Breakfast

When we first got to Sweden, and spent weeks in hotels, I sort of OD'ed on breakfast buffets, but apparently that was long ago enough, because this morning felt like a pleasant return to tourism. The Gothia's buffet is absolutely typical for a Scandinavian hotel: open-face sandwich fixings; muesli and yogurt selection; bacon, sausage and eggs for the foreigners; bread and rye crisps; fruit. With the exception of the scrambled eggs (powdered!?!) it was pretty good, and of course fulfilled it's critical role in that we now have sandwiches and fruit to eat for lunch today. There is, after all, just no way to get lunch for less than 60 SEK per person, unless you have you own kitchen, and that adds up fast. (Good news is that there is a massive ICA grocery store on the next block, so affordable eating should be relatively easily accomplished.)

Jennifer is off registering for her conference, and then it looks like she has the afternoon off, so we're off to watch the Göteborg v Linköping Damallsvenskan match which, coincidentally, is going on just around the corner at Valhalla IP. Hopefully the seats are in the shade, because it looks to be bloody hot again today.

To Göteborg

We're in Göteborg now (or Gothenburg, if you prefer), on Sweden's wild west coast. We'll be here for the next week, while Jennifer attends the FEMS conference. We took the train over this afternoon—one hour to Stockholm, then another three to get to Göteborg on the high-speed X200 train, which it must be said is quite comfortable, even if the high speed internet is only free for first class customers.

Anyway, by 5 we were in Göteborg train station at the end of a sweltering afternoon. Sweltering for Sweden anyway, as there was a high of 28°C today! I'll admit, I'm not fond of cities in the heat, and arriving in a new city on a hot afternoon tends to permanently color my perceptions of it. I'm sure that Piran is a cute little Mediterranean city, but I remember it primarily as hot, dry, and occasionally smelly. Likewise, first impressions of Göteborg: we spent over an hour in the train station trying to figure out the tram system to get us to our hotel, an hour full of sweaty, smelly, and possibly insane Göteborgare (disappointingly, the locals are not known as Götebo).

We're staying at the hotel attached to the conference venue, the Hotel Gothia Towers, a matched set of 18 and 23 floor glass and steel hexagons in the southern part of the city, which is incidentally Scandinavia's largest hotel. We are, naturally, on the 13th floor; on the other hand, we have a great view of the major tourist attraction across the street, Liseberg amusement park. It being high summer, it stays open quite late to take advantage of the light, but we are a bit further south now, so the sun went down (and the park closed) a little before 11. It's now midnight, and this is the darkest I've seen the sky be in months. I'm tempted to call it "night," in fact.

Anyway, dinner from a local pizzeria (the Obama special: mozarella, feta, provolone, and ricotta—so the message is, "he's cheesy"?), followed by a stroll around the block (huge conference center, soccer pitch, canal), and now a bit of blogging before bed. Oh, and a few minutes of CNN… gosh, thats a lot of talk about Michael Jackson…

One More Midsummer

Duka din veranda till fest
För en långväga gäst
I landet lagom är bäst
Vi skålar för en midsommar till
Färsk potatis och sill
Som om tiden stått still
        -"Sverige", Kent

This past Saturday was that most Swedish of holidays, Midsummer. It's a day when everyone abandons the cities for their familial stuga in the woods, to bask in the nigh on 24 hours of glorious midsummer sunshine while eating plates full of herring and potatoes, pausing only to sing traditional drinking songs and down yet another glass of aquavit.

What, exactly, you are supposed to do on a rainy and cold midsummer day when you happen to be a foreigner who owns no cabin in the woods, has not been so clearly explained. This is not an issue which appears to occur to Swedes. For example, the organizers of the conference Jennifer attended last week in Uppsala encouraged foreigners to attend by mentioning how wonderful Sweden was at midsummer; they neglected to mention that, as the conference ended the afternoon of midsommarafton, there would be absolutely nothing to do in Sweden in its aftermath. Friday night there was only one restaurant open in Uppsala (which somewhat grudgingly took those attendees who were not flying out until the next morning)—a bar or a nightclub is simply out of the question. Tourist attractions shut down for the weekend as well.

We spent midsummer with our Swiss friends G. and D. again,although it wound up being a much larger gathering. We started the day around noon with six of us, the other two being C., a new Danish post-doc (with an Irish accent) in Jennifer's lab, and M., a Québécois house guest of G. and D.'s. Despite the grim forecast for the day, it was sunny and relatively warm on our arrival, so we decided to start the day with a round of lawn games.

The local lawn game of choice (forgive me if we've described this in some detail before) is Kubbspel. This is, in fact, the game I referred to last summer as, "a bunch of people standing in two lines, taking turns throwing sticks at each other," or words to that effect. It is a game native to the Gotland region, but the implied antiquity of that statement is hard to support: in fact, despite its occasional billing as a Viking lawn game, Kubbspel appears to have arisen in Gotland in the 1990s when someone invented the game and began selling it. This does not detract from its entertainment value, however.

There are already some perfectly decent explanations of the game online, so I shan't attempt to replicate them. In brief, though, you divide into two teams, each standing behind a line of 5 wooden blocks. The teams take turns throwing a set of slightly smaller sticks at their opponents blocks. Knocked over blocks are claimed temporarily by the team that knocked them over, adding to their own collection until they are knocked down a second time. Once all the blocks have been eliminated, a larger block in the center, the "king," is knocked down as well, and the game ends. "A minute to learn, a lifetime to master," may be overselling it a little (OK, a lot), but it does involve more strategy than I'm implying it does, and we happily wiled away a number of hours throwing sticks and drinking beer.

Eventually though, the sun went away, and the cold dark clouds rolled in. So we headed inside, and channeled our competitive natures in to a bit of spirited Guitar Hero. Sometime in between my massacre of "On the Road Again," and Jennifer's rousing rendition of "Crazy Train" the remaining guests arrived: Jennifer's co-worker K., her boyfriend visiting from Poland, and their Polish friend along with her Swedish boyfriend (who was in town because he had to, gasp, work on midsummer—but no worries, his family called from the stuga to rub in how beautiful the weather was there).

Dinner was, of course, excellent: a whole poached salmon, färsk potatis och sill, a couple of shrimp salads, buttermilk cole slaw (hmm, if only I could tell what the Americans made…), home made bread, and a few other dishes which elude me at the moment. There was also, of course, a selection of appertifs, including aquavit, a spicy cherry vodka from Poland, Becherovka, and a Portuguese almond liqueur. This is where having a Swede in the mix started to show, as we were in fact led in a series of traditional songs between courses. By the time we had rounded off the entertainment with a couple of highly entertaining table games (like a local variant of Fuzzy Duck, which involves lots of hand waving and never showing your teeth), it was fast approaching 11 in the evening, and with the realization that the busses and trains would stop running soon there was a rather abrupt mass exodus as we all headed off towards our respective homes. Fortunately the clouds had cleared by then, so we had a bright and sunny bus ride back to Eriksberg.

Having opened with a quote from the ubiquitous Swedish folk group Kent, I would be remiss indeed not to provide a translation. There's a funny bit I don't quite get in the middle there, but this should be close enough to give the idea:

Lay the table on the porch
For a guest from far away
In the country, just right is best
We toast to one more midsummer
New potatoes and herring
As if time has stood still

Hedgehog sighting

Ieftermiddags såg jag en igelkott!

I have wanted to see a real live hedgehog for a long long time. Since 1985, in fact. That's the year my grandparents took me to Europe, and we spent a lot of time in Germany with my aunt, and apparently Germans love hedgehogs because we saw lots of hedgehogs... as stuffed toys. I've been to Europe a couple times since then, and never managed to see a real one. Joe saw one a few days ago as he was biking to the grocery store, and I was quite jealous.

This particular hedgehog couldn't have been timed itself better, either. After two days in which the sun shone a little (just a little, mind you, only before afternoon), it's back to rainy and cold. The conference I've been to all week (more on that later) had just ended, and that can be a little sad if you've had a good time. On top of that, it's Midsummer, the big holiday, so most Swedes have fled to the countryside and the few other people that remain in Uppsala all seem unhappy as well. So there I am, feeling blue, and just getting to the steps up to our apartment building... when what should cross my path but a hedgehog.

Of course, when all your experience with hedgehogs is with them in plush toy form, when you finally see one in the flesh, you can't help but want to pick it up and cuddle it...

And why had this hedgehog wandered out into our backyard, and why was it too preoccupied to give us much thought? Well, it was eating, eating, eating. All the rain, you see, has brought up lots and lots of worms. The irony of this is not lost on me.

Gallic Troubles

Those of you with particularly long memories may remember a time when I was a regular contributor here, a time I like to call "before the spring semester." Well, the semester's over now, and I appear to have survived it, so perhaps I'll be appearing here a little more frequently in the future. I've had a week now to recover from my surfeit of projects, papers and exams, and metaphorically things are looking much brighter now (although if you've read Jennifer's missive on the weather, you'll know that the brightness is, alas, only metaphorical).

I don't want you to think that my semester was without its highlights, though. I did in fact learn two very valuable lessons. The first is that I have finally learned to make myself a decent pot of coffee, a fact which I fear will be met with disbelief by all those who might remember my tenure as café manager for a certain midwestern chain bookstore. The second lesson is this: when choosing partners for a class project, do everything in your power to avoid getting saddled with the French exchange students. The greatest portion of my woes this spring have stemmed from dealing with no fewer than two of these, whose greatest contribution to our slightly massive project was to vanish utterly for the last 6 weeks of the semester, relieving the rest of us of the need to wonder whether or not the pair of them would in fact do any work.

Not that I'm bitter.

I'm not the only one done with school for the summer here—last Friday was graduation for the local high school students, which means that once again the city center was filled with bunches of nattily attired ex-high school students, hooting and hollering from flat-bed trailers or dump trunk beds. I have to say, the whole thing felt like an exact repeat of last year, the same tractors pulling the same trailers, presumably with new students. The only differences were that this year it was quite a bit colder, and this time we happened to be downtown with a decent camera, so at least there are some pictures this time around. Oh, and the signs made more sense this time—that one on the left reads, Ikväll redslös, imorgon arbetslös.

At the same time, the city was gearing up for the EU Parliamentary elections. Oddly, every party running was given an identical little stuga right in the main square downtown, from which to hand out their literature, and hold little impromptu front porch speeches.

Well, not quite identical: the Pirate Party either supplied their own stuga, or painted the standard one purple. The Pirate Party, incidentally, is not a joke, it's an actual political party founded on a platform of internet piracy. They've been around for a few years now, but this spring they saw a massive surge in popularity, following the passage of a Swedish law illegalizing file sharing, and the extremely unpopular prosecution of the Pirate Bay Four. There has been just enough populist outrage to give the Pirate Party an unexpected victory: their 7.1 percent of the vote secured them one of Sweden's parliamentary seats.

The new law, of course, just brings Sweden into line with (most of) the EU's anti-piracy requirements, so I don't think the government really had much choice in the matter; Swedes are rather proud of their civil rights record, though, and tend to view the EU's current French-led position on piracy as falling somewhere between misguided and despotic. No matter what your stance on intellectual property might be, the stance of the French government right now is fairly draconian: not only are all ISPs required to keep track of your browsing history, but Sarkozy also created a new governmental department which could review those records without a warrant and then summarily cut off your internet access (while still requiring you to pay your monthly internet bill). At least it could until a couple of days ago, when the French court overturned it (incidentally, why does it seem so quaint to have a court overturning a new law by citing the Declaration of the Rights of Man?).

And so, having come full circle from, "Don't trust the French," to, "Don't trust the French," I will bid you all a fond adieu. Well, au revior, at least.

The weather

So that's it—I've nearly snapped. I made it through autumn with its chills, winter with its alarmingly short days, and a spring that was long and cold and in which the icy slush seemed to stick around forever. After all that, two weeks in June has almost done me in.

After the beginning of May was so unusually warm, and then a nice sunny weekend or two, everyone was looking forward to a glorious summer. However, since the start of June, the weather has been just crappy. I'm not the only one to think so—even the Swedes are complaining about it. Swedes talk a lot about the weather, but they don't often complain, exactly, it's more like someone will say "Vilket vädret!" or "Det regnar" and everyone else will make non-verbal agreeing kind of noises. Foreigners who dare to offer an opinion about the weather, either negative or positive, are often treated to a rather gleeful description from a native about how it can snow in June. But no one is (half-)joking about it anymore. My attempt to be positive at Thursday morning fika, saying that perhaps it was a tad less dark that it had been earlier in the week, was met with universal scorn. "How can you say that that it's less dark?" scoffed a professor. "Dark is dark." He went on to relate that the whole summer could be like this, no warmer than 10C and raining. It's happened before.

So far, it's looking like this may be just such a summer, and the awful realization of this possibility is sinking in to even the most stoic of the Swedes. K. declared at lunch on Wednesday that summer is over: we had it in May, and that was all. Yesterday afternoon, Joe rode his bike through a cold rain in order to bring cookies in for my birthday fika and was completely soaked by the time he got to my workplace. A.-S. arrived in the upstairs break room first, and the three of us sat around the table in silence for a few moments. She looked outside at the dark and the rain, and sighed. "It's bad," she said. "It is not fun anymore." This, from her, is an outpouring of grief, a cry of outrage against an uncaring universe. It's a complaint.

And now there's proof: this article in thelocal.se (in English) says that the meteorological agency agrees that this is in fact the coldest start to summer in memory.

Sigh.