Sämsta sedan 1896

The 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing were the most disasterous games that Sweden has endured. Ever. Sure, they ended up with a total of 5 medals, 4 silver and 1 bronze, behind both Denmark and Norway (oh the shame of it!), but not a one of them gold. Finland? Finished with 4 medals... but one of them gold. Finland, for heaven's sake! (Sweden did manage to beat Iceland, who only managed one silver. Woo-hoo!)

Here's a list of some individual things that went wrong for Sweden, or are otherwise shameful in some way:

—Ara Abrahamian, the Greco-Roman wrestler who was a victim of knowing the rules better than the referee did. He should have wrestled in the gold medal match, but instead wrestled in the bronze match so that he could gave up his medal in protest. (The day after the closing ceremonies, the wrestling court ruled in his favor.)
—Susannah Kallur, a popular hurdler who was favored to win, hit the first hurdle in the semifinal race. She was interviewed by an SVT reporter immediately afterwards, and under continual pestering cried a little bit. "For heaven's sake, leave the poor woman alone!" I shouted at the TV. Turns out many other people did too: SVT got lots of angry mail, and the whole story headed the media for days. There were newspaper interviews how awful it was that a TV reporter made her cry, and then they interviewed Kallur's mother to ask how she felt about it, and then Kallur herself, and then the reporter, to ask him to defend himself... it was an amazing feeding frenzy, almost American in its scope.
—The women's soccer team left the tournament after their quarterfinal loss to current world champions Germany, who played badly in every game except against Sweden. And on a related note, while talking about the soccer tournament on the late-night wrap-up show, commentator Rickard Olsson said about Team Germany that it was hard to feel sorry for them, you know, after that whole Hitler thing. SVT is conducting an investigation...
—Carolina Klüft, apparently bored with years of dominating the heptathlon, entered only her worst events, triple jump and high jump, and did miserably.
—Stefan Holm, a known-to-be-prickly-and-perfectionist high jumper who just couldn't get it together.
—Sailing team Fredrik Lööf and Anders Ekström thought they were finishing in second place, but a judge said that they were in third place. The team only had a couple of minutes to lodge a protest, and since they thought they had finished second, they didn't. Their protest at not being able to file a protest is still underway, I think.
—Swimmer Therese Alshammar had a "wardrobe malfunction" right before her swim. (Link does not go to pictures!)
—Skeet shooter Håkan Dahlby, who shot the vey worst he ever has in a competition and was in tears afterwards.
—A Swedish taekwondo referee was kicked in the head (on purpose) by the Cuban he had just ruled against.

Swedish TV coverage was good. They did show lots of Swedish athletes, of course, but also showed finals and semifinals of event in which Sweden had no players/teams. There were no stories that I could tell of athletes overcoming hardships and "Doing it for their little brother Timmy, who has a deadly but heartwarming disease," as Wait! Wait! put it. On the other hand, post-hoc coverage of Sweden's failures was thorough and merciless.

One thing they did that I really liked was that in the early wrap-up each night, they had a biomechanist, a sports psychologist, and a practical philosopher (!) discussing the day's events, and often with a guest commentator as well to talk about about specific events. The ones we saw included boxing, wrestling, swimming (plus an explanation of how the suits work), diving, and most hilariously, the triple jump, featuring a slow motion re-enactor on wires.

So it's always a little sad when the Olympics is over—when else do you get to see so much handball?—but on the other hand, now we can get away from the TV and get back to work, school, and blogging...

Revenons à nos moutons

Today is the first day of orientation for the Datavetenskap Masters Program at Uppsala University, so this afternoon I returned to that sheep-strewn meadow. Up until a week ago, the only firm information that had been sent out about the program start was a note that there was a mandatory roll call on 25 August. Last Monday, this explanation was amended to include a time (13:15) and a place (building 1, room 211), with the promise that further information would show up during the course of the week at a web address, provided.

Needless to say, by last night, the web address was still not available. However, one of the returning students happened to mention on the program's message board that volunteers were needed for the tour of campus for the new students, as indicated on the orientation schedule, which was available at a completely different address. That site had not just a schedule of the week's activities, but also included an offhand mention of the fact that new students are required to bring their passport and a copy of their letter of admission to the roll call. Apparently, this past spring when the department informed us that on the first day we had to provide certified copies of previous diplomas and transcripts, they actually meant passports and letters of admission. Naturally.

Anyway, roll call was scheduled to run from 13:15 to 16:00 today. Since I had both of these items, roll call went off just fine. For me, anyway. For the half dozen or so erstwhile students of whom the department had no record, despite their letters of admission, it may have been a little bit rockier. Nevertheless, when the rest of us were dismissed at 14:00 (just a hair shy of the originally scheduled time, you may note) and told to go and enjoy the sunshine while it lasted, the program director seemed to think that everything would work out for everyone.

Tomorrow: Grillfest Tisdag!

They're here! part two

Note: this post originally started on August 2, but somewhere between vacation and the Olympics it got lost. I thought I better finish it before the apples come in (which they are starting to do already)...

They're here!

What are here?

Svensk blåbär, that's what! Oh, you thought cherries were my favorite? Well, anyone who knows me well knows that blueberries are actually my favorite. Not blueberry-flavored things, mind you, but blueberries, the raw fruit, the real deal. What did I used to get from that Dutch place in South Haven, a 10lb box? And I could eat half of that in one sitting. Just look at that big pot of blueberries (500 grams for 40SEK) Joe brought back for me. I'm going to dive in there and eat and eat and eat until...

Hang on...

What the heck are these things?

Turns out that when you buy a box of what are called "blåbär" around here, you get fruits that are smaller, darker, tarter, and they come with unusually silvan contaminants, such as leaves and pine needles. Most berries still have a stem attached as well, almost as if they had been picked with some sort of mechanical device (like a comb) instead of by hand. Hmmm...

My first research stop was of course the MSU Extension pages, but no help there. A little more research (okay, Wikipedia) has convinced me that what these folk call "blåbär" are actually what we or Brits would call "bilberries," not "blueberries." The two plants are of course very closely related, and both the taxonomy and the vernacular nomenclature is conflicting and confusing; some people call bilberries "huckleberries" (but I'm not sure that's right) or "wild blueberries" (which also is probably not correct). Anyway, I'm not a botanist, but one thing I can do is spot a taxonomy in trouble, and so I will not try to assign species names, but trust me, they're different. (Did that sound a little too authoritarian? Evidence is presented below.)

You can get real blueberries here, but they come from Belgium or something, cost a lot more (200 grams for 50SEK) and they're not as sweet and juicy as the ones from Michigan. Bilberries are not as good to eat raw, by the handful, as blueberries are, but their small size and tartness makes them excellent for baking. They shine in a sweet muffin matrix. I expect the ones I froze to work equally well as a syrup or in pancakes.

Bluberries: fruit large, blush on the skin, flesh green or white. (Belgian fruits pictured here, with a nickel for scale. Note slices through longitude and latitude.)

Bilberries: fruit small, no blush, flesh purple. (And your fingers will be blue for days after you sort and stem them.)

37 minutes of night

Tonight we see the return of an old friend: actual night. It's been hard to track the dwindling of daylight this month, for several reasons. Our new apartment is on the first floor and pretty thoroughly shaded, so it has never seemed as bright here in the evenings as it did in Flogsta (where our view to the northwest was virtually unimpeded). What's more, the past two or three weeks have been unremittingly overcast, making it hard to tell when exactly the sun is going down. Actually, there's been so much unseasonable rain this month that there's a danger of Sweden's crops being ruined.

Nevertheless, it's definitely getting darker now. As I write this it already looks like nautical twilight outside, and by midnight tonight we'll enter our first half hour and change of official night.

Yup, not long now till it's just plain dark out.

I survive a möhippa

So I got this rather enigmatic email last Wednesday morning that read:

Subject: <A.>'s "möhippa" (hen-party for a bride-to-be)

Hi all,

Since <post doc G.> and <A.> are getting married soon we want to give <A.> a hen-party for a bride-to-be. Would you like to participate? It will be on Sunday (sorry about the short notice but we didn't know any details until today...), approximately between 11.30-18. Send an e-mail or give us a call if you want to join! :)
Keep it a secret... ;)

/<two names and phone numbers for women I do not know>

I know and like G., of course, and I knew that he was getting married soon, but I have never met his fiance, so I assumed that this email got to me by mistake. After taking a moment to snicker at the phrase "hen-party" ('What is this, 1962?' I thought to myself), I banished the email to the trash can and didn't think about it again.

Until Friday, that is, when suddenly the other recipients of the email (all the female members of my department and the girlfriend of another) started thinking that this was very odd, and maybe there was a reason that so many female friends of G. had been invited to this party... "Maybe she doesn't have any friends and we are needed to create a party atmosphere," was a common sentiment. It was mentioned that G.'s buddies were throwing him a real blow-out of a bachelor party even as we spoke; they had a full day of games including laser tag, mini-golf, bowling (and they went to an atmospheric restaurant in a cellar somewhere and got completely drunk). At the end of the day, grad student P. (who had also never met A., but at least is Swedish) was drafted to call one of the people, with the instructions to make sure that we we were actually wanted at this party, and not just invited by mistake.

Through what appears in retrospect appears to be a series of misunderstandings, we decided to meet at at 11:30 to all walk in together. Grad student Z. (who has met A. twice) and I had to leave at about 10:30 to get there in time, and so did C., post doc E.'s girlfriend, who lives a 20-minute drive out of town (and who has also never met A.). Meanwhile, P. called the party to confirm that we should be there at 11:30... only to be told that they had all gone out to lunch, and could we come at 13:30 instead?

Well, this was a little awkward... it was now 11:10, and C. was already in town to pick up Z. and me from downtown, and now we had two and a half hours on our hands. C. offered to take us to her house, and so that's what we did, stopping at a large shopping center on the way to buy some freezer pizzas and cider for lunch. C. and E. live out in the country, in a village with the charming name of Tibble. Tibble is approximately the size of Derby, Michigan (but it does have an old stave church from the 1200s and its own runestone), and to get there you drive through some lovely farmland, and some rocky areas that are more suited to ranching. C. and E. have a very nice small house that was built at 1932, on maybe four acres, complete with a barn and hallon and röd vinbär bushes, smultron plants, and an äpple tree. It was very nice to drive out in the countryside, and I was surprised at how pleasant it was to be in a house with a family for a little while. I guess I've been missing that! It was amusing to hear their son Sven, who is three, speaking to us in a pidgin of Dutch and Swedish.

So after lunch and a tour of the property, we headed back into town. The möhippa started with a chocolate tasting, with red wine to clear the palate, and this was not the informal affair I had expected. Our hostess had been to a fancy tasting once, and had bought a chocolate-tasting kit with thin disks of chocolate (high-cocoa-low-sugar content, single-origin beans) from around the world. We were given a double sided piece of paper for evaluating the chocolate on utseende, doft, brytbarhet, konsistens, smak, and finally, to give it an omdöme. On the reverse side, there was a list of suggested adjectives to choose from, including words like "spansk skinka" and ""sjungande" and "skogsdoft" (just to list a couple that I understand). And here, finally, is where we run into some cultural differences: I coudn't tell how seriously they were taking this.

I have some foodie friends (you know who you are), and I can easily imagine that we'd have a chocolate tasting. I can even imagine that the words "Hmm, tastes a little smoky" or "This one is more creamy and sweeter than the others" might pass our lips un-ironically. But I think that phrases like "It smells more interesting than it tastes" might start to make our lips twitch at the corners, and things like "It has just a hint of nuttiness, almost as if you expect to hit a nut at any moment" and "The sound it makes when you break the disk is reminiscent of ice breaking in spring after a long hard winter" might have us giving each other sidelong glances and sniggering, before breaking into open laughter. Let me make it clear that it is not the solemnity of the occasion that I am questioning here; rather, I am merely reporting my inability to properly read the other people, who were without a hint of self-mockery. I pitched in along with the rest. The Madagascar chocolate was the best one, we all agreed. What did it taste like? "Coffee and wine with a sour aftertaste." The sound of it breaking? Not singing like ice, but "Sounds solid, like a car door slamming."

But it wasn't over yet. The next group activity was to paint a punch bowl for the couple, while the bride-to-be painted two champagne glasses, one for her and one for the groom. It was decided that we should have a theme inspired from the party, so a chocolate pod was painted on the bottom, while the rest of us painted an outline of one of the countries from which we had chocolate. Venezuela is hard to draw, as is "St. Dominigue."

While the bowl was being slowly passed around, very strong coffee and a cake came out. The cake was banana with a little lemon (home-made by one the Swedes) and decorated with banana slices cut into Pac-Man shapes. My female elders will be shocked and horrified to hear that, for some reason, I was chosen to cut the cake. And yes, yes, I screwed it up. But it wasn't my fault—no one told me the secret! After cutting it carefully in half, then that half into half again, then one quarter into thirds (oh it was going so well up to this point), then carefully extracting one piece... it started to slip, so I grabbed a plate quick and flopped it onto the plate. Shrieks of laughter! After the hilarity died down, someone explained to me that it considered bad luck for the bride-to-be to get a piece of cake that has fallen on its side. In fact, anyone who wants to get married needs to have their cake slice upright. So after that I took orders: some wanted their cake upright, others did not. (It was a tasty cake, by the way, even more so after one remembered to sprinkle toffee bits on it.)

So a fun afternoon was had by all. We parted on very good terms, and it turns out that we are in fact invited to the wedding on August 30 (we weren't sure if we were, but G. printed up their invitations this afternoon). So what's my final word on a svensk möhippa? I still have the feeling that this one was a little non-traditional, but I bet that too much wine, too much chocolate, and lots of coffee are common to all of them. Why mess with a good thing?

I don't want to eat that

"Vad tycker du om surstömming?" was nearly the first thing I heard them say on the radio this morning when the alarm went off. Oh no, I thought, it's August. That means it's surströmming season. That means there might be a surströmming party.

Surströmming is something that everyone agrees is a Swedish specialty, even though plenty of Swedes either don't like it or refuse to even try it. It is one of those one of those sorts of foods that can be considered a national dish, mostly because it can be used to terrorize outsiders.

At morning fika, post-doc K. related the story of how a Brit that she met at a conference was given a couple cans of surstömming as a "present" by a Swedish colleague. "But the Swede didn't give the Brit any special instructions," K. said, "So the Brit got home and just opened the can in his kitchen. The surströmming exploded of course*, and the kitchen smelled like surströmming for days." K. herself, being sensitive to smells, has never eaten surströmming. Student Z. said that she had it at a surstömming party last year, and it wasn't so bad, when taken in small quantities and mixed with chopped raw onions, served on plenty of bread, and washed down with beer and aquavit, which is how it is eaten these days. (For a good story that's not too disgusting, read Francis Strand's description of a surströmming party—scroll down to October 14. For disgusting stories, search YouTube for "surströmming." Not for the faint of heart.)

This train of conversation inevitably led to a discussion of every nation's disgusting cuisine, including Iceland's famous fermented shark (which the Swedes at the table all agreed was much worse than surstömming), and other historical failures in food preservation. What happens if you try to preserve something and it doesn't work, but that's all the food you have? Then you will probably eat it anyway. And thus a cuisine is born.

Post-doc E. suggested that they do away with the rather clinical word "fermented" and just call it what it is: rotten. Staff artist L. said "That's a good thing about America. You are so young that you don't have a 'rotten' stage in your history. You never had to eat rotten things."

I'm not sure that I agree with his historical analysis, exactly, but I am rather pleased that I personally have never had to eat rotten fish to survive. But what if the department has a surströmming party, like they did last year? Will I succumb to peer pressure and try to eat rotten herring from a can, just to fit in? Stay tuned for the rest of August, and find out!

*Why does the can explode, you ask? Well, the fish ferments in the can, so the can is under enormous pressure from the build up of gasses. The proper way to open the can is under a sinkful of water, or, better yet, outside in a bucket.

Swedish Lessons (almost)

Today my Swedish lessons started… er, sort of, that is.

You may recall that I attended a meeting about taking Swedish classes at the end of June. At the end of that meeting, we were told that we would get a letter detailing the where and when of the class before it started on August 4th. Fast forward to last week, at which point I still had not heard another peep about the class. I started sending some e-mails, but got no response. Finally, Friday afternoon at 3:40 I got a response, telling me that the class started Monday at 12:30, but it had moved from the ever-so-convienently located Polacksbacken to an industrial park on Fyrisborgsgatan—all the way on the other end of town. No explanation was ventured as to why I had not previously been informed of this little tidbit.

So today I made the 30 minute bike trek into Boländernas (plus an extra 10 minutes for the time spent getting lost in the city forest). After some initial idle standing around, we were broken up into two groups of about a dozen each and escorted to a couple of classrooms. There we were presented with textbooks, notebooks, mechanical pencils, and 4-ring binders, and given a schedule for the week. Then there was another prolonged explanation of the course structure, after which I still don't understand how it's supposed to work. Perhaps this has something to do with the fact that all the explanation was given in Swedish.

Here's what I could figure out: the class is mostly web-based. There are lessons and exercises online, as well as tests (some essay tests, but also some which require you to record yourself speaking and submit it to an instructor, or to make an appointment to have a Swedish conversation with an instructor via webcam). In addition to this, there are class times. Most of the class time is spent in individual activity, but some of it will be lectures. Some students (those immigrants required by law to take this class, such as political refugees) have to be in the building 30 hours per week; the rest of us only need to come in when we need help, or if we feel like it. The rest can be done online. Except for the lectures, I guess. Not all of which are mandatory. And some of which may be available online.

However it's supposed to work, today's main task was to get us all registered on the online system. Just to prove how new the new classroom was, the whole time I was getting registered there was a guy standing on my desk, armed with a pair of scissors and a cordless drill, doing something to a junction box in the plenum space above me. The registration process involved all of six steps, but each step involved the instructor wandering around for five minutes getting everyone on the same page, so it took half an hour.

That accomplished, we broke for fika, and to let the other students come in to register. There was coffee and mineral water, and cinnamon rolls and clementines. After half an hour of that, we headed back into the classroom, where we waited for another fifteen minutes, at which point our instructor came back, said, "If you are registered for the web course, goodbye!" (in Swedish, naturally), and left. Day over, a few minutes shy of 2:30 PM. I tell you, I don't know how these Swedes keep up with this hectic pace.

Tomorrow we learn how to use the website. By Monday, we might learn some Swedish.

Goodbye Helsinki (and Temptation Resisted)

For a map, see post for the outward bound trip

The ship departed Helsinki at 17:30 local time (which is an hour earlier than Stockholm time, the various guides and brochures took pains to point out), and we got on board with plenty of time to spare. This time we headed straight up to deck 11 to get good view of the departure and the little islands dotting the harbor. Smoothly and with no fuss or drama, the ship left punctually. "Well, we wouldn't want to miss our tide," I said, deadpan. Joe sniffed at my attempt at naval humor.

We didn't have too much time to linger, though, because we had reservations for the evening's diner buffet at 20:00. On a ship this size (holds 2500 people), the evening buffet is done in some kind of overlapping shift system. A shower and a change of clothes (nothing fancy), and there we were, in line at 19:55. The doors opened at 20:00, the mob rushed in, and the feed was on! It really was a little maniacal at the start, with people rushing get in line for food before they had even found their table. We had a two-hour block reserved, as I assume most other people did, and it's not like they were going to run out of food... why the rush? Our advice to anyone attending one of these things is to saunter in 15 minutes late and miss the madness. Or do what we did, and sit back and watch the chaos in amazement.

Viking Line has been advertising their new and improved menu, responding to demands from customers for "lighter and healthier" and "exotic" food. I was a little concerned about that, because I had not gone to sea for an all-you-can-eat buffet of steamed vegetables. I need not have worried. The "lighter and healthier" was taken care of with a small salad bar, and all we could find that was easily identifiable as "exotic" (i.e., non-Baltic) was the stuffed grape leaves and marinated skewered pork at the appetizer table (pretty good, both of them). Otherwise, the fare was what you might expect: pork chops, meatballs, salmon, chicken, some kind of whitefish, a variety of sauces to go over them (the wild mushroom was particularly good), several kinds of potatoes (my favorite Engelska sign advertised "Gratinated potatoes"), and of course, a fish bar, pictured here. Herring, herring, salmon, salmon, mackerel, herring, salmon, salmon... thankfully, they also still had an old-fashioned dish called "Jansson's Temptation," a mixture of hashed potatoes and herring, seasoned with spices that make one think more of December than July. Drinks there were a-plenty, including light beer and red wine. Desserts included chocolate mousse, ice cream and toppings, various small cakes, crackers and cheese, and fresh and stewed fruit. We acquitted ourselves pretty well, I think, but left no room for post-dinner drinks. How was the food quality-wise? Pretty good overall, with the salmon being excellent, and we ate lots of it in various styles of preparation. I am glad to have had "Jansson's Temptation" at least once, but I do not feel an urgent need to repeat the experience.

The strategy of several of our fellow diners seemed to focus more on maximizing their beer and wine consumption. I may have mentioned before the large duty-free shop and the fact that people were buying bottles and bottles as fast as ever they could; earlier last week, when talking to co-workers about our plans, I had mentioned that we planned to spend lots of time up on deck, looking at scenery. "You will have the place to yourself then," laughed grad student B., "Everyone else will be in the bar or drinking in the casino or just in their room getting drunk." This wasn't too much of an exaggeration; the only time we couldn't sit exactly where we wanted was upon departure, when only the outdoor bar was open. The casino and bar were busy every night, and the lines at duty free lessened but did not cease. Despite this, we didn't ever see any bad behavior. I suppose that the ship turns a blind eye to everything that would interfere with their profit (which clearly comes mostly from alchohol sales) but at the same time I bet that everyone knows that they'd better behave, or they might never be able to come back.

After dinner, we hit the duty-free store ourselves (we're trying to fit in, after all, and to buy alcohol on a Baltic ferry seems almost as strong a Swedish tradition as the frog dance around the maypole) and bought our legal import limit of alcohol (2 liters), then we dragged our bloated carcasses upstairs again, to catch the sunset and loll about on deck and digest. Off to bed, where "long day of walking around" was apparently trumped by "too much food," and we slept rather fitfully, even though the engine thrumming was less than it had been Monday night.The 04:00 docking at Mariehamn woke us up both docking and departing, as the aft engines alternately fired up and quit. I had intended to go out on deck to see the town and the dawn, but somehow, when the time actually came, the idea didn't seem so attractive.

But we got up relatively early, and Joe fetched some breakfast from the cafe, but oddly, we weren't too hungry. We nibbled lazily and watched the Archipelago go by, with its charming houses and old buildings that line the coast as you approach Stockholm. This time we did see a couple places that looked like McMansions, as well as some older houses that better suit the surroundings. We decided that we could bear to live in the place pictured here, on the north shore, some 15 minutes shy of Stockholm, but we're not sure we could afford it. Anyone out there want to go halvsies with us?