City of (Occasional) Lights

This November, in an acknowledgement that November is not a nice month to be in Uppsala, the city has decided to hold a repeat of its very successful venture two years ago, Allt Ljus på Uppsala, a sort of festival of colored lights at various places around town. (Why they decided not to do this last year, the darkest November in living memory, remains a mystery.) Forewarned that the snow was coming today, I decided to head downtown last night to check out this years entries.

There are 16 sights in theory, although I refused to take pictures of the really lame ones (yes, Dragarbrunnstorg, I'm looking at you. Four red lightbulbs tied to a streetlamp? For shame.) The best entries were the multisensory ones, such as the singing lamps in Slottsparken and the musical interlude on the pedestrian bridge overlooking Upplandsmuseet (I'll post a video of part of that here if I can get it working). If you are up for a tour of the the odder entries, check out the gallery, but the best shots are included here.

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Nu är det wintertid igen

Last year Sweden had the worst November in decades, as measured by having very few hours of sunlight (17 in total). Throughout the month, everyone was secretly hoping that it would snow, a lot, and soon, as the snow makes it what light there is brighter and is much better than endless grey days with a temperature hovering just above freezing.

One day toward then end of the month, the afternoon fika conversation at work turned to a prediction that there would be 25cm of snow overnight. I frankly didn't believe it, partially because the weather forecasting is so bad here (and partly because I wanted it to be true). I expressed my disbelief by using a sarcastic, crude American expression that involves my posterior and winged simians. People laughed.

That night it did in fact snow, and at least 25cm. The next day, car traffic was completely snarled, the sidewalks were a mess, and many trains and buses were cancelled or ran very very late. I had to go in to work early for a seminar in another department, and I lingered after it was over, trying to delay having to face my work comrades for as long as possible. But at last I could put off going to work no longer. I went down to the break room, with a forlorn hope that they had already finished with morning fika and were back at work. No such luck. In fact, they appeared to be waiting for me. Their conversation halted. The whole table stared at me as I stepped up to the coffee machine. Their faces can only be described as smug.

"Don't you people have work to do?" I said, in an attempted preemptive strike.

"Hahaha," they said. "So how are those monkeys doing?"

Well, I learned my lesson last year, and have not uttered that sarcastic crude phrase again. I'm telling you this story now only to say that it is not my fault that we are having a blizzard just at the moment, and that it looks like winter time is here early, and for good.

I was supposed to do an errand downtown this afternoon, but when I got there it was so slippery that I decided to get right back on the bus and go home. I however make a short detour to the hat of an accordian-playing busker with a sense of humor, who was playing "Summertime" as the snow blew up in swirls around him. "Det är för att du spelar 'Sommartid'," I said and put a crown in his hat. "Tack," he grinned, and started the tune once more, with feeling.

(I'd say it's this kind of thing that makes Swedes great, but truthfully, it's this kind of behavior which makes immigrants to Sweden great.)

Fuzz!

Here's a quick video of the computer science campus here. It's in the news today because Lars Vilks, the art historian who has gotten in dutch with the Musilim community, is giving a lecture on campus, so all the buildings are locked and the police are swarming all over the place. I'll post more tonight if anything interesting happens, but in the meantime the video offers a pretty good view of campus in the Autumn.

Heavy, Indeed…

Jennifer contemplates our proto-dresser.

September was kind of a crazy month. All summer long we'd been uncertain what was going to happen to us in the fall after I (hopefully) finished my Masters degree. Both of us were looking for jobs, both here and elsewhere, and I was madly writing and revising and coding. Then suddenly Jennifer had a job interview in Cambridge (note from Jennifer: details to follow), and with a week to go before my defense it looked as though we might be moving to the UK. Five days before D-day, I got a call from a professor about a PhD position I had applied for in the department here; I'd interviewed in June, and had pretty much thought that it was not going to happen, but apparently the committee had chosen the weekend before my defense as the time to make their final decision. At 5pm the night before my defense, I got a phone call offering me the position—we still had no idea about Jennifer's potential job in the UK.

Long story short: my defense went fine, Jennifer's job did not materialize, and today I became a PhD student. Whiplash, much? In Sweden, incidentally, being a doctoral student is considered a job; not a particularly well-paid one, but not bad, and it does include all the benefits that any other University employee would have. So the upshot is, instead of getting kicked out of the country at the end of the month, we're now staying for another five years—and let me tell you, signing paperwork this afternoon festooned with the date "October 1, 2015" gave me a bit of a shiver.

We celebrated, naturally, by going to IKEA. We've been living this whole time in a two-bedroom apartment, and the second room has never really been used for anything, mainly because our computer is also our tv, so we've had our desk in the living room. I know, how student bohemian can you get? Anyway, it was fine for a while, but as of six months ago it had officially become old. Now that we're planning on staying here until after Doc Brown arrives with Marty and Jennifer in tow (incidentally, do I get my hoverboard soon?), we decided it was time to turn the spare room into an official study, and have a big-person living room. We spent an entire Wednesday* in our local mega-IKEA, and by the weekend we had a bunch of boxes in our living room.

Jennifer didn't reveal until we got home that we had purchased the Benno tv-bänk partly because it was named after Benno of Uppsala, a monk in The Name of the Rose.

So we spent the whole weekend putting together furniture, and marveling at the fact that neither of us noticed while in the store that we were buying a soccer pitch as our new living room rug.

*Not just any Wednesday—it was classic meatball Wednesday! Seriously, a 16 SEK plate of meatballs and mashed potatoes is nothing to scoff at in Sweden.

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.")