Election time

The big election day was the weekend before last— we had a few other things on our minds so didn't pay too much attention at the time I'm afraid— but I did get into town to take some pictures of the campaigning and the little huts ("valstugor") that each political party had put up to be a center point for distributing literature, have rallies, etc. The huts were set up in the main square in town (the one that the buses don't go through just at the moment!). They split themselves up neatly and by color coding: the left-leaning (Rödgröna, the'redgreens') parties on one side, the center/right folks (The Alliance, the 'blues') on the other side. Rödgröna are what you might expect: the communists, the social democrats, and the environmentalists (although the greens do not always hold with the reds in voting). Joining the redgreens were Sweden's famous Piratpartiet, the Pirate Party, who value freedom of expression and bandwidth above all and appear to have claimed purple as their color.

We have been learning about politics in Swedish class for the last month of course, and I did a small presentation on Feministisk Initiativ, the Feminist Party (the 'pinks', I guess) and their charismatic leader Gudrun Schyman, who's fun. They aren't really a political party yet, as they have not gotten enough votes for a member of parliament, and they don't have an . But I went to the Uppsala rally, where I got a couple balloons and a button right off the lapel of our local candidate. "Please vote for us," she said, "even if we don't get a seat in Parliament, if we get just 1%, we can have a real election hut next year!"

The Girl who was Annoyed by Stieg Larsson

I have heard that the Stieg Larsson thrillers have been all the rage in the US; of course they were popular here a little beforehand. Hollywood has taken notice, and they are filming the first book now ("The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo" in English, "Män som hatar kvinnor" på svenska). (Of course it was already made into a perfectly decent movie in Swedish, but never mind.) And... they have decided to film parts of the movie in Uppsala! (The line at the bottom of the sign says "Uppsala. Borrowed by Oscar. Every day since 1984 [when the last movie, "Fanny and Alexander," was shot here].)

However, Uppsala is the setting for some flashback scenes, and in order to make a block or two in Uppsala look like it's the 1960s, they're going to be doing some set-building and facade renovation along the way, and so they have decided to close all of Drottninggatan ('Queen Street'), which runs more or less from the castle down to the main square. All buses running from west of town (that is, from our place, or from my place of work) use this street. Now all these buses have to make a quite long detour to the south, around the hospital complex, and of course cannot drop people off right in town. Not a big deal for most of the populace, I think, but for those of us who consider five blocks to be a bit of a hike... well, it's quite inconvenient.

Okay, I confess: mostly I'm mad because it's going to make it very hard for me to try to sneak into town and catch a glimpse of Daniel Craig. I am going to have to send a spy on a bike with a camera. And yes, I fully plan to see the movie, and giggle when I see the streets I know so well, and complain to everybody within hearing range about how much of a pain it was when they were filming here.

(If you enjoyed the books, you may enjoy this parody, "The Girl Who Fixed the Umlaut.")