En mycket glad påsk

For Påsk we were invited to the home of our Swiss friends G. and D., who planned to make a traditional Swiss Easter dinner for us and another couple, A.-C. and A., who are from Brittany and Austria respectively. For some reason it didn't occur to me until the week before that we should bring cascarones*; fortuantely we had already decided that we would make quiche, so between that and a few more egg-heavy meals, we managed to have 21 cascarones ready to go.

Söndag 13 april was a beautiful day, sunny and warm enough to sit outside on G. and D.'s balcony for a pre-dinner påskmust, which no one else had had before, but is really just like julmust ("Tastes better than it smells," was A.'s opinion). Everybody had at their dinner plate a sweet-bread roll with a soft-boiled name egg in it, and the first game of the day was to try to see who had the toughest egg, by trying to crack each other's eggs. For salad, we had the eggs along with a pear-based dressing; the main course was lamb with a hot arugula sauce. Having had a Swiss dinner, I suggested that we should now do an Ast-family Irish-German-Mexican tradition, and go outside to get a little exercise in order to earn dessert.

It's always fun to introduce new people to cascarones. There's a few minutes of disbelief that anyone would actually make these things, followed by a little hesitation about what exactly to do with them, then once the proper technique is demonstrated, everybody starts running around and hilarity ensues. This bunch was no exception, I'm happy to report. People in other apartments came out on to their balconies to see what the foreigners were up to, and the only slight negative is that the resulting mess of eggshell and confetti, which I assured everyone would be gone after one good rain and wind, is still there on the common lawn...

We then played a traditional Swedish yard game called kubbspel, which involves throwing big sticks at even bigger sticks; its origins are said to be ancient and obscure. Back inside afterwards for dessert, a complicated and delicious confection G. had made out of meringue, cream, and raspberries. We left shortly thereafter, because we were getting a ride from A. and A.-.C, who live on an island in the Stockholm archipelago and had to get back in time for the last ferry. It was a very good day, and I'm happy to have introduced what is surely one of the stranger traditions of the Ast family to a whole new set of people, who enjoyed it so much.

*Most of you know about cascarones, but here's a quick description for others. Take a raw egg, poke a hole in the end, shake the egg out and use as normal. After the egg shell has been rinsed and dried out, stuff with hand-cut confetti. Decorate but your favorite method (except don't dunk them in dye!), hide them, find them, and then have a blast breaking them over each other's head. Clever people, like Gramma, keep an egg or two in reserve, and strike after everyone else thinks cascarones is over... you will all be happy to hear that Joe got me this year.

A Narrow Escape

We just now had our first visitation from the witches, and it was a close call, let me tell you. My impression was that they were not supposed to come by until Saturday, and not wanting to have a house full of candy when it wasn't necessary I had not, therefore, been stocking up. Nevertheless, I was downtown in one of the nicer grocery stores this afternoon, so I figured it was time to stock up. Not a moment too soon, as it turned out!

This particular coven had three members, complete with hats and the other bits of required accoutrement: a little bucket for collecting candy, and a teapot (apparently witches generally carry around their freshly brewed potions in teapots). I was so startled by it all, I think I may have forgotten some details, but here's basically how it went down: they said, "Glad Påsk!", I ran off and got the candy, I put a handful in their tiny bucket (pretty much doubling their meager haul), then the littlest one (who was holding the bucket) and I stared at each other expectantly for a minute. I'm not ashamed to say, I blinked first, and I hastily gave her a second handful of candy. This was not, apparently, what she was waiting for; after another moment she must have decided I wasn't going to do whatever she actually expected, so instead she turned to her taller companion and (somewhat imperiously) gestured to the teapot. After a moment's scramble, the larger witch managed to extract a small red piece of paper from the teapot, which she handed to me; this however, caused the smaller one to roll her eyes, and she took the card back, and turned it over so that the side that read, "Öpna Mig"(sic) was facing up, gave it back to me, and gestured expectantly for me to open it. At this point, witch number three, who had been somewhat anxiously scanning the hallway for other potential sources of candy, finally could wait no longer, and she dragged them all away.

So, catastrophe narrowly averted.

P.S. What did the card say? Click the image, and you can see for yourself…

Tre Gånger Större

Winter has finally ended in Uppsala, and with the melting of the snow Spring's bounty is revealed: in the gardens, crocuses in bloom; on the streets and sidewalks, a 3 cm deep layer of gravel; and in what used to be an empty lot in Bolanderna, Uppsala's new mega-IKEA. This weekend was the store's invigning, a fact which I learned from my Swedish instructor, who is always eager to let us know about things we should do to be more Swedish. Mind you, this isn't the first time IKEA has come up in class: on the very first day the teacher wrote the name Ingvar Kamprad on the board as an example of a famous Swede (he's the founder of the company, hence the I and K in the name), and we learned numbers by discussing how many IKEA's there were in various countries ("Det finns arton IKEA i sverige.").

Anyway, going to the new IKEA was expected of us as Uppsalabo, so we went. It is massive (tre gånger större than the old one, as the ads point out—in the picture above, the original Uppsala IKEA is the small building behind the flags, just left of the big yellow section), and wandering around it proved so exhausting that we were forced to stop halfway and fortify at the cafeteria. One pleasant surprise was that the new cafeteria is high enough up that it has a view of the castle and cathedral in the distance; the other surprise, perhaps not so pleasant, was the live "soft jazz" performance going on there.

We did our part of course, coming home with a few odds and ends. Our most successful purchase was Jennifer's new IKEA lunchbox: at her table at work today, 4 of the 6 people eating had exactly the same lunch box as her; the other two bought their lunches. Does this mean we're Swedes now?

First derby

Last Wednesday night, 1 april, we went into Stockholm to go to a soccer match. Our local team that we cheered for last year is no more. They had such a bad season that they were relegated to the lower division, and I would have supported them there, but then the team went bankrupt. Therefore, if I am to get my football fix, we are going to have to go into Stockholm a little more often than we did last season. The stadium of the Stockholm team we've picked, Hammarby, is quite easy to get to, despite the little adventure we had last year getting to this very same game.

The game was a derby between southsiders Hammarby (it pleases me a little to be cheering for the working-class southside team—oh, and their colors are green and white, which I'm also used to) and rivals AIK (whose colors are navy and yellow!) from the north. The game was a really good one—I wrote a summary for it if you're interested—but I do want to mention something funny that happened. On our way in, I noticed the coach of the Swedish national team hanging about... of course it's not cool in Sweden to notice people, so I ignored him (well, I took a picture when his back was turned). It was harder to ignore him when he sat right in front of us in the stands... I kept ignoring him, of course, although I couldn't help smirking at Joe... however, it became really hard to ignore him when he turned around, seemed to look right at me, and said "Jennifer!" It turned out he was trying to get the attention of his daughter, who was standing behind the bleachers. It's a very strange sensation, when someone that you consider famous, looks at you and says your name.

In my post about the month of mars, I said that here april is considered the month of big weather swings, and by gosh this very first day we experienced aprilväder. When we left Uppsala it was warm and sunny; by the end of the game we were nearly frozen, and the 40-minute train ride, which had seemed stuffy on the way into the city, was most welcome for the ride back. Here's Joe at the end of the game, thankful that I had remembered to bring the team scarf, which is quite lightweight and I suspect is meant more for display than to provide warmth.

Fika småpratar 2: A naughty word

Some while back, when my officemate S. and I were the last ones to leave fika, I dropped the F-bomb on him. Yes, there is an F-bomb in Swedish, but it's not what you think it is—the English F-word, here in Sweden, is nearly meaningless, and is used by parents in front of their children, and by teeny-bops in front of their grandparents. This constant and casual use has two effects on the poor English speaker: first, she becomes quite inured to hearing the F-word; second, and much worse, it robs her of a precious descriptor. V. and I were commiserating about something truly horrible that the GenBank repository for DNA sequences had changed about their file formats, and I used the F-word to describe them. He didn't react at all.

The Swedish F-bomb is not an equivalent to the English F-word, it just starts with the letter F. I said this word to S. at that long-ago fika for a reason that was relevant at the time, I promise you. His reaction was most rewarding: he blushed, and actually stuttered. "Well, I didn't expect you to know that word," he said later, "and I certainly didn't expect you to use it in the definite form."

So what is the Swedish F-bomb? Here's an ad, facing the street, for a play put on by the Uppsala Players last fall. The Swedish F-bomb is the word after "bitter" (which means bitter) and it appears here in the definite form (as indicated by the letter 'n' at the end of it), so that you too can shock any Swedes you know. This display caused what could be considered protest—two people wrote to the newspaper to complain.

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By the way, I finally added the picture of Joe and half of me from the TV coverage of the bandy game... see the post below.

That's some Sirius bandy

I've made it to two bandy games this season, both in Uppsala and featuring local team Sirius. Bandy, you might recall, is a fairly Scandinavian-specific sport, played outside, on a soccer-sized field covered in ice; the players wear skates and carry clubs that they use to smack around a soft-ball sized orange ball that's made of golf ball material. On the evening of 10 december 2008, in heavily falling snow, German student M. and I drove over to Studenternas IP, paid our 60SEK, and found a good place to stand just behind the fans of the away team, who had arrived in a bus, ready with their drums and banners. It was quite cold, but the glögg and lussekatte at halftime helped, and any sport that requires the halftime services of both a snowplow and a Zamboni must be good, right? Sirius won handily, beating the visitors from Örebro 7-1. An Örebro supporter (who was at least two sheets to the wind) turned to congratulate M. and me on our team's win. Geniality among the fans is another hallmark of the sport, something I appreciate.

Sirius did much better than expected in the regular season, finishing third in the league, and earning a play-off spot. On 18 mars 2009, we went to Sirius' semifinal game against league winners and last year's champions Edsbyn. Most bandy games are rather sparsely attended, and we should have gone much earlier to this one, which ended up having 8900 fans.The stadium organizers were clearly not ready for so many people, and had not opened up the north and south stands: the east and west ones were already packed, and we got rather pressed into a corner, while trying to find a place. So... the fans started getting into the stands anyway, crawling through rails or leaping over them, as dictated by youth and vigor, a near riot by Swedish standards.

But "a near riot by Swedish standards" is not, by any means, a riot in the usual sense. With all these people crowding in next to each other, no one was actually touching each other; no one pushed, no one rushed. And when they inevitably did bump into one another, it was okay: the bumper was too embarrassed to admit they had bumped, the bumpee, too embarrassed to admit they had been bumped into. In some places you might worry when two burly strangers collide and spill each other's beers, but here, the two immediately look away from each other. No words were spoken or exchanged (heaven forbid!) between strangers. (This shyness is so extreme that it leads me to wonder how on earth these people ever manage to reproduce, but that's a topic for another time perhaps.)

We ended up in the southern stands, in the extreme southwest corner of the field, a not so great vantage point from which to see what turned out to be the worst bandy game I have seen. Good thing we had thought to bring along a thermos of Irish coffee with which to pass the halftime; the respectable looking couple behind us were openly pouring whisky into a camping cup and sharing it. (It's a little more traditional to try to mask the alcohol in a thermos.) In the northeast corner, in a brilliant marketing ploy, someone had set up a giant hot tub, from which a number of lucky people watched quite intently. They had about as good a view as we did, and were a little warmer (it wasn't that cold, really), but the end result was the same: Sirius crashing out of the tournament with a 1-7 loss, in a mirror image of the game from december. Sic transit Sirius.

Oh, there was one advantage of being in the corner: we got to be on TV! That's Joe, in the yellow jacket to the left, and half of J!, to his left, in the white hat. Don't confuse Joe with the ball boy (who also in yellow but on the ice) or J! with the player taking the corner (who is also wearing a white hat, but is on the ice, has skates, and a club in his hands)...