrupting fika?). So I made an appointment and set off to see what else I could accomplish.

By now it was nearing 10, at which point the shops would open, so I wandered around for a bit scoping out kitchen stores in preparation for my next task: locating a 28 cm oven safe stainless steel sauté pan with flat sides and a lid, with no teflon coating. Should be in the first place I looked, right? Well, apparently Swedes like their teflon, because there's hardly non-nonstick pan in Uppsala as far as I can tell. The exception is that there is some cast iron cookware about, and that would have been OK, except that all the cast iron I found was kind of odd: low sides, wooden handles, kinda froufy, and way overpriced. Plus I had may little culinary heart set on a nice stainless steel pan. By the time 11 rolled around, I was running out of stores, and having absolutely zero luck.

I got back to the frisör at the stroke of 11, and was seated immediately. The barber confirmed my worst fears by sort of pulling at my hair a moment whilst frowning, and then asking, "What would you like? You want it very short, yes?" He seemed surprised that I wanted to leave some hair on the top of my head. We discussed options for a few minutes, and then he quietly got to work. He didn't say anything for like the next fifteen minutes, during which time he gave me the most thorough haircut of my life. Not too short, mind you, just very thorough. I swear he cut every hair three times, and all of it by hand. He did finally settle in enough to ask where I was from, and then to tell me a story about a young client he used to have who went off to the US as a male au pair, fell in love with the neighbor girl, and got engaged. When the barber asked the lad what her parents did he said he thought it was something to do with raisins—turns out he was unknowingly marrying the daughter of the Sunmaid empire. Anyway, half an hour later, I found myself in possession of the best haircut I've ever had; darn good thing too, since it set me back 340 SEK. Ouch. Hopefully it'll last until September.

By now I had gotten a call saying that Surtr was all ready to go. On my way back to Humac, I stopped by one last shop, an overpriced designy looking place, in which I thought I detected the distant glint of quality cookware languishing against the back wall. Amazingly, they had exactly what I wanted, on sale no less. So, another 449 SEK poorer, but one extremely heavy-bottomed stainless sauté pan richer, I hied towards Humac, fortifying myself with a street sausage along the way. The replacement went fine, and now we can read all those pesky discs. Yay!

I should probably go back to Ikea now, but I think I'll have a bit of a sit down first. Maybe just close my eyes for a minute...

April Foo… aw, shucks

So I had this whole April Fool's post planned out, about how I'd gone to Ikea and found heir new line of Ikea Cola, where they sold the syrup and the carbonation in little packets and you assembled it at home. Yes, I know, hah very hah. Anyway, imagine my horror when, while perusing electric kettles at Åhlen's department store, Jennifer pointed out that they're selling home pop machines that let you do just that.

Better luck next year, I suppose.