Where do I begin?

Did I say we were spending two nights at the hostel? I'm not sure that Jennifer has quite done the place justice. Allow me to attach the directions to our room which I sent Jennifer via the e-mails:

OK, so by "a little obscure" they apparently mean "completely invisible from the road." Here's rough directions:
1. Pick up the #8 somewhere before Vaksalatorget (The last stop it shares with the #7 is Stadshuset).
2. Take that to the Kvarntorget stop.
3. Look around you. You should see a little shopping area with a blue kitchen appliances store called "Elon" or "Bo Wahlgrens" (or possibly both). Head towards that. You may also notice the oliv-o-mart flags waving in the breeze, but they are a little further than you need to go.
4. The building behind the kitchen mart has a pizza place, a hot dog stand, a massage parlour... in short, all the ear marks of civilization. At the far end of the front side is the hostel.
5. At 7 they lock the front door. You can let yourself in by typing "7613" into the keypad.
6. Go up the stairs.
7. There should now be two doors along the left hand wall. Take the 2nd, which is labeled "Hotel Rooms 200–214" or somesuch.
8. You will now feel like you have intruded on a construction zone. This is good, as it means you're probably in the right place. 9. We are (of course) the last room along this wall (#214).
10. If you haven't run into me by now, I must be in the room, so knock. I can't possibly be more than two feet away from the door.
Oh! I forgot to tell you, our personal numbers showed up in the mail as I was suiting up to leave Akademihotellet. I don't know quite what this means for our plans, but I guarantee you we will not want to spend two weeks in the hostel.
Joe

Having now spent the night in the hostel, I will add a few observations. The wing we stayed in appeared to actually be the "budget hotel," which was significantly more expensive than the hostel; however, by paying an extra 100 SEK/night we got our own WC and shower, and we brought sleeping bags (avoiding the charge for linens) so we got essentially a hotel room with no sheets for 600 SEK (now that's a bargain). Oh, the actual hotel rooms also had a luggage rack in their "closet," a space which in our room was just an empty bit of floor. On their website they note that they are a "green" hotel, which here means "miserly"—the shower only stayed on for 90 seconds, the bathroom light turned itself on and off automatically, and you had to use your room key to turn on the electricity to the room (so that you couldn't leave anything running when you left). This last turned out to be lucky, because when I said the bathroom light turned itself on and off, you shouldn't get the impression that it did so when you entered or exited the bathroom. No, it just randomly turned itself on and off, incessantly, until we pulled the key out of the light switch and cut the power.
This should have made the room pitch black, lacking as it did all external windows. It did have a large window looking out onto the lobby, which was indeed airport-esque, and seeing as we were on the second floor our window was right under the klieg lamps which shone brightly all through the night ("green hotel," my lilly-white caboose).
Oh, and the construction crew showed up at 8 a.m., to start loudly removing the plexiglass panes which lined the edge of the mezzanine we were on.
So, the question I am left with is, how much are they going to charge people to stay in the hotel once they've finished building it? If it's more than we paid, then I don't see what the "budget" part is, because it would basically cost as much as a real hotel, one with furniture and working TVs and telephones and crazy stuff like that. On the other hand, if it's not more then we paid, then why didn't we get a discount for staying in a hotel that wasn't built yet?
You may notice I am referring to the hostel in the past tense. I assume it is still there; we, fortunately, are not. There, I mean. We have moved to the Hotel Uppsala, where we will be staying for the next couple of nights before moving on to an extended stay apartment run by the same company (we had no idea this even existed, so kudos to Jennifer's department for finding it for us).
Oh, and we got our Personal Numbers. But that's another story, for another night.

Burgers and beer

Tonight we spent our designated burger money (Thanks Mom and Da!) on burgers and a beer at the restaurant attached to the youth hostel we are spending the night at. It was actually very good-- I think it was made with kebab meat-- including pickle slices, sort of tomato-y things, and fries complete with a sprinkling of seasoned salt. It was nice to eat out for a change, and after everything that happened today (too tired to write it all now, details to follow, don't worry, happy ending), a very welcome and satisfying meal.

The hostel is... well... what can you say? Small. Weird. Still under construction, judging by the smears of grout on the bathroom floor and the exposed electrical wiring here and there (see the photos of the bizarre, empty, airport-reminiscent "lobby" that they are very proud of). Cheap, though, and quite clean. And far far away from anywhere we've stayed yet. Tomorrow we move again, to a hotel more in the downtown area.

Snowy Morning

Well, today we have to change hotels, so of course it's snowing again. It's been in the forties and drizzling off and on ever since the blizzard we had for our arrival, but naturally today it would snow. Moving out of our current hotel has taken all morning, and isn't quite finished yet. We actually started last night, grabbing some spare luggage and taking the bus over to Jennifer's office, where we'll stash it for the next few days. This morning I took a couple more pieces over, which actually made for a relatively pleasant walk (it wasn't the heaviest of our luggage) though the sloppy snow. Jennifer caught up later after trying to deal with checking out from the hotel (a complicated story which appears to be largely resolved now, but the details of which I am, alas, not privy to). Anyway, I'm back there now after marching all over downtown, having a brief sit down before gathering the rest of the luggage and making my way to our new digs.
Incidentally, the plan is to stay at the hostel for 2 nights, and then we have a tiny apartment reserved for the month of February. It won't be much, but it has a kitchenette, so we can go back to cooking a little, which will be good.

The National ID Number

The National ID Number is very important. Do not believe anyone who tells you that you can do anything without The National ID Number. University administrators will tell you you can open a bank account without it-- you can't. University administrators will tell you that you can rent an apartment without it-- you can't, because you need insurance. Did I mention that the University administrators will tell you that you can get insurance without the National ID Number? Well you can't. Need a permanent phone number for your potential landlords to call? Too bad. You can't have a mobile phone without The National ID Number. New University email address? Nope, not without The National ID Number. 

We don't have our National ID Numbers yet. We applied, of course, but they must be mailed. Snail mailed. And no, they cannot be mailed to one's work address. So how does one know where The National ID Number should be mailed... because remember, one doesn't have a permanent address yet or phone number, because... etc. I guess I should count myself lucky that they let me buy a bus pass without The National ID Number.

Certain Americans who think that the UN and social security numbers are a sign of the Apocalypse would not like this aspect of Swedish bureaucracy, I suspect.

Adventures in Bus Riding

Sunday night was a minor adventure. I had found a promising looking sublet listed on a database maintained by the Student Union (I must digress momentarily to wonder why this little gem was never mentioned in our months of apartment searching…Hmph.), and a phone call to the owner resulted in an apointment to meet at the apartment Sunday night at 7. The apartment is in Gottsunda, an outlying neighborhood to the southwest, well out of walking distance but only a 15 minute bus ride, so it was obviously time to brave the busses.

I don't want you to get the impression that the busses are frightening. They are large, clean, and well lit; what's more, they run from 6 in the morning to after midnight, even on the weekends for the most part, and they are both frequent and on time. In fact, they sound like a public transport dream, and they mostly are. There is just one small hump to get over: getting a ticket. Now, you could certainly just get on the bus and pay cash money for a bus ticket, losing nothing in the process except for the respect of the bus driver and 30 SEK (that's $4.50 at the current exchange rate—yes, that's right, $4.50 to ride the bus). I hear you cry, "But Joe, what other option do I have? I need to ride the bus!" Oh, you have options, gentle reader, never you fear. Got a mobile phone? Why, just SMS the bus, and you'll be charged a mere 20 SEK (that's $3 for those of you who are keeping up with these things), and all you have to do is flash the SMS to the bus driver upon his arrival. No phone? Well, proceed to the nearest major transfer point and purchase a ticket in advance from an automat (coins or credit cards only, please)—it can be used anytime in the next thirty days, and is good for unlimited bus rides in a 90 minute period once used (actually, that's true of all bus tickets in the city).

But surely these methods must seem pedestrian (and thereby unsuited to a patron of public transit such as yourself). What truly elegant solution presents itself? Just buy a bus pass. What could be simpler? Wait, first you must choose: do you need a value card (värdekort) on which you load a few hundred kroner, thereafter using the card to purchase half price tickets on the bus (note that we're down to $2.25 now)? Or perhaps a monthly pass, unlimited rides for a mere 500 SEK (call it $75)? Even better, 4300 SEK ($665) for a year? Of course, there's alsoa couple of regional cards, something called a Tim-Kort (haven't the faintest), and a few other options. Oh, and don't forget the 75 SEK deposit for a card, plus maybe another 150 SEK for spärravgift or 75 SEK for expeditionsavgift (again, no clue). Oh, and some people claim there's a discount for university students, but the employees of the bus company do not appear to rank amongst them, so that one's probably a no go.

Well, it being Sunday afternoon in a socialist paradise, all the card options were out (actually, we probably could have purchased one at the newsstand around the corner, but we wanted to talk over our options with someone more official than the nearest quickie mart clerk, for the first time out, anyway). Being cell phone free at the moment (don't even get me started) the best option was the automat, as there just happens to be one a few blocks away from our hotel. I might have gone more smoothly if I'd known in advance that it didn't take paper money, but OK, we can bail to the credit card option. It took me 10 minutes and the unknowing assistance of a native (who also didn't appear to understand the machine, but who did manage to procure a ticket), but I finally latched on to a nearly random sequence of button pushing and card swiping that resulted in a pair of bus tickets. I swear, there's just something about control panels in this country...
All right, I know, what's really important here is the apartment. Long story short, it's a cute one room apartment (not a studio, the kitchen is a separate room, but the bedroom and living area are the same), on the ground floor of a little complex in Gottsunda, with a patio and a small garden. The owners have moved to a suburb of Stockholm to be closer to work, but don't want to give up their apartment (which they've lived in for 15 years), partly because it's about the same size as their new house, and they can't fit two apartments worth of furniture into it. So, they will happily leave us a set of simple furniture (for a little extra, of course). Oh, and they dote on their adorable dog Myra (sp?), so they don't mind cats at all. They were at pains to point out that children were entirely unacceptable, but cats are fine.

We agreed on a very reasonable rent, which took a little while due to a moderate language barrier (only one of the couple speaks English, so there was a lot of time spent translating back and forth). Then we ran into our two hitches: the form for the sublet requires our personal numbers, which the state won't issue for another week or so, and after the application we have to wait another 2-3 weeks to get approval from Uppsalahem (the landlord) for the sublet.

Ouch. Four more weeks? Nothing for it, though, as we would run into the same trouble at any other place. So, we're off to work on interim housing. Jennifer found a hostel-apartment typ place through a new colleague, and they appear to have an apartment available for a month for a mere 8000 SEK ($1200), which is OK for one month. Certainly better than the 800 SEK a night for a cheap hotel room.

Wow, this is a long entry. Well, after all that, the fact that Jennifer took the bus to work for the first time this morning, after buying a monthly pass, doesn't seem like such big news. Oh well, here's a picture, anyway:

Apoteket

Today's new challenge: a trip to the drug store. In Sweden, that means Apoteket, a government controlled monopoly which is the only place to buy prescription or over the counter drugs in the country. It's a strange experience, as most of the bewildering panoply of cold treatments and so forth that fill the aisles upon aisles of US drug stores are available, if at all, only by prescription in Sweden, so the self-service portion of the store is remarkably stark. What's more, there seem to be only one or two options available for any given complaint, mostly packaged in these sort of hospital surplus looking packages.

I was there looking for something for Jennifer's cough, but nothing seemed to have any of the ingredients I had been sent for. According to my reading, to get help you're supposed to take a number from the machine by the door, which will issue one number for help with prescription medicines (recept) and another for non-prescription medicines (receptfri). Unfortunately, the machine at the door of this particular Apoteket had a recept button and an empty place where I presume the receptfri button used to be. Hmmm. Unclear how to proceed, and unable to find anyone to help (shops in downtown Uppsala seem to be quite busy on the weekends), I took a recept ticket. This was greeted with only minor annoyance by the pharmacist, who, when I described the problem, pointed out that there should be someone on the other side of the shop to help me with that sort of thing. I agreed (to myself) that there should be someone to help, but the pharmacist had to admit that there wasn't, so she frowned a bit and took me to the shelf (which I'm pretty sure was labeled allergy medicine, not colds) and pointed out all the cough medicine which was there, including something which didn't sound at all like what I had been sent for but which she assured me would do the trick. It was only 30SEK (about $5), which seems a downright bargain, so I decided to risk it. Indeed, a little online research which Jennifer did upon my return revealed that the active ingredient was in fact just what we were looking for, except that in the US it isn't generally given to humans, but rather administered to particularly snuffly pigs.

All in all, I think we're going to call that one a win. Now if I could just find a cell phone for less than $300, we'd be in business.

My Nemesis

Now, you know I'm all for the high-tech gadgets. But seriously, it should not be this hard to do a load of laundry. Admittedly there's lot's of knobs and buttons, all labelled with obscure international symbols for, I don't know, doing laundry during an eclipse or while stuck in a maelstrom or something. But there's an instruction manual, and it isn't all in Swedish. There's a copy of the English instructions in the binder to the right of it, all 28 pages of instructions for the dryer, and a half dozen not-entirely-illuminating charts for the washing machine. Plus a wall chart. And extra labels someone printed out and stuck on the machine. All of which I read. Twice. Some of it three times. 

The result? Three hours into my first putative wash cycle, I had a pile of soapy laundry resting in a pool of lukewarm water, while the machine did occasional half-hearted impersonations of a spin cycle. After I spent half an hour convincing the machine to relinquish my clothes, they sat in the dryer for another hour, which changed my cold wet clothes into hot wet clothes. 

I give up. I'm going to go have a sauna.

Yes, cannons!

The morning firing of the cannons turned out to be small potatoes compared to the afternoon firing of the cannons (two Krupp models 90 03/33, to be precise, wielded by a volunteer regiment representing the Östersund 9th). This tradition has been carried out for the last 408 years. 87 shots were fired in total, one shot for each graduate, and for those returning to celebrate the 50th anniversary of their doctoral degree, a double-shot. Each celebrant was then entitled to keep the brass shell fired in their honor. 

For my doctorate, I was handed a blank piece of paper in a cardboard tube. 

I am jealous.

Cannons?!

They take commencement seriously here. And yes, there was indeed cannon fire at 7am. I lost count of how many shots, but more than a dozen. The cannon (a Howitzer-looking thing on an older carriage) was driven right past the hotel while we were eating breakfast.

Work so far

So far work has consisted of: 

1. Having lunch with the Boss and two other students joining the lab this term, a Swedish post-doc and a Mexican undergraduate student. The Evolutionary Biology Centre cafeteria lunch is a decent deal: 63SEK for a large plate of hot food, a salad buffet, and tea or coffee. It was a very pleasant lunch and I like everyone so far.  The "Swedish sausage special" consists of a brick-sized chunk of bologna floating in a cream sauce. 

2. Getting my office space and meeting my officemate, who is a doctoral student working with computer modeling of biological systems, and who is a killer Othello player. 

3. Attending a journal club meeting, in which a recent paper in Science was trashed for extolling exciting results that turn out to be based on poor phylogenetic methods (among other things). This sort of thing was de rigueur back at UM, so I consider it a good sign.

Today we applied for our national ID numbers. The funny thing is that you need to have a permanent non-work address to get an ID number, which we haven't been able to get because we don't have an ID number. Similarly, tomorrow I hope to get my key to the building... and to get to the person who does the keys, one must go through at least three interior keyed doors, even after one has somehow managed to get into the building from the outside. My plan right now is to throw pebbles at the windows to get someone to notice me hopping up and down outside, and hope they let me in.

These sorts of experiences are exactly what my international student friends have been telling me to expect. Fortunately, so far the bureaucrats have been kind to us and it hasn't been too bad.

Second Day

It's the morning of day three (Sv+3 maybe?), and after a good and fairly productive day two, this morning we are bedeviled by jet lag. I woke up at midnight last night and didn't get back to sleep until after three, about when Jennifer woke up—I don't think she got back to sleep until about 20 minutes ago. So for now I've retired to the lounge to admire the view of the cathedral and catch up on this.

Now, bearing in mind Jennifer's first axiom of blogging, i.e. "No one cares what you ate for lunch today," I will endeavor not to leave a long string of posts regarding days in which nothing happened. In the future, that is. For now, even the most mind-numbing of mundanities is   shiny, so please forgive the following somewhat self-indulgent recap of a not-very-eventful Wednesday:
We managed to get up for breakfast without too much of a struggle. It was pretty typical Scandinavian hotel fare: fixings for open-faced sandwiches, hard-boiled eggs, mueslix, yogurt, and of course, rye crisp. Packed a lunch of sandwich and fruit—it's hard to justify spending another ten dollars on lunch when the hotel already costs $120 a night. Then Jennifer was off to have lunch with her new boss (she'll tell you about her day herself, once she regains a semblance of consciousness) and I set off to wander a bit and get my bearings. The cathedral is just around the corner (I already went on at length about it in the Uppsala section of our 2006 trip travelogue, so I won't repeat it all here), and it seemed like a natural first stop. Remembered to visit the unassuming tomb of Olof Rudbek this time. Then I tried to find my way to the bus information office from memory, and failed miserably. Took the wrong bridge, overshot by blocks, got totally turned around and had to backtrack quite a bit once I got my bearings again. Ah well, it'll come with time, I'm sure. The bus station was a bust, anyway, as all I really wanted was a printed route map, and while they have a nice one posted they don't appear to distribute it except electronically. Dropped into a bookstore on route back to the hotel, mostly to reaffirm that there won't be much book buying for the next couple of years—$20 for a mass market paperback? Ouch.—then made my way back for lunch. Spent the afternoon researching our next steps regarding civil registration, insurance, housing, etc., while browsing through afternoon television (and discovering that Days of Our Lives is rendered no less painful to watch by the addition of Swedish subtitles).

Having finally found a street address for the local Skatteverket (the Tax Office, where we must go to get registered), I set off to find it. It was a bit further away than I had anticipated, but not too bad. On the way back I tried to find the local SFI office, where we should be able to register for Swedish lessons, and briefly checked out two public libraries on the way.

By the time I got back it was four o'clock, and I was in need of a hot chocolate from the lounge to warm up.  Caught the end of a tense handball match on the tele (imagine playing soccer on a hardwood court inside, but dribbling like basketball instead, and you've pretty much got it) in which Sweden managed to pull off a one point win over some former Soviet republic, and then Jennifer got back from her afternoon at work. We grabbed a table in the breakfast room to look over all the materials they had given her and to do some more online housing research, which failed to turn up any actual leads, but did perhaps reveal a couple of new places to try.

We caught the news at 19:30, which revealed that everyone is worried about the US economy, and that some Swedes had held a ceremony to give Bill Gates a funny hat (I'll presume that these two stories were unrelated). For dinner we decided to try the little kitchen on our floor of the hotel. It has a little oven and stove, but either it's been switched off or I'm an idiot, because I couldn't get the stovetop to turn on. We were therefore reduced to microwaving a couple of packets of freeze-dried chicken soup mix (blecch!) and eating a clementine for dessert. Hmm, I think some other options will have to be explored there. And then it was off to bed, for the worst night's sleep ever.

Well, the morning is wasting away, and it looks like the rain has stopped. Better go wake Jennifer and set off to experience the best that northern bureaucracy has to offer—the Skatteverket!

We've arrived!

Well, we made it. Our flight turned out to be only mildly annoying (who would be insane enough to take a trans-Atlantic flight with four children under 10?), and we landed in Sweden at 7:14 CET, about 10 minutes ahead of schedule. Unfortunately we couldn't get to our gate because of the snow! Eventually they got us a couple of buses and a staircase, and we deplaned onto the tarmac in the middle of a small blizzard. This would have gone pretty smoothly if the driver of the second bus had not decided that he had to force as many people as he could onto the first bus by keeping his doors firmly shut not only in our faces, but also in the (somewhat desperate by now, I like to think) faces of the aforementioned family of many small children.

Everything else went smoothly, though. We made it through passport control, got all our luggage(!), and by 9:30 we were on a train to Uppsala, barreling through the Swedish countryside as the snow relented and the sun came out. By 10 we were at the train station, and it had turned into a bright, clear day. It took a lot of running back and forth to deal with our somewhat unruly mound of luggage, but we managed to hail a cab and get ourselves to the Akademihotellet by 10:30.
Of course, check in is supposed to be at 1, so our room wasn't ready, but after seeing the mountain of luggage (Did I mention the luggage already? I think it might become a bit of a recurring theme over the next couple of weeks...) they quickly arranged a room, and let us hang out in the rec room in the basement until it was ready. I was just trying to figure out whether the easiest way to make use of the sauna shower next door was to go find a towel somewhere or just dry off with paper towels, when the lady from the front desk came down to tell us our room was ready in record time.

The room is every bit as adorable as you would expect of a Scandinavian hotel, compact without being crowded. The wainscoting makes it feel traditional, and the natural wood and brushed steel fixtures bring it up to date. The hotel itself is remarkably well located, just a block from the University Library, and an easy walk to the Cathedral in one direction and Jennifer's new lab in the other (well, a little less easy a walk, that last one, but not too bad). Jennifer's still fighting off her cold, so she went straight to bed, while I took advantage of the shower to rejoin the ranks of humanity, and then nipped out for a walk and some groceries. 100 SEK got us lunch, and probably tonight's dinner, if the little blue box I purchased is actually instant chicken soup mix as I suspect it to be, and I can find the camping pan we packed somewhere. 

So, now it's 3 PM, and the light is beginning to fade a bit. Still, it's a lot more sunlight than we feared, so I think it will be just fine (I'm sure that will come back to haunt me by the middle of next winter). Obviously the wireless internet works, so we should be in touch for the next few days at least. Tomorrow we'll have to contact the local authorities and become registered aliens, and Jennifer will meet with her new boss. OK, I'm going to go and try not to fall asleep now.