BOKREA

This week's foray into Swedish culture: the annual book sale. Every year, starting on the last Tuesday in February, all the bookstores in Sweden have a great big sale. I guess it started in the 1920s as a way for stores to sell off their overstock from the previous year, and over the years it has evolved into a bit of an event. Not surprising, in a country where the average person spends 55 minutes a day reading. Apparently many people save up, and plan their book sale purchases for months in advance, and publishers will run special, cheap printings of classic hardcovers just for the sale. Naturally, I couldn't let such an event pass me by, so I wandered down to our local Akademibokhandeln (Sweden's largest bookstore chain, and Uppsala's best English language selection).

Backstock wasn't on sale for the most part, but there was a pretty large selection of hardcovers at heavily reduced prices, stacked by subject all over the center portion of the store. I had to fight my way through the crowds for about half an hour before I found the English section: Bob Dylan bios, some History of Rock coffee table books, and a couple of art books, all priced about half of normal (which made them only a little more than I would have expected to pay for them full price in the States). The Swedish language selection was impressive, though. Anyone need a copy of Harry Potter och Dödsrelikerna for a low, low 99 SEK? Yeah, me either, although it is oddly tempting. The first few volumes of the Lemony Snicket books were there in Swedish, which surprised me—Scandinavian literature is so pessimistic and grim that the lives of the Baudelaire orphans must seem pretty run of the mill. There were some interesting looking cookbooks, and plenty of bar guides (as if anyone could afford to stock a home bar in this country), and lot's of Baltic history, plus a smattering of books I recognized but translated into Swedish.

My new goal: learn just enough Swedish to justify buying at least one decent cookbook next February.

My daily bus ride

I've always liked using public transportation. Public transport is a cheap and easy way to see people, and all sorts of people take the bus here. It is not uncommon to see kids younger than 10 taking the bus by themselves, and some of the city busses also serve as school busses, when you can get groups of up to 50 8-year-olds crowding on. (Actually, err, I will probably try to avoid that bus in the future.) In Uppsala, you are allowed to take bring your pet with you on the bus, and there are also spaces reserved for baby buggies, which are loaded in the back doors, and fastened to the wall.  

I love my bus ride into work. Every morning I walk over cobblestones to Stora Torget, the main square, which is ringed by bank buildings (Nordea is the reddish building to the right) and the old city hall (the white building, built in 1883). I have my choice to catch either the #6 or #7 bus, which follow the same route for a while, one of which leaves about every 6 minutes in the morning.

A block past the square, we pass over the river, and if the sun is shining, the view up and down the river is stunning.

As we head up Drottninggatan, the hill turns steep and Carolina Rediviva, the old university library (which houses the 5th century tome "Codex Argenteus," the only surviving text in Gothic) is at the top of the hill—it's the building at the very end of the street in the picture to the right (because of the hill and the way the streets run up there, it's surprisingly difficult to take a decent picture of it!) According to rumor, the building itself is sliding backwards down the hill at some fraction of a millimeter per year, because the hill is made of soft alluvial clay and is therefore unstable. 

Drottninggatan dead ends into the library (the picture at right is taken from the bus), so we hang a sharp left at the worst 3-way intersection in all of Uppsala. It's a fairly busy crossing point for University students walking and on bicycles, and last year, for reasons that are not clear, someone decided to take away all the traffic signs at this intersection. Fortunately most cars are going fairly slowly at this point anyhow, and everyone makes way for the busses that are charging up the hill... except, of course, for the pedestrians, who, acting on their privilege as a sacred species, occasionally put the bus's brakes to a severe test.

Having turned left off of Drottninggatan, we are now on Dag Hammersjöldvägen, and on the left, on top of an even higher hill, is the huge pink castle, now used mainly to house municipal employees, but which also hosts the formal ball for graduating doctoral students and professors who have been promoted. (The morning cannons for commencement are fired from here as well.)

If you can tear your eyes away from the castle, and instead look to the right, you (and the castle's inhabitants with westward facing windows) get a great view of the formal part of Botaniska trädgården, the University's formal garden with topiary and fountains (in the summer) and botanical samples from all over the world. The yellow buildings at the far end are the Linnèanum, which served as the hosting point for the 2007 city-wide celebrations of Carl Linnè's 300th birthday, and continues to house some part of the University's botany department.

Two stops later, when I get off the bus at the Evolutionary Biology Centre, the first buildings I see are the Museum of Evolution Zoology, the building on the left, which houses the public exhibits and is where F. had his Disputationsfest. The building on the right has classrooms, a part of the library, and the EBC's cafeteria, where Joe and I had our Valentine's Day lunch of split pea soup and pancakes (click here to see what's on the cafeteria's menu this week... Swedish only, I'm afraid!). 

When I cross the road, directly in front of me are the low brick buildings of the EBC's research departments, and hi-ho, hi-ho, it's off to work I go. (The Department of Physiological Botany has helpfully put up a picture of the EBC from the air, which gives a better feeling for the whole complex.)

The ride home is always in the dark at this time of year, so there's not much to see until one gets back to the river, where sight of the lights still hanging on the trees over the river is cheering after a long day of staring at DNA sequences.

Café Linné

When Jennifer was first introduced to semla a couple of weeks ago, one of her coworkers mentioned that there was a little place called Café Linné just across from the Linnaeus Trädgården which was famous for having huge semla. Today we finally made the trek over to see for ourselves, and of course things were more complicated than they seemed. There, across the street from the garden was the Café Linné, and on the corner next to it was another Café Linné. A quick glance inside each revealed that they both offered outsized semla, so we were reduced to picking more or less at random. We settled on the Café Linné Konstantina, not to be confused with it's doppleganger, the Café Linné Hörnan.

We had planned on going there for breakfast, but it was nearly 11:30 by the time we made our decision, so we had a lunch instead: two pieces of quiche, brocolli-skink for Jennifer, kött for me (yes, honestly, ground beef quiche… but good!), with salad, bread and coffee for 68 SEK each, and then another 27 SEK for a semla that was, in fact, somewhat monstrously huge. The cafe was very cute, built into a little house so there were a bunch of different rooms, each with divans and coffee tables, and the requisite adorable blonde pig-tailed hooligan delightedly stomping from room to room.

We lingered over today's edition of Aftonbladet, an only moderately disreputable Swedish tabloid which we did our best to translate—Princess Madeleine upheld the honor of the Royal Family by competing in Tjejvasan yesterday (that's a women-only version of Vasaloppet, a 90km cross-country ski race steeped in Swedish traditions, many of which appear to revolve around blueberry soup); your toothpaste may be killing you (antibiotics, don't you know); glamour photography is sexist; a seering exposé into the prosthetic devices professional athletes use to pass drug tests; what's John McCain's favorite ABBA song; and so on, and so on. This enlightening reading inspired us to stop at the city library on the way home, where Jennifer picked up a book of contemporary Swedish poetry that will I'm sure raise the level of discourse around the apartment for several days.

Upon reaching home, a little web detective work revealed that we made the right choice of cafes (probably): while the Hörnan is (I think) on the site of the original Café Linné, the Konstantina sells semlor made by the original proprietors at their new bakery across town.

On an unrelated note, I got to put my hard-won knowledge of Swedish laundry room reservation boards to good use this evening when, as I retrieved my laundry, I ran into the Serbian basketball player who lives downstairs, and showed him how it all works. Turns out that he played against EMU back in his days at University of Central Florida. Small world.

Language Notes Part 1

Everybody new that I meet asks me where I am from. I always say "Michigan," and they almost always ask, "Oh, you're American?" I would have thought that it was obvious I was American the moment I opened my mouth and spoke, but apparently not. Joe points out that to them I'm just one more person who can't speak Swedish, so I speak English, with some kind of accent. (And apparently several people who I had talked to before thought I was Brazilian, because of the pennants of two São Paulo soccer teams hanging in my office, which are visible from the hallway.)

Similarly, my inability to discriminate among Swedish accents surprises them. Early in the evening a couple weeks ago, it came up with my doctoral student office mate, S., and the student in the next office over, V., who had come over to visit. Since I didn't really know S. and V. well, I asked where they were from. They told me, and V. said "You really can't tell the difference in the way we speak?" I confessed I couldn't, and asked them to demonstrate, but they refused on the grounds that it would be fake to do it knowing I was listening for it. Then suddenly the Swedish Chef came up (for reasons that will become clear), when out of the blue V. said that the Swedish Chef is funny and all but that he just didn't sound Swedish. 

Applaud my forbearance, gentle readers. I bit my lip and did not say what I was thinking, which is that yes, Swedish does in fact sound kind of like that.

Thankfully, S. disagreed with V. on this point. He had heard that the Swedish Chef was based on an actual Swedish cook's guest appearance on American TV, long ago, who got nervous when the camera started rolling and started muttering under his breath in Swedish. V. said no, he didn't believe it. S. explained to me that the cook in question (Lars Bäckman) is from same state as S. is, and therefore has the same accent. V. said no, no, not even S. ever sounds like that. S. said that he could easily imagine talking to himself like that, if he were nervous, or alone and reciting instructions to himself. He proceeded to demonstrate, pretending to be mixing something in a bowl and muttering.

I laughed politely at this, but laughing politely also took self-discipline, because the truth is he sounded exactly like the Swedish Chef, and I was about to bust a gut. A "Muppet Show" writer denies that Bäckman was Henson's inspiration, but I think I'll believe S. on this one. Even V. admitted that S. sounded just about right. Whether Bäckman was the inspiration or not, there can be no further doubt: the Swedish Chef is from Dalarna, home of colorful wooden horses and a lovely sing-song accent. I just hope I can resist ever asking S. to do that Swedish Chef thing again.

28 Days Later

Uppsala, Sweden: Day 29. Our journey continues, despite the heavy fog that has descended upon the city this evening, swallowing all sign of not only the cathedral, but indeed the buildings across the street; while pleasant in a Whitehall sort of way, it spells almost certain doom for our plans to view the lunar eclipse at 4am. Meanwhile, supplies brought along from America are now exhausted, so we are reduced to trading with the natives to meet our basic needs. We've managed to find sources for most necessities, but some are, sadly, lacking. The lactose-intolerant among us had a dicey couple of weeks there, when it looked like certain remedies, easily obtained over the counter in the US, were wholly absent here in this, the land that invented lactose-tolerance. Fortunately, the ready availability of probiotic drinking yogurt and fil helped to ease the transition, and a plethora of lactose-free dairy products can be found at all the markets (supplied, no doubt, for the convenience of any visiting Finns, who rank among the least lactose-tolerant people in the Western world). More lately, we have located a source of over-the-counter lactase enzyme, which while painfully expensive is, nonetheless, a welcome supplement.

This weekend saw the end not only of our soap and shampoo, but also our laundry detergent, so we have begun experimenting with local varietals. So far, there have been no major incidents. The choice of shower soap was completely non-rational, but based instead on the fact that the company, LdB, recently bought the soccer team from Malmö (well, and the soap was on sale, too). Unfortunately, our quest for decent beer has been less successful. The local "dark" would best be described as an amber, and the rest of it were best not described at all. The tetrapak wine is something of an oddity, but we are trying to keep an open mind. Our stock of English language reading materials has been well supplemented by a trip to the city library; on the other hand, envelopes and file folders have remained elusive.

At least we have an endless supply of fish oil.

River Walk

The weather broke a little earlier than expected, which really should have been exactly what we expected. We've been, umm, dissatisfied with the quality of the weather forecasting we've been getting, so Jennifer asked a while ago at work if there was a better source, and I guess they all just laughed and said that there just aren't any reliable forecasts for Sweden. Yesterday afternoon the temperature was climbing fast enough that even though they kept revising the forecast high temperature for the day we were always over it. I think we topped out at 8° or something absurd like that.
Anyway, fortunately we decided to take a walk down to the river before the cold ended, and we got a few cold looking pictures of the lights and the water. Also a good view of the cathedral spires, which have been sort of eerily lit the last two Saturday nights. The nightlife is oddly restrained on the weekends. Weekdays see lots of post-work bar hopping, but Saturday night is a lot quieter on our side of the river. I'm sure the students are out having a good time, but they seem to mostly party at their nations (more about that later) so they aren't out wandering the streets so much. The downtown move theaters seem to do a pretty good Saturday night business (who doesn't want to spend 90 SEK to see Asterix at the Olympics in French with Swedish subtitles?).

A visit to Ikea

It may astonish you to learn that I have never been to an Ikea before now, because, well, who hasn't been to Ikea? Even people who are not Scando-files have been to Ikea. Well, today, we went to Ikea Uppsala, a roughly 15 minute ride on the city bus through industrial parklands and auto dealerships, more or less in the area of our adventures getting to Migrationsverket. (Sure, it's technically the #14, but, really, it's the Ikea bus. See the picture? The bus says says so right on the front!)

Turns out that everybody here also goes to Ikea (properly pronounced "EE-kay-ah"). A couple weeks ago a co-worker with a small child said that they were going to Ikea for dinner. I think I looked skeptical at this, because he assured me that it was good, cheap, and best of all, the child could be dropped off. This didn't really help, because I still couldn't wrap my head around the idea of purposefully going to a big box furniture store for food and childcare. Or for the furniture either, for that matter, as the noisiness and busyness and overly-bright lighting in big box stores generally make me a little queasy.

Well, I have been converted. Ikea is just cool. I will not say that I liked absolutely every item in it, but I'd say that for everything I didn't like, there were four things that I did. I won't describe contents in detail, because you can just go look at the catalog, but I can tell you that lots of the furniture is extremely comfortable, and lots of the little things are attractive and well-made, and many things are quite cheap as well, relatively speaking.

We went around 11am, because we had it in mind that we might want to have lunch there. Again, my initial skepticism about eating in a store were overcome by the heavenly smell of meatballs, which did turn out to be quite a bargain. 59 SEK gets you a middle-sized plate of meatballs and potatoes, salad, fountain drink with free refills, and coffee. One difference between here and the US stores (I'm just guessing here) is that fountain drinks includes lättöl and lingonberry soda. And do the US stores also have salmon on the menu? 

We had come specifically for a small desk light for me at work, but we had lingered over the furniture long enough that we had to hustle after lunch in order to be home in time to watch the mass-start women's 15k biathlon.* Joe grabbed a whisk on the way out (because he cannot live without one any longer) and some jelly-jar style shot glasses (15 SEK), and I ended up with a small avocado-colored clamp lamp (49 SEK) and a fluorescent light bulb for it (which cost nearly as much as the lamp, at 45 SEK). A successful shopping trip, all in all, and a nice afternoon out.

I'm looking forward to going back sometime, to properly investigate the last two-thirds of the store. 

Oh, and it turns out this whole thing was a set-up. Joe came out here a while back (it's near a large grocery store he wanted to check out), and was quite taken with the furnishings. He though that getting me into the store would make me more eager to set up house and get our own things into it... and he was right, dang it, I really want one of those couches now.

*The world biathlon championships are being held right now in Sweden, up north in Östersund where they have plenty of snow, home of the volunteer regiment that set off the cannons for the January 25 University commencement. The women's 15k mass-start turned out to be a real nail-biter, too, with a sprint to the finish, and only 3 seconds separating the first and second place finishers, from Germany and Norway respectively. 

Winter Rose

Every once and I while, I'm thankful for MTV, or in this case a local version, ZTV. I had it on the other night for a little background noise whilst I was banging my head against the computer over a bit of javascript which it turns out was never going to work in the first place (who knew that all modern browsers would view an XMLHttpRequest to another domain as a major security threat?), when this little Scandipop gem came on:

Firefox AK feat. Tiger Lou: Winter Rose

I'm totally hooked. The album doesn't release in Scandinavia until the end of February, and is pre-selling online for the unbelievably low low price of 129 SEK (seriously, that's slightly over half the price of most of the CDs I've seen here). In the meantime though, the single is available for download, and there are remixes (ooh, and the complete album!) streaming on Firefox AK's myspace page.

Now that's more like it

This is a little closer to what I expected from Uppsala in winter. We had a cold snap at the end of the week (it's been below freezing for two whole days!) and we finally got a little snow to go with it. If our luck holds, we may get to keep it for the weekend. Perfect for a trip to Ikea for some meatballs, or maybe a semla-the-size-of-my-head at Café Linne. Does the snow explain the groups of men wandering the downtown area singing while carrying grocery bags full of beer cans? No, but then again, I don't really expect that anything will.

Can't Get Enough Of Your Fika

As Joe mentions, Valentine's Day isn't pushed here as much as it is in the States, but nevertheless, it provided an excuse for another excessive fika, which was held in the Floor 1/2 break room, and spilled out into the hallway, where extra tables were set up with plates of yummy custard-filled tarts and gummy raspberry-flavored candy hearts. Even better, the social committee (the good souls in charge of this sort of thing) had put out vacuum pump carafes of good coffee (that is, brewed coffee, not the stuff from the big black machine). Red paper tablecloths covered the tables, each of which had three or four tealights burning in the ubiquitous glass holders. The lights were turned down low, and a boom box in the hallway blared Barry White and Frank Sinatra love tunes. Posters in the hallway encouraged us to "Take the opportunity to talk to someone new!" (Which I did.) Oo la la!

Really? All this, at 9:30am? Maybe it's just me, but I'm not at my most romantic at 9:30am. It was fun, if a little surreal. Especially when the talk turned to crayfish, and the horrible things that can happen to you if they are not properly purged before you eat them.

Happy Hjärtans Dag

Well, it's hjärtans dag, which means it's also the 17th anniversary of the first time I asked Jennifer out on a date. Our anniversary doesn't seem to get as much media attention here as it does in the States, but we decided to celebrate anyway. We had lunch today at the cafeteria of the Evolutionsmuseet at the EBC where Jennifer works, for a traditional Swedish Torsdag meal of split pea soup and pancakes (with creme fraiche and strawberry jam, of course). We had planned on spending  little time checking out the Svensk Fauna wing of the museum afterwards (as opposed to the Utländsk Fauna wing) but this is Sweden, so the museum was closed this afternoon for no discernible reason. On the walk home I stopped by the Svenskundervisning för invandrare (SFI) office, which is supposed to be open for drop-ins from 13–15 on Torsdag afternoons, but they have also closed for the week with no visible explanation. Is something going on this week, or do official offices just close in Sweden for a holiday that no one here seems to celebrate? Ah well, at least I managed to get myself a city library card, and, as a result, a copy of the most recent Steven Erikson book, Reaper's Gale, which hasn't been released in the U.S. as yet; if you have any interest in fantasy at all and I haven't already recommended the Malazan Book of the Fallen to you, then I have been remiss in the extreme—he makes Robert Jordan look like a mouth-breathing hump, with all due respect to the dead… what was I talking about? Oh, yes, well obviously the library was still open, so it wasn't a complete governmental shut-down.
For dinner we had a salmon fillet glazed in a honey mustard sauce, with apples sautéed in rosemary butter and a bottle of South African Pinotage. The salmon here is excellent of course, and not really more expensive than any of the other meat. Also, it turned out we each bought chocolates, so for dessert we had one of our few remaining Zingerman's salt caramels, some cognac truffles, and some cayenne pralines (which in Sweden appears to just mean 'filled chocolate candies', not anything involving pecans, which don't seem to exist here). Actually, I'm quite full. Oh, and we watched SVT's coverage of today's skidskytte in Östersund (we're still marveling at getting 2-4 hours per day of cross country skiing coverage on television).

So, where do you get softener salt?

Turns out, it's easier to find dishwasher salt than it is to find garbage bags (long story—it took me a couple of days to find trash bags because they don't put them in boxes—Okay, it's not so long a story). But look, the salt light turned off! Are my dishes any cleaner? Sure, why not.

Revenge of My Nemesis

I'm feeling more comfortable with the washing machines now. I managed to figure this new one out without recourse to a dictionary for help with the instructional chart. Call me crazy, but it just doesn't seem like washing a load of clothes should have quite so much required reading material.

Today's little laundry revelation: I'm a laundry outlaw. A sort of illegal immigrant of the laundry world. I've been washing clothes without registering for a session first. Mind you, the English guide to this apartment failed to mention the bokningstavlan, but I suppose ignorance of law is no excuse and so forth. Anyway, I went down earlier to do a load of laundry, and the door was locked. This had never happened before—I'd just been walking right in—but this time I was forced to stop and look around. That's when I noticed the swipe pad for the electronic lock next to the door. This apartment building uses these little key fobs to give access to common areas, as well as to get you in the front door, in fact I'd just swiped it a moment before to get into the basement, so it wasn't too big a shock. This time, though, it didn't open the door, but rather activated another thing I hadn't paid any attention to, this:

Ah, yes, perfect, another inexplicable electronic device with two pages of instructions, that's exactly what I needed to make my day complete.

Turns out, you have to use this thing to reserve the laundry room in advance. You pick a three hour window sometime in the coming week, reserve it, and then show up at the appropriate time with your laundry. When you swipe in during your reservation, the gadget will unlock the laundry room door to admit you. The only reason I was able to get in before is that the lock tends to stick, so the door wasn't closing all the way. It's byzantine, yes, but actually quite civilized, and certainly better than the alternative…

To the post office!

Today I mailed my grad school application, so now I proceed to the final stage: keeping my fingers crossed for two months. In the meantime, I've had my first encounter with the Swedish postal service, Posten. Like the USPS, Posten is not quite a private company and not quite a branch of the government. In the mid-90s Posten started a process of "rationalization." I don't know what exactly they mean by that, but I do know that while there were post offices in Sweden when we visited in September of '06, they are all gone now. Yup, they closed all the post offices. To buy postage you can go to a bunch of different places, mostly newsstands and tobacconists in the city, or gas stations and grocery stores in the country, who happen to have a little blue and yellow post sign hanging out front. The tobacconist I picked had a few envelopes, a postal scale, and a box of stamps, which was plenty for me today. After selling me the envelope and weighing it with the contents, he sold me some stamps and pointed me to the post box out front. Very low key. There seem to be plenty of postal employees still though, many of them pedaling around town on Posten bicycles with baskets full of letters.

I can hardly wait to go and pick up some mail at the local gas station.

Working Conditions Part I

In some ways, the working conditions here are a little different than I'm used to. In Part I of this discussion, I'll cover Creature Comforts.

First, the the coffee break, or fika. Every day, at roughly 10am and roughly 3pm, is fika. Fika may or may not involve snacks. The time of starting and ending is not exact; by some mysterious process, people suddenly emerge from their offices all at once and converge on a common room. This is a time for socializing, and although I have overheard some work-related topics discussed, most talk (at least in my presence) has so far involved odd Swedish customs and foods, the execrable accent of Danes, and the curiosities and absurdities of the US primary elections. By a process probably analogous to the start of fika, there comes a moment roughly half an hour later when everyone suddenly stands up and goes back to work. 

There are of course exceptions. Two weeks ago, when F. defended his thesis, he started at 10am (so no morning fika), and there was not so much an afternoon fika as a small post-defense party with champagne and chips. The Monday after that, a student celebrated the end of his master's degree by providing for a lavish fika for our sub-department with several cakes and sweet yeast breads. The day after that was Fat Tuesday, so we had a rather formal afternoon fika involving the whole department and semla. On such occasions, fikorna (I think that's the proper definite plural) tend to last more like an hour. Occasionally there will be a seminar or discussion group meeting at 3pm, in which case people bring their afternoon refreshments with them to the seminar room. 

Where do these fika take place? In my building are two common rooms, so let's tackle the large room on floor 1/2 used by the whole department first (yes, floor 1/2—more on floor numbering and department and sub-department structure later, it's a whole thing). Morning fika tends to be in the 1/2 floor room, which has a large coffee machine, a couple of smaller, drip coffee machines, a electric kettle, an assortment of teas, the condiments you would expect, two refrigerators, two microwaves, two electric burners, two sinks, and a dishwasher, all provided for the use and comfort of students and employees, and all free of charge. There are candles on the tables, which are usually lit for morning fika, and orchids on the window sills. Everyone complains about the quality of the coffee, and yet, oddly, the coffee machine is rarely left alone for long. Floor 1/2 was the site of the department-wide Fat Tuesday celebration.

The other common area is on floor 1, where my sub-department is headquartered. People in my sub-department tend to eat lunch there, and it is also used for sub-department "official" occasions (such as F. and the master's students' afternoon parties). Here we manage to get by with merely a single refrigerator/freezer, a coffee maker, a microwave (made by Whirlpool!*), an electric water heater, and a sink for doing dishes. Candles are present but rarely lit in the afternoon. Being on floor 1 (that's the second floor to Americans), this room affords a great view of the fancy nearby houses, and lovely and soothing natural light, quite welcome after hours of staring at a computer screen. 

Rumor has it that there are recreation facilities in the basement, like a ping-pong table and a sauna ("But only the systematic botanists ever use the sauna," I was told). I have yet to see these things, but when I do, you'll hear about it. 

*An additional note for southwest Michigan denizens: Besides the Whirlpool microwaves, I have also run into some pressure gauges, the faces of which read "Gast: Benton Harbor, Mich." Small world!

Don't take that elevator!

You know, it's the little things that take the most getting used to. Like elevators, for example. Sure, there are elevators all over the place here, but they're, I don't know, different. For one thing, most of them don't have any memory. You hit a button, and they go where you want them to, but if you hit another button in the meantime? Nothing. Or you're waiting for an elevator and you press a call button, but someone's already using the elevator, so the button doesn't even light up. You have to wait until it's done with what it's doing, and then you can call it. Is this really important in my life? No, but I spend a lot of time ruminating about it nonetheless as I wait for elevators.

The big difference, though, is that very few elevators here have internal doors. I've ridden in enough cargo elevators in my day not to be completely freaked out by the wall of the elevator shaft whizzing past me as the elevator goes up, but it's still a little strange. And it obviously leads to certain horrifying potentials that an internal door would eliminate. Every one of these elevators has one of these little signs, and let me tell you, they just get worse the more I look at them. What a way to go…

Grocery Shopping

Now that we have a kitchen again, it's back to the cooking. What with the packing and moving and all that, I haven't really cooked much at all since, I don't know, November, so I imagine it's going to take awhile to remember just what it is we eat every night. Meanwhile, though, there's the grocery stores to figure out.
We had read coming in that there would be some differences. For example there's no maple syrup, and brown sugar can only be found at gourmet stores as a specialty item. Peanut butter is available, but far from cheap. Salmon is relatively cheap, while chicken is relatively expensive (although it isn't as extreme as Norway, where salmon is poor people food and chicken is a fancy import item). You can get good pork cheap. Don't buy the Danish Salami (no processed meat product should be that color). The toothpaste tubes labeled "kaviar," well, they aren't quite caviar (I'll let Jennifer fill you in on that one). There's no Mexican food. And, of course, don't eat the herring.
This has mostly turned out to be true, although there do seem to be some rudimentary Tex-Mex ingredients in the stores. While nearly everyone speaks English, however, this nascent bilingualism does not, for the most part, carry over to product labeling. So, there has been some guessing, most of which has worked out. Fläskfile appears to be pork tenderloin, which, when on sale for 79 SEK per kilogram is not unreasonable. Filmjölk, on the other hand, is not what you or I would recognize as mjölk, but rather a kind of unappealing fermented milk. My quest for Italian sausage continues, and now I can add chervil to my list of hard-to-find ingredients.
My favorite bit of food labeling so far has to be the eggs I bought the other day. Every egg is stamped with a code that tells the country of origin as well as the production method. The choices for the latter are ekologisk produktion, burhöns, and my favorite: frigående höns inomhus. Just how much walking do indoor hens really get in a day?

Bride of My Nemesis

Our temporary apartment came with an interesting new feature: a tiny, countertop dishwasher. Specifically, it's a Husqvarna 95i Harmony dishwasher, interesting mainly because I hadn't previously realized that Husqvarna manufactured anything other than sewing machines and chain saws (although, in retrospect, I suppose it makes sense that they would make something in the middle there). The only problem with the Husqvarna 95i Harmony dishwasher is that it's never been marketed outside of Sweden (well, except for in Finland, but that hardly counts) so there doesn't appear to be an extant copy of an English instruction manual. No fear, half an hour spent pouring over the Swedish instructions with a dictionary yielded most of the information necessary to run the thing (I still don't know what the little knob on the sink does—perhaps it's unrelated?). Unfortunately, after getting it loaded and switched on there were more indicators lit up than it seemed there should be, and indeed, a little more investigating led to the cause: our dishwasher is out of salt. Well, that's no problem, I'll just—hang on, out of salt? Surely not. Just a minute, let's see here… "Signallampan indikerar när det är dags att fylla på salt i avhärdaren." Yup, it's out of salt. I wonder what one does about that, when one apparently lives in a country which has yet to discover kosher salt? Sigh. Well, at least it's a quiet little thing, even if it doesn't pre-salt my dishes.

Fat Tuesday

Today is Fat Tuesday, and in Scandinavia, the day is marked by the consumption of special pastries called semla, which are cardamom yeast buns cut in half, smeared with a layer of marzipan, then filled up with whipped cream before the top is placed back on. The whole pastry is about the size of a large hamburger. Today's afternoon coffee break featured about a dozen boxes full of them, and everybody had one with their coffee (I have not yet seen anyone refuse or even pretend to protest the consumption of any sweet treat). The multinational group that I sat with included representatives from Sweden, Mexico, Latvia, and Poland, and we had a good time discussing the various traditions by which each culture marks this day and Lent in general. In Latvia, they eat lots of pancakes; in Poland, they celebrate Fat Day on Thursday instead, and I amazed the Pole by knowing about (and pronouncing) pączki ("I'm from Michigan," I explained). The Mexicans did indeed perform the cascarone ceremony on Easter, and they laughed as they recalled, from their teenage years, that as a trick on each other, they would fill their eggs with things like flour instead of the usual confetti.

To further protest Catholicism in Sweden it became a tradition to have semla not just on Fat Tuesday, but on every Tuesday from now until Easter. Semla are absolutely delicious, but I am secretly hoping that I will not be expected to eat one a week for the next month. Woof. 

There were about eight or so left over from the coffee break so I brought one home for Joe. However, he ate it before I could take a picture; hence the picture from Wikipedia. Our semla looked just like that, though.

Domesticity

We finally moved in to our temporary apartment this afternoon. It's a one bedroom with a decent kitchen and a fair amount of space, probably better than we can hope for in a long term place. What's more, it has a great view of the castle and the cathedral, and it's right in the middle of downtown, only a block from the main bus stop at Stora Torget. Not a style of living we can sustain long term, but it looks to be nice for now.
And for now, it's just nice to get back to a bit of domesticity. After I got all the luggage moved, I went grocery shopping at the Hemköp across the street. It is going to take a little adjusting, trying to buy groceries in a foreign language. Actually, the biggest challenge for today was remembering that I didn't have simple things (like olive oil and salt) waiting for me at home. Despite the difficulties, we managed a bottle of wine, a little pasta with tomato sauce and vegetables, and as a substitute for Italian sausage (it has to be here somewhere, right?) a falukorv, which turned out to be essentially a ring bologna, but kind of tasty nonetheless.
Tomorrow, I'll tackle the dish washer.

My Nemesis Returns

Sunday afternoon at the Hotel Uppsala, and it's time to wash clothes again. Now that we're living a little closer to the real world, the laundry is no longer free, and let me tell you, at 10 SEK a pop the pressure is on. Despite the directions (Jennifer points out that it's never a good sign when your directions end with the phrase, "Good Luck!!"), things went a little more smoothly this time, as I apparently guessed correctly which buttons not to push. I'm glad I talked to the desk before attempting it, though, as there was a very specific sequence of events needed to get things started: put clothes in machine, add soap to box, select appropriate settings, put 10 SEK coin in box on wall, come back and press start button. If you haven't got the machine set when you put in your money, well, you just lost two potential trips to a public toilet, matey.
Drying was another matter. Having been forewarned by the desk that the dryer was free, but didn't do anything except for, "blow lots of cold air on your clothes for a really long time," I opted for the Wascator, a sort of small closety thing that blows hot air over your clothes while they hang there and (presumably) get dry. After a couple of hours, this had our clothes near enough to dry that I think they'll be ready to go in the morning.
Tommorow we move to the extended stay apartment if all goes according to plan, where (hopefully) there will be a new set of washer challenges to face (if not, it's the shame and humiliation of attempting to use a public laundromat in a foreign language).

I survive a Disputationsfest

The older universities in Sweden have some interesting centuries-old customs; one of them peculiar to Uppsala, the firing of the cannons at commencement, I have already covered. Another is that the defense of a doctoral dissertation (or disputation), if it is successful, is celebrated with a Disputationsfest.

Yesterday, one of the students (let's call him F.) in my department successfully defended his dissertation. The defense itself lasted from 10am to about 1:30pm. Immediately after F.'s success was announced, everyone in the department dived into the sweet champagne and bowls of cheezy-poofs that had been set out in the common area earlier. This was not the Disputationsfest itself, of course; that was later in the evening. I had not been formally invited to the Disputationsfest, because RSVPs were required before I even got here, but everyone said I should come anyway, and not to worry, because F. was a generally informal guy, so surely his party would be informal too. I did some work in the afternoon, but everyone except another postdoc (E.) left early to go home and change clothes. I had come to work looking decent from the waist up, and was assured by E. that jeans would be okay (he was wearing them too) as, again, F. was an informal guy. "I brought a coat, but probably won't put it on," he assured me.

Sometime later, E. and I headed to the hall reserved for the party (accidently about a half-hour early, as it turned out, and him in his coat after all, the fink). As people started drifting in, it became apparent that this was in fact a very formal event. Men in suits (some three piece), women in fancy dresses. F. was very popular and had many friends and family attending, and out came the assigned seating chart. Fortunately there had been some last-minute cancellations, and my name had been pencilled in over someone else's. 

At each place was a bottled beer and beer-glass, a wineglass, a small shot glass for aquavit, and a double-sided page of text. The napkins were cloth, and there were tea-lights on the table at every other place or so. The beer was apparently there to hold us over until the wine could be passed around, and then gentlemen bearing aquavit came by to fill the shot glasses. Dinner turned out to be buffet-style—T., the very nice airline pilot I was seated next to (whose girlfriend's place I was sitting in) offered to carry for me, which was appreciated. Not too unusual buffet fare—ham slices, beef slices, salmon, rolls, cheese and fruit skewers, puff pastries, potatoes au gratin, all of high quality and quite delicious. 

We were given about 15 minutes to eat, and then the party started.

About every ten minutes thereafter, someone stood up to say something in praise of or tease about F., some in English, most in Swedish. At other random times, a guy stood up and held up the paper, which turned out to be song lyrics, and we all sang one of the dozen or so traditional Swedish drinking songs whose lyrics were on the paper. Twice, two small groups stood up to sing a song directly to F.; a video had been produced by the department artist featuring interviews with other students, lightly roasting F.; at one point, two other students made F. attempt to explain some aspect of his dissertation in charades; F. was presented gifts of varying usefulness or silliness. I lost track of the interruptions after about the first eight or so; I think there were at least twenty before I left. 

Each interruption, be it speech, song, or story, was followed with either a toast with wine or a skål with aquavit, mostly the latter. Aquavit glasses, once emptied, were immediately refilled.

Long story short, a Disputationsfest is lots of fun but can be a one-way ticket to extreme drunkenness if one is not wary. 

I was as wary as I could be while still being polite, as it had been a long day and I had to catch a bus home. Since I had been assured that F.'s Disputationsfest would be "informal," I had emailed Joe that I would probably be back to the hotel around 7pm. I actually got home slightly after midnight. When I left, the party was still going full swing, if not actually ramping up.

The only negative thing I can say about a Disputationsfest is hardly a complaint, but just an observation that all the interruptions make it difficult to keep up a sustained conversation with one's neighbors. I never did get to hear the end of T.'s story of landing at a small airport up north earlier in the day, made in a blizzard with severe crosswinds, nor did I get to hear as much as I would have liked of K.'s (the graduate student seated opposite me) stories about the tribulations of gathering flatworms in Russia.

(An aside—the good news is that taking a bus downtown and walking through the streets of Uppsala at midnight on a Friday feels perfectly safe.)

The Frozen Tundra, or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Byråkrati

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As I mentioned before, briefly, on Wednesday as I was suiting up to depart Akademihotellet for good, our Personal Numbers showed up in the mail. This was somewhat unexpected, as we had applied for them just the previous Thursday, and had been told that we should expect to wait 10-14 days for their arrival. Nonetheless, it was good news, because as Jennifer described at some length a few days ago, it is difficult to actually accomplish anything in Sweden without your personal number.

The irony of the personal number is that you already know most of it, and could compute a bit of what's missing. In fact, we were really only waiting on three digits each, our so-called "birth numbers," which are nearly random. The complete personal number is a ten-digit number which looks like this:

YYMMDD-BBBC

Y, M, and D are for the year, month, and day of your birth; B is the three digit birth number (in which the last digit is odd if you are male and even if you are female); and C is a check digit, computed by multiply every other digit by 2, adding the results to the sum of the remaining digits, and subtracting the ones digit of the result from 10. (The complete description of the Personal Number system can be found in the SKV 704 brochure available from Skatteverket, but alas, as of publication this no doubt riveting read is only available in Swedish . If you are curious, you can check out SKV 717B, "Population Registration in Sweden.") BTW, on your 100th birthday, the hyphen before your birth number becomes a plus. Congratulations!

Having acquired our personal numbers, we devoted Thursday morning to taking care of some of the things we couldn't do without them. First stop, the bank. We picked one which was recommended by the University as being used to dealing with students and foreigners. Setting up an account only took about half an hour, but that half hour was a series of interesting revelations regarding the Swedish banking system. For example, there is no such thing as a joint bank account in Sweden. Just doesn't exist, apparently. Also, the banks would very much rather that you didn't come to the bank. Ever. So they charge you fees (which they admit up front are nearly extortionate) for any business you conduct in the bank. Not that you can necessarily conduct our business there even if you want to—the bank we were at doesn't handle cash. That's right, it's a bank (the central Uppsala branch of a major Scandinavian banking firm, mind you) which neither takes in nor hands out cash. What can you do there, other than open an account? I don't know. There's also no such thing as a personal check in Sweden. Bills are paid online or through the bank, and to give money to another person you have to transfer it to their account, through a process which we'll have to have explained when it comes time to pay the rent. Checks from US banks are viewed with disdain at best, suspicion at worst, and are cashed only after a huge fee is charged.

So, we placed an order for the Swedish equivalent of a couple of debit cards, got a personal card reader device which enables you to do secure banking over the internet, and set off to find the next branch of the same bank, which would take our cash deposit. This was handled fast enough that we had time to grab a sandwich from a little cafe (a skink och ost (ham and cheese) baguette for Jennifer, and a salami och brie ciabatta for Joe, plus a coke, 127 SEK) before heading to our next stop, Migrationsverket.

The Migration Board's offices in Uppsala are only open from 1–4 Monday through Wednesday, and 1–4:30 on Thursday (that's "Mo–On: 13–16, To: 13–16:30" in the local parlance). We had to go there to obtain a paper copy of our Uppehållstillstånden. Armed with a bus map and an online mapping program, I had determined that the #6 bus, which runs right by Jennifer's office, would get us there. So, we hopped the #6, took it to the Bolandsparken stop, and got out, assuming that #10 Bolandsparken would be easy to spot.

We found ourselves in the middle of a large field of snow. Across a set of railroad tracks was an industrial park, beyond that some factories, and in the distance the largest water tower I've ever seen. As the industrial park seemed to be in the right direction, we set off that way. This would have been fine, except that temperatures had plummeted overnight, and the slush covered parking lot had turned into a sheet of solid ice. What's more, Migrationsverket wasn't listed on any of the directories. 10 minutes of scouting turned up the (obvious in retrospect) solution: cross the deadly parking lot to the next open field of snow, go through that to the imposing-yet-open gate through the razor wire topped fence, cut through another parking lot to find, in the middle of a bunch of factories, the Uppsala Migrationsverket office.

By this time it was 15 minutes past 1, and apparently every other immigrant in town decided to show up at opening also, because the house was packed. Fortunately, we weren't applying for anything, so we didn't even have to take a queue number (you have to take a queue number for pretty much everything in Sweden), we just went to window number four, and by 1:30 we had our Uppehållstillstånden.

At this point, Jennifer had to go to work for a meeting, so I took her passport and her letter of employment and went to Försäkringskassan. I had actually been there once before, because while there's some information about benefits in English online, there's nothing about applying or eligibility, so on Tuesday I headed down to the office to find out what we needed to do. After a few minutes wait I was helped by an extremely happy, chatty fellow who showed me what forms I needed to fill out and what paperwork I needed to bring (and agreed that, yes, I had to wait until I had my personal number before applying). 

Thursday, I got queue number 223, and the counter was on 207 with a full waiting room, so I settled in for a longer wait. 45 minutes later, I was sitting in front of desk number 3. Puzzlingly, the guy I talked to this time wanted slightly different stuff than the first guy had—he was satisfied with our Uppehållstillstånden, but he wanted different forms for each of us (the first guy said one form for the two of us, but this guy gave me a brief, blank look and then said, "But you are different people," with which I could hardly disagree), didn't want a copy of our passports (making him like the only official in Sweden who hasn't made a photocopy of our passports), and agreed that Jennifer was a student, not an employee. Whatever. In the end, he seemed happy (I use the term loosely here, you understand), so I was happy, and I went home.

If only it was this easy to deal with Comcast, I'd be all set.