Goodbye, city life!

This morning marked the end of our residence on Dragarbrunnsgatan. It was actually a little sooner then we had anticipated—we were thinking we had the room through the night of 31 March, but it turned out we had to check out by noon that day. So Sunday night saw a little more frantic shuttling back and forth from Flogsta than originally planned, with the result that we set a new personal best: it usually takes us about five minutes after we move into a hotel room to completely trash the place, and this time the disaster zone was well under way a good twelve hours prior to our actual arrival. Yay, us.

I already miss the view of the castle and the cathedral, but honestly it was probably time to get out of Dodge anyway. The weather has started to turn this week, not to what you would call warm, but that wintery edge is gone, and the people are feeling it. Despite having a bedroom window which faced a Karaoke bar for the past two months, up until this past weekend we had never really noticed any late night whooping and hollering; with the change in the weather, though, the kids are definitely staying out more, a situation which I'm sure will only get more pronounced over the next few weeks. So, between the 2 am Bon Jovi sing-alongs and the 5 am sunrise, there was starting to be a little hindrance of the blessed state that is somnolence (not so much on my part, mind you—my somnolence has never really trucked with hindrance—but there is another, less doughty sleeper to be considered).

And so we find ourselves in the bucolic fastness that is Flogsta. If our apartment but faced a little further west, we would in fact have an unhindered view from the bedroom of fallow fields rolling off towards the distant trees, which is in no way to belittle the commanding view of the Enköpingsvägen expressway that we actually possess. Certainly no danger of karaoke here.

With apologies to Francis Strand, the Swedish word for today is ankdamm.

Language Notes Part 3

On Monday and Wednesday nights, I take the #18 bus out to the building pictured above, and attend Swedish A1 for Beginners. The class is offered through Folkuniversitetet, which is sort of like a nation-wide community college, with campuses (or buildings at least) in all major cities. My class of 11 people includes a Spaniard, a Moldavian, a Greek, a French, an Italian, a Chinese, a Japanese, and three Germans. The class is therefore taught in English, of course. How strange it must be for these other students, to learn a foreign language in a foreign language. But everyone speaks English, and most of them speak at least one more language as well.

We have all learned a bit about each other, as we go around the room and practice introducing ourselves ("Jag heter Jennifer, och jag kommer från Michigan," I said on Day 1, so for a brief time the teacher though I was Canadian). Most other students are associated with Uppsala University, and several are scientists. The Moldavian woman is studying law in Stockholm, and had to take some sort of exams for four days in a row over the Easter break ("But Easter isn't really for a month yet, so I don't care," she said, and the Greek guy nodded in agreement).

This last week I managed a fake phone call with one of the Germans, during which we properly greeted each other, inquired as to what each other were doing, and arranged to meet at some later time and place. In a lull, I asked whether German or English was more helpful to her in learning Swedish. "German, certainly," she said. "But they pronounce things so oddly."

I haven't taken a class of any kind for a long time now, and I must say I have a new appreciation for all you community college teachers out there. It is true that we students are, for the most part, self-motivated; however... how shall I put this... we are all individuals, as well, with widely differing personalities and abilities and agendas. Riding herd on such a bunch can't be too easy, but our teacher T. manages with humor and patience. I like her very much, even if she does keep insisting that we try again to make this peculiarly Swedish sound, the voiceless palatal-velar fricative, indicated in Swedish by the letters sj, sk, or skj.

So what does the "sje-sound" sound like? I thought perhaps it sounded a bit like a Chinese "hw" kind of sound, but the Chinese student disagrees and struggles with it as much as anyone. At Swedish in 1000 Difficult Lessons, one commentator described it as "trying to hiss like a cat while gurgling." T. insists quite rightly that we must recognize it when others say it, although we ourselves can get away with just making a "sh" sound instead... "... if we're sissies," is the unspoken end I hear to that sentence. But perhaps I'm the only one who thinks this way. One of the Germans refuses to do it at all.

What is "The Stuff"? (besides bad, I mean)

You might recall that, when last I wrote, it was Tuesday, and I had gone in to work but had then been sent home, due to our little fire Friday evening. On Wednesday, everyone on my floor got an email from the boss advising us to just stay home this week. I quote her here: "... I spoke with the [university maintenance] and the clean-up company today and they will start with the corridors and put in some extra ventilation which will make it possible for everybody to work in the offices. But for the moment I would really recommend you to stay home and work if you can. It does not feel good to breathe "the stuff" and [E.] said that if you close the door and open the windows "the stuff" comes in under the door ..."

What, you may ask, is "the stuff?" Well, I didn't know, and I couldn't stand not knowing what "the stuff" was anymore, so I went in this morning, ostensibly to fetch some some more things to read at home, but also of course to poke about and see how things were going. I walked in to find the floor of my corridor has been covered with a Tyvek-like substance. The air smelled of... something, something not good. Our two technicians were in the corridor near the break room, hovering over a lab cart filled with glassware and looking rather grim, their normally pristine lab coats covered in smudges. "Look at this," AS. said to me, and picked up a bottle. "We just put this through the dishwasher, and this is how they came out." The bottle was covered in a thin smear of nasty oily brownish... stuff. This appears to be "the stuff," and it's covering the furniture, corridor walls, and just about every surface in the corridor. No one knows exactly what "the stuff" is, although it is almost certainly the result of burned plastics. And if not even the hot soapy water of the laboratory dishwasher can wash off "the stuff," you know it's nasty.

E. has been coming in to work each day anyway, at least for a little time, and he came by my office this morning and admitted cheerfully that breathing "the stuff" had given him a headache yesterday. He did say that he thought that the air had gotten better with every passing day, and as we sat with my office door closed and the window open, it didn't seem too bad. I looked at some data for a while, then it was time for fika. Besides myself, E. and V. were the only inhabitants of the second floor around, and V. had just come by to meet with a student, and said he had no intention of staying.

After a half hour downstairs, we went back up, to find that they had begun cleaning, which meant that they were stirring up "the stuff," and the smell was much increased. We hustled to our respective offices to shut ourselves in. I thought I would just take a quick peek at some new data before I left... then I looked at some more, then some more (DNA sequences are like potato chips, you can't do just one)... while I sat there looking at my beautiful sequences, my eyes burning just ever so slightly, another staff member stopped by, on his way back from retrieving something from his office. "You know that you are voluntarily poisoning yourself," he said, in his usual jovial manner. "Ha ha," I said. "... really?" "Yes, I think so," he said.

Well, even I can take a hint, eventually. I left soon thereafter, just before noon, having spent a grand total of probably two hours at most exposed to "the stuff." Joe and I then spent the afternoon preparing for our move this weekend to Flogsta by running out to Ikea again, for sheets and towels. What will work be like on Monday? Tune in then...

Light Fixtures

The standard plug-and-hook fixture.

The little plug cable.

The light fixture. Note the little bar which catches the hook, and the white box for clipping the wire in.

Tah-dah!

This week's reason I won't want to leave Sweden when they inevitably kick us out: light fixtures. Seriously, light fixtures. In unfurnished Swedish apartments, overhead light fixtures are not always included. Instead, there's a standard ceiling fixture in each room, which has a tiny electrical outlet and a little hook. All the ceiling lamps in the stores are built to fit this mount: they have some kind of gadget to catch the hook, and they have a little box that the light fixture is wired to. All you have to do is buy a tiny cable which fits the outlet on your ceiling, clip the cable to the box in the light fixture, plug it in to the little ceiling outlet, and clip the fixture to the little hook. Voila! With no wiring, and no sinking anchors into your ceiling, you've got a new fixture. Want to move the dorky fixture the last people left into another room? It'll take all of three minutes.

There's something to be said for living in a nation of unapologetic apartment dwellers.

Waffle Day!

As if a four day Easter weekend wasn't enough holiday for one week, today Sweden celebrates Waffle Day! Actually, it doesn't have anything to do with Easter, it's just that this year 25 March happens to fall a day after Annandag Påsk. Why waffles? Well, 25 March is the Day of the Virgin Mary in the Catholic Church, or Vår Fru Dag, and the faster you say "Vår Fru Dag," the more it sounds like "Våffel Dag!"

So, Swedes celebrate by eating waffles. Pretty much the only indication I saw today that it was Waffle Day was when I was in Clas Ohlson, which is sort of a mid-century department store sort of place—adjustable wrenches, frying pans, lightbulbs, office supplies, alarm clocks. Anyway, they were serving little heart-shaped waffles with ice cream and strawberry jam.

Not wanting to miss out on such an important cultural experience, we had waffles and coffee for afternoon snack today. We don't have a waffle iron, so I had to get waffles from the grocery store (fresh, not frozen), along with some lactose free creme fraiche and, of course, strawberry jam.

Having celebrated in the finest tradition of Waffle Day, I am left only to ask: how is this different than every other day in Sweden?

The post "Post-Påsk Post" Fiasco Post

I had originally intended the following post to follow Joe's Easter post:

Post-Påsk addendum: A quick addendum about Easter here—like kids asking for candy, there are some more Halloween-ish prank traditions associated with this holiday. At fika Thursday, V. mentioned that this is the week during which you are supposed to do silly things like sneak "Kick me" signs onto the backs of unsuspecting classmates or colleagues (I didn't notice anyone doing this, but I checked myself when I got back to my office), and Z. said mentioned that when she lived in a large apartment with several roommates, someone switched all the labels on their personal foodstuffs. The oddest thing that happened this week was that all members of my department got an email from the boss on Friday, written so she said from her husband's email address, saying that her office had burned down because her broom had backfired as she was on her way to Blåhall, so she won't be getting out emails for a while. The last last sentence from the mysterious email said that the firemen advised her to go home and drink something strong. It is not clear to me whether this is her joke on us, or her perhaps her husband's joke on her, but I guess I'll find out Tuesday, when the normal work schedule resumes.

Well, it turns out it was no joke whatsoever. My advisor's office (and the adjacent office, and part of the main lab) got burned to a crisp last Friday. She was working in the afternoon, reading in the break area, when the fire broke out in her office and smoke started pouring out of her office door. She sounded the alarm and got out, after initially trying to put it out herself. Fortunately no one was hurt (being a holiday, no one else was around), the things that were lost are replaceable, and in a strange coincidence, earlier in the week she had just moved some personal items that would have been irreplaceable.

So her office is uninhabitable, the lab cannot be used, and they only let us in this morning long enough to get some things and get out, because they (the local equivalent of the HazMat people, I guess) are not happy about the air quality in the second-floor corridor yet, as a lot of plastic was burned and the smell is still quite strong. We got a tour of the damage, too, (see the gallery for pictures). I have things I should read anyway, and can and will do this reading from home, but when will I be able to go back work? I'll let you know when I do...

Glad Post*

*That's a (very) little Svengelska joke. The traditional Easter greeting here is Glad Påsk, and the 'å' is pronounced a lot like a long 'o' in English.

It's Easter, as I'm sure you've noticed, and an early one at that. Just about the earliest Easter there can be, and the earliest any of us likely to experience or have experienced (Easter hasn't fallen on it's earliest possible date, March 22, since 1818, and won't again until 2285). Which reminds me, Happy Easter Birthday, Aunt P.! It's going to be a long haul until the next one for you (2060, I believe), but take it from someone born on Modal Easter Day, it's not such a big thing.

Birthdays aside, Påsk is a pretty big deal in Sweden, as it turns out. Well, not so much the day itself, but it's the center of a four day national holiday: Långfredag, Påskaften, Påskdagen, and Annandag Påsk. It's a time for spring things here, just like everywhere, I suppose, specifically spring cleaning, airing out the country house, feeding the witches candy, changing the curtains to something flowery, decorating the house with birch twigs covered in colorful feathers, and eating turkey. Yes, you heard me right: turkey. Not a common bird here at all, but apparently something of a Påskaften dinner tradition, and Påskaften is the day for all the big Easter family celebrations here, not the day itself.

Right, so, witches. You see, the thing is, in Scandinavia, Easter is when all the witches go to meet the devil (or possibly Odin) at a place called Blåkulla. Since they are all on the road (as it were), there's a chance that one of them might decide to get off the broom for a while and stop by your place en route. The wisest course, as someone who doesn't want to be on the witches' bad side, is to have something handy with which to bribe them to leave you alone, and the most popular choice of bribes is sweets. Naturally, the children of Scandinavia, being a bright and enterprising lot, are not about to let such a golden opportunity pass them by; so, they traditionally dress up as witches and go door to door asking for candy. Let me emphasize hat last bit: asking. None of this, "Give me candy or I'll do something bad to your house," stuff here. In fact, when you give them candy, they are supposed to give you a Glad Påsk card in exchange. Oh, you're allowed to give them money instead, if you prefer. Say what you will about them, those witches are always practical.

Living as we do in a building of the more or less itinerant, we didn't actually get any Easter witches dropping by, but we armed ourselves with candy just in case. There's a lot of the stuff you'd expect, like peanut M&M things, and little fruit jellies, and gummy this and that, and chocolate covered marzipan. There's also a lot of marshmallow hens, and banana flavored slugs, and salted licorice so salty it burns the tongue (seriously, ouch!).

My favorite new Easter treat, though, has got to be Påskmust. This is a soda only available at Easter. Well, Easter and Christmas, because it's actually Julmust, and they just relabel it in the spring. Whatever you call it, it's sort of an unnatural cross between a Dr. Pepper and a Grape Nehi, which as long as you keep it really cold is quite tasty.

Another Påsk tradition we latched onto is that of Påsklillja, which despite the name are actually yellow daffodils. They're sold in grocery stores all over the place in the weeks leading up to Easter. Either we got a particularly prescient batch, or the Swedish florists really know what they're doing, because both pots of flowers we got waited until Easter morning to suddenly burst into bloom. On the other hand, they might have done a day earlier if Saturday hadn't been the coldest day of the winter for most of Sweden. For us, it alternated between glaring sunshine and near-whiteout-condition blizzard all day, with a low of -12° overnight. We headed out during one of the sunny bits to go and see the crocusses coming up all over the castle lawn, and to wander around the eerily deserted downtown area (most shops seem to close for the whole four days). Then it was home to shelter from the storm and have a dinner of Påskmust and Spaghetti Carbonara, followed by an encore presentation of "The Kipper and the Corpse."

By the way, if Swedish Easter traditions seem odd to you, check out this nugget from Wikipedia:

In Norway, in addition to cross-country skiing in the mountains and painting eggs for decorating, a contemporary tradition is to solve murder mysteries at Easter. All the major television channels show crime and detective stories (such as Agatha Christie's Poirot), magazines print stories where the readers can try to figure out who did it, and many new books are published. Even the milk cartons change to have murder stories on their sides. Another tradition is Yahtzee.

Oh, those wacky Norwegians! Well, I'm off to try to solve "The Mystery of the Bean Soup Recipe," and Jennifer, as you can see, is hard at work studying her Swedish. Happy Easter!

Junk food

Some weeks are long and stressful, and you're tired, and hungry, and in need of something quick, tasty, and greasy. Some nights, you just need fast food.

This week was such a week, and tonight was such a night. There is in fact a McDonalds just down the block from our current apartment—you can see it in this picture taken from our front window. It seems to be a fairy popular destination for local teenagers, but we haven't tried it, preferring instead to walk the extra block to a place called Max, in a nice old building next to the old City Hall in Stora Torget. Max is a Swedish-owned fast food joint that got its start in northern Sweden, and outcompeted the local McDonalds up there so completely that the McDonalds closed, and Max has since expanded southwards. Max proudly advertises the fact that all their beef and chicken products are grown in Sweden, and are therefore carefully regulated. (The Wikipedia entry for Max, as of today, reads more than a bit like someone in their own marketing division may have written it.)

The Max menu is a lot like McDonalds. Burgers, fries, chicken nuggets, fish sandwiches, etc. Max also sells some things that McDonalds doesn't, like bean salads and lite beer. Other differences include the fact that the chicken nuggets taste like chicken, and they have really really good onion rings. (Whatever other culinary oddities they may practice, there is no doubt that the Swedish people have mastered the art of deep fat frying.) As a customer you also get your own copy of the daily newspaper Dagens Nyheter to peruse as you eat from the comfort of bright green plastic chairs.

Another big difference is the price. Fast food does not mean cheap food. The delicious and nutritious meal pictured here (Joe's chipotle burger meal (a brand new menu item, and rather tasty), including fries and drink, and my onions rings and 9-piece nuggets, including two sauces (note that they say "Homemade" on them—it is unclear what that means in this context)) set us back 131 SEK. Still well less than half of what you would pay for dinner out anywhere else that we have seen. And, on those rare nights when you just need fast food, it's worth it.

Grocery Shopping, Revisited

Tonight, by special request, I'm going to take a moment to answer a few questions about Swedish grocery stores.

Can you describe what the stores actually look like? For instance, do they look like Rogers? With one exception, the Swedish grocery stores of my experience have been significantly smaller than their American counterparts. This is, no doubt, partly due to the fact that we are still living downtown; however, the ICA a few minutes from our new place in Flogsta is no larger than the downtown ICA or the Hemköp across the street from me as I write this. Part of the size difference comes from the fact that grocery stores here sell little other than, well, food. Oh, sure, there's an aisle of paper goods and cleaning supplies, and a few toiletries, but no greeting cards, no pharmacy, no wine and very little beer (nothing with more than 2.5% alcohol, in fact), and no magazines other than a few at the register. Beyond that, though, the stores here simply don't have as many choices for any individual item. For example, any given store will only have about half a dozen varieties of Campbell's soup, and maybe only a dozen varieties of soup all told. Instead of an aisle of breakfast cereal, there's maybe 8 kinds of prepared cereal, plus some muesli and oatmeal and whatnot. Say you want to buy something like refried beans? Expect one brand of beans, available in one variety. For something more popular, like tuna, maybe two brands plus a generic, each in two or maybe three varieties.
Not so much Rogers as Zicks, in other words.

Are there carts like ours? Well, slightly smaller, but yes, they do have shopping carts. They don't get used too often, though. They have the same little baskets that American stores use, as well. The most popular option, though, is something I hadn't seen before. It's sort of an oversized basket that has one handle you can fold out to carry the basket, and a second handle you can fold out instead to drag the basket behind you like a little cart (Did I mention the tiny wheels? I should have mentioned the tiny wheels. Note to self, mention the tiny wheels next time.)

Does one go through cashier lines? Yes. Again, similar, but smaller. The main difference is at the tail end of the register counter. They all have a belt the cashier can put your food on after it's been scanned, but they also have a sliding divider. The cashier pulls it to one side, and all the food goes sliding down to that side of the counter. Then, before they ring the next person up, the cashier slides the divider over to the other side, and the next person's food goes down the other side. They do this because after you pay, you'll be down there bagging your groceries, and they don't want to wait for you to finish.

Are there baggers, and will they help you to the parking lot? First of all, no, there are no baggers. In fact, it's rare for a store of any kind in Sweden to bag your purchase for you. As for helping you to the parking lot, well, most of the stores I've been to so far don't have a parking lot. Get out of downtown, and many will have a small parking lot (although it isn't in any way unusual for you to be expected to pay to park there while you shop), but in the downtown area there aren't any parking lots like that, just structures.

Even if they had parking lots, I doubt anyone would bag your stuff and take it to your car. Swedes make a big deal about equality, and to them bagging your groceries for you isn't service, it's servility, and it makes Swedes very uncomfortable (both to give and receive). They tend to view American customer service as disingenuous at best, and invasive at worst.

I assume you use your own bags... Yes, I use them all the time, not just at the grocery store, because with few exceptions all stores charge you for bags. They keep the bags at the start of the register line, and if you want one you put it on the conveyor belt with your stuff, and they sell it to you. Only a few crowns, but it adds up.

How often then do you grocery shop? Pretty much every day. Most people seem to stop at the store on their way home from work and buy a day or two worth of food. Keep in mind that most everyone is walking, biking, or taking the bus to the store, so no one buys more than they can carry.

Have you found Swedish brand of food that you really enjoy? Well, Hemköp had Mamas Meatballs on sale for 15 SEK per kilo last week, and they were pretty tasty (not to mention the cheapest food we've found in the whole country).

And the important question—can semlas be sent across international borders? I don't think there are any international accords preventing the shipment of semlor across borders, but they go stale wicked fast. A day old semla can be partially resuscitated by serving it in a bowl of warm, cinnamon scented milk, but after that they're pretty much done. Anyway, it's Easter in a few days, so semla season is just about over!

Well, that's it for this week in grocery shopping here in Uppsala. Next it's back to the pharmacy!

"Bandy, bandy (la la, spela bandy)"

The title of today's post should be sung to the opening line of "Monday, Monday" by The Mamas and the Papas (where spela means "play"). It's a sort of in-joke here, to sing a song about bandy (which has the reputation of being an old-fashioned sort of sport) to the tune of a popular, kind-of-hippie song. And the title therefore neatly covers the two big events of the day.


First of all, Uppsala hosted the country-wide finals of the bandy season, for both the women's and men's club teams. We had thought about going, but it had been long and tiring week for both of us, and the prospect of paying a total of 800SEK for the privilege of standing in the cold for 6 hours was not especially appealing. 


We still got to enjoy a bit of the festival atmosphere, though, as fans started parading through the streets, singing and drumming, around 10am, and then later, between the men's a women's finals, a much larger crowd went by on their way to the stadium, strung out of blocks and stopping traffic in all directions. At one point they released a bunch of blue and yellow balloons, which we live close enough to the stadium to see once they flew above the building. 


The women's final was at 11am, and featured AIK (a famous team from Stockholm) vs IFK Nässjö (from, err, Nässjö, I think). AIK was heavily favored to win, and in fact did so 3-0, scoring all three goals in about the span of 4 minutes. The men's match featured Sandviken AIK (who we watched beat Hammarby last weekend in Stockholm) vs Edsbyn IF. I had thought Sandviken would be a shoe-in, because they really dominated the semifinal series with Hammarby, while Edsbyn just barely managed to get past their semi-final opponents Västerås. However, just 7:30 into the game, Edsbyn led 3-1, and went on to win 11-6. Shows what I know about bandy! The winners get golden helmets, as well as a somewhat silly looking trophy that I think is supposed to be a bandy ball and bandy sticks, but looks more like a walnut and chopsticks. As I write this it's now midnight, and bars are closing, so there are now revelers in the streets again, hooting and hollering.


The other big event of the day was Melodifestivalen, the Swedish finals of the schlager contest. Someone asked me at lunch yesterday about whether I was planning to watch "the great Swedish cultural tradition" this weekend; I thought they meant the bandy, but it turns out he meant this song contest, this same contest that was won many years ago by Abba, thereby launching their career. Tonight's finals would determine the contestant that Sweden will put up for the Eurovision competition, which will be held in Belgrade. So we watched most of it, being alternately amused and horrified by some of the contestants—at one point, Joe wondered aloud why someone had not set this one fellow, Christer Sjögren, on fire long ago, thereby putting him out of his misery, and saving us the pain of listening to him warble sickly-sweet sentimental songs about Europe.


The media had been making much of the coincidence this year of the bandy finals being on the same day as Melodifestivalen, and the local paper featured wise-acre quizzes to help you determine whether you were a bandy person or a schlager person. Not too surprisingly, from what little I could translate, I came out as a bandy person. But I must say that I got into Melodifestivalen enough to be incensed by some of the voting. The popular phone-in vote was done by region, and the populace of Gothenberg have much to answer for, for giving Christer Sjögren even a single point. Meanwhile, my favorite band, a sort of medieval-inspired rock band called Nordman came in sixth, while the tune I considered to be clearly the best radio-friendly piece of bubblegum dance pop, by a group called BWO, came in third. (Don't worry, you can read all about them at the Wikipedia "Melodifestivalen" link above!)


Oh, and I completely forgot to mention that, along with the general festive atmosphere in town today, we had a protest in the town square! Maybe a hundred people came marching up the pedestrian-only center of town, carrying banners and chanting "USA ut ur Irak" (I'll just let you guess what that means). But really, once you've chanted that a couple dozen times, there isn't much else to say, and the crowd sort of broke up and wandered off after a few minutes.

Apartment in a Box

I spent a couple of afternoons looking at second hand stores around town. A couple of them weren't bad, and if we were willing to take a couple of months to gather the furniture we need, and if we didn't have to pay for delivery for each item, we could put together a pretty decent apartment that way.

Alternately, I could go to IKEA, pick all of our furniture in one afternoon, and have it delivered that night for 495 SEK total.

So, I opted for that last bit. The delivery guy said, "You've got a whole apartment in one trip." Not quite, but it's pretty close. I've spent the last two days assembling flat-pack furniture (and struggling with javascript (grrrr....)), as a result of which, my planned title for this post ("I Love Flat-Pack Furniture") had to be discarded as it had developed a lack of truth. Once my hands stop hurting, I'm sure the love will return.

In the meantime, you can watch the apartment grow:



Next week: colorful stuff!

Welcome to Flogsta

Last week turned out to be a bit busier than expected, but it's had a welcome result: we found an apartment. It's been a long hunt, with a bunch of near misses. The first place we looked at seemed fine to us, but some of Jennifer's coworkers were horrified. We're still not sure exactly what's wrong with the neighborhood it was in, but it seems to be the closest thing Uppsala has to a slum.

By a month in, it turned out that we weren't even using the right resources. We'd been looking mostly at the websites of large apartment companies, which do indeed advertise available apartments. The problem is, apartments are offered on a queue system: once everyone has expressed interest in the apartment, the person who has been waiting for a place the longest gets first stab at it, then the next person, and so on. It's all very egalitarian, sure, but it turns out that the average wait time to get a place is something like two years. So we could have a nice place by the time we leave.

Instead, we turned to a couple of places that list sublets that are avaiable. These are available on short notice, but suffer from exactly the opposite problem: they are all totally first-come, first-serve. It took a couple of weeks before we even began to find places that weren't already gone. The next challenge was deciphering the ads. It turns out my rudimentary Swedish doesn't handle classifieds shorthand too well, but with a dictionary and enough time I was able to figure most of it out. My favorite place was an "exciting opportunity near downtown," which either had an east-facing balcony or was over a cheese shop. Turns out it was on the top floor of an industrial building, wedged in between the train tracks and a factory. Yummy.


Anyway, we are now the proud owners of a student apartment in Flogsta. Well, not owners so much as tenants. Sub-tenants really—we're subletting it from a nice student until the end of August. It isn't the perfect arrangement: Flogsta is on the western edge of town, not on one of the two bus lines that goes past Jennifer's place of work, in a huge block of student apartment buildings. Jennifer's commute will be significantly longer now that she has to switch buses, and we lose our pretty view of the cathedral and castle.

Having said that, it's a nice apartment, with two bedrooms, a small kitchen that looks out onto the front room, a small balcony, and a walk-in closet. And while the view isn't exactly spectacular, it is conveniently located just a few minute's walk from a large grocery store. It's also unfurnished, so we're going to have to get some furniture after all.

Looks like it's back to IKEA.

Bandy! Bandy! Bandy!

Next weekend the bandy finals are being held in Uppsala, and in preparation the town has been decked out in orange flags. Bandy, as I may have mentioned before, is essentially soccer played on ice, with hockey skates and sticks, and a baseball-sized
orange golf ball (well, that's what it looks like, anyway) instead of a puck. Anyway, we had been planning on going to the finals, possibly with a group of Jennifer's coworkers. Due to a little scheduling mix-up on our part though, we sort of double booked next Saturday, so we're not going to go. Yesterday, though, N., who had been talking about arranging a department outing to the final, offered instead to take the two of us to one of the semi-finals, which was played today in Stockholm. He even offered to drive, making it a very easy trip indeed. So, despite the dismal overcast skies and threat of rainfall, we hopped into N.'s car this afternoon and hied towards Södermalm and Zinkensdamms Idrottsplats, storied home of Hammarby Bandy.

Traffic wasn't too bad, so we got there with a little time to spare. N. dropped us at the stadium and went off to find parking (no parking lot, you have to fend for yourself), and when he got back we decided to drop into the little grill outside the stadium entrance and have a sausage and some fries before we headed in. N. had warned us in advance that there are no seats at Zinkensdamms IP, just raised standing platforms, but we were there early enough that we pretty much had our pick of spots, so we headed up into the back and got places next to a rail for something to lean on. The weather actually turned out to be pretty cooperative—5° and no rain, which is positively balmy for a bandy match.

By ten minutes to kick off the stands were pretty full, and the teams came out onto the ice to loud acclaim and/or jeering, as appropriate. I should mention that Hammarby, the home team, hadn't been expected to get into the semi-finals in the first place, and they lost their last meeting to today's team, Sandviken, by 14–2. Nevertheless, the crowd was, erm, vocal in their support of the boys. The singing started up pretty much the second the team hit the ice, and let up only for half time. This is not the sort of everyone-for-themselves cheering that I'm used to at American sporting events, but rather the entire crowd (except for the unfortunate visitors) singing together for 45 minutes. Not the same song that whole time, mind you, but a series of more or less recognizable tunes ("When the Saints Come Marching In", "Over There", "When Johnny Comes Marching Home Again", some bit from Aida, "Go West", and something that sounded a lot like the base line from "Seven Nation Army", just to name a few), all with the words changed to

"Hammarby! Hammarby! Hammarby, Hammarby, Hammarby! Hammarby! Hammarby-y! Hammar, Hammar, Hamm-ar-by"

or occassionally "Heja Bajen!" ("Bajen" is the team's nickname—it is meaningless in Swedish, but allegedly it's a joke about how Americans mispronounce the team's name. I don't get it.).

The first half started a little slow, but after a few corner kicks and an indirect kick or two (I'm just going to use the soccer terms to keep things less confusing), not to mention some really bad offsides calls, Sandviken was up to a 1–4 lead by the 35th minute. At this point, Hammarby abruptly woke up and scored 2 more goals, ending the half down 3–4, so we broke for half time on a pretty positive note.

This gave us a chance to sit for ten minutes, during which N. drank some of the coffee he had brought along. Due to the conditions it's played in, coffee has replaced beer as the stadium drink of choice for bandy, with most people bringing thermoses to the games, which in many cases have as much whisky as coffee in them. N. explained that this is the source of a common bandy joke:

Would you like some coffee?
No thanks, I drove to the match.

N.'s coffee was just coffee, though, as he had indeed driven to the match, and Sweden's drunk driving laws are no laughing matter (a single drink with dinner is enough to put you well above the legal limit). Oh, I almost forgot the half time entertainment. As soon as the players were off the ice, one of the ball boys (you have to appreciate a sport where the ball boys have to wear full face masks) brought out a little cone and put it on center ice, and then the crowd began hurling bandy balls out towards it! This was apparently the explanation for the lads with buckets of numbered bandy balls we had passed on entering: you buy a ball, and whoever gets theirs closest to the cone wins a car. Now I'm sorry I didn't buy one.

With the second half the singing returned. There was also a lot of banner waving and some drumming, and I believe someone had a flare at one point. Despite the crowd's enthusiasm, and a notably faster paced game, the second half didn't see much scoring right away. This was in no small part due to some excellent goal tending. Unlike hockey, where the goalie's pads make him nearly as large as the tiny goal behind him, bandy goalies wear no visible padding, and the goals are about half the size of soccer goals. On penalty shots they stretch out their arms to try to block as much of the goal as possible, but it just doesn't look like they'd be able to stop much as that tiny orange ball goes whipping through the air. Still, the score remained the same until about the 80th minute, at which point Sandviken scored again (against the run of play this time, as far as I could tell). There was a brief ray of hope when one of Sandviken's players was red carded in the 83rd minute and sent off, leaving them a man down. A couple of minutes later, with another player in the penalty box, they were reduced to 9 on the field, but still managed to score once more in the 88th minute. Despite the almost certain doom this spelled for their team, though, the fans weren't reduced to grumbling, or leaving early (one or two did, but not a mass exodus by any means). Instead, they started to sing louder.

By the 90th minute, when Hammarby did manage to score one last point for honor, the singing was echoing off the local apartment blocks, and when stoppage time ended and their season was over, the fans just kept singing, completely drowning out the Sandviken victory celebration. In fact, the only thing that shut them up was when the team captain came over and raised a hand for silence, so that he could lead he team in a cheer for the crowd. Then there was some more singing as folks filed out, and one of the fans passing us said something wistful and shrugged and shook Jennifer's hand as if to say, "Good season." Honestly, it was all more than a little touching.

It was a little bit like this:

I survive a conference

Last week, I attended a two-day bioinformatics conference that was held at the Evolutionary Biology Centre. The conference was jointly sponsored by my department, another department at my university (The Linnaeus Centre for Bioinformatics), and another university in town that I haven't mentioned yet, which is Sweden's agricultural university (Sveriges lantbruksuniversitet, or SLU for short—if you can imagine UM and MSU sharing the same town, you pretty much have the idea). 

I'm sure you would all be fascinated to learn more about the topics covered (such as "Position-resolved free energy of amino acid solvation in membranes from molecular dynamics simulations")... but let's just skip that for now. Participation was restricted to students and post-docs, with a couple of keynote talks given by early-career professors, so it was a young-ish crowd of almost 100 registered participants, who came mostly but not entirely from Scandinavian institutions. The two grueling and rigorous days were organized thusly: an outrageously early starting time (10am), two talks, a coffee break, two talks, lunch break, two talks, a coffee break, two talks. Oh, the humanity! The coffee breaks included snacks, although perhaps the reverse order of what you might expect back home: morning snacks were cheese sandwiches with cucumbers and tomato, while the afternoon break featured pastries and fruit; the pitchers of water all had several cucumber slices floating in them. 

Our conference badges all had one or two colored spots on them; these identified us as a group (in a strange coincidence, I was blue and yellow). To force social interactions, during the first day's coffee break, we were instructed to find others with the same colored badges and talk to them.  Then we were supposed to eat lunch with them. Then at the afternoon coffee break we were supposed to introduce someone from our color group to someone from our institution. Then, in a final blow to our egos, we had to... but I'm getting ahead of myself.

On Thursday, after the second set of afternoon talks, we also had wine and snacks, and then the conference banquet, which was held at Gästrike-Hälsinge Nation. I was greatly looking forward to dinner at G-H Nation, because the student nations are one of the famous ancient traditions of this university. The Nations' buildings are some of the most attractive in Uppsala, with G-H Nation being a good example of a more recent one, having been built in 1880. And indeed, the banquet was impressive, held in a high-ceilinged, wooden-floored room with large windows, and oil portraits of noteworthy (and now presumably long dead) G-Hers staring down at us from the walls. It was formal enough that there was a seating chart and our names at our places (which led to some confusion and milling about, because it they had accidently reversed the order of the tables on the chart), but it was much less formal than a Disputationsfest. The food was simple but very good—pinot grigio from France, salmon in a mustard sauce with potatoes, a chocolate flourless cake with mango and passionfruit slices for dessert. 

 

In between dinner and dessert, our color groups had one more team-building task: we were given 50 plastic bendy straws, 6 pieces of A4 paper, 1 roll of scotch tape, and told to make the longest span bridge we could out of these materials in 5 minutes. The best Team Blue and Yellow could come up with was to use as much tape and as many straws as possible, and we came in second to Team Green, which built an elegant arching device reminiscent of a suspension bridge. I spent far too much of the rest of the evening thinking about our bridge, and where we went wrong. (Several other people confessed the next morning that the bridge building exercise, while fun, had haunted their dreams also! I suppose this sort of behavior is to be expected from a gathering of technically-minded analytical types. Some of you [you know who you are] may be inclined to read more into Team Green beating Team Blue and Yellow than is really necessary.)

After coffee, we were shagged out of the room temporarily while the tables were cleared and put away, and the room was turned into a lounge, complete with soft music, candlelit tables, a multicolored flashing disco ball, and a cash bar in the next room. The G-H Nation choir, which had been practicing downstairs, decided to serenade our party from the stairway, first with a Swedish song that sounded quite fierce, then a gospel tune that I feel that I should know but didn't. Everyone else did, though, judging by their toe-tapping and humming along. I spent about an hour after dinner talking with a fellow from Göteborg about freshwater bacteria and their strange ways, and then left about midnight. I took the scenic route, walking home over the wooden footbridge, lingering to admire the view of the river and lights of the city (see Riverwalk). Apparently some people stayed much later; the opening remarks the next morning included the fact that some people were having so much fun that they had missed the last trains and busses home.

All in all in was a good conference. I met several potential collaborators, as well as hearing about some really interesting work that's not in my field, such as the fellow working on growing artificial hearts and modeling arhythmia. It was a rough two days, with all the coffee breaks and good food and socializing and so forth, but somehow we all made it. Next year, the conference will be held 'way up north, at Umeå University.

Language Notes Part 2

Consider the following joke:

"A termite walks into a bar, and says 'So! Where's the bartender?'"

If you laughed, or groaned, or wished you hadn't read it at all, you are probably a native English speaker. 

At Tuesday's afternoon fika, V. and another student, Z., and I got into a discussion of puns, which I accidently started by referring to the polls that had just opened on the east coast. V. gave me a very strange look, then his face cleared and he said "Oh, polls, polls. Right. I thought you meant poles, and were referring to the East Pole or something." V. said he considers puns a high form of humor. So I asked if he'd like to hear a really bad one, he said yes, the worse the better, so I whipped on the one above. 

While V. and Z. were considering this, S. showed up, and asked what was going on. I was asked to repeat the joke, which I did, and tried this time to emphasize the word "bar" in "bartender," and perhaps even put a little bit of a pause in between the two syllables. Now I was alone in a room with three students, all completely mum, all staring distractedly in different directions. Having just read the book "Culture Shock: Sweden," I have learned that Swedes in general do not reason aloud, but prefer to consider silently. Still, I challenge my American readers, you just try sitting quietly for several minutes waiting for people to get your joke. Not easy! I was just about to burst when S. saved me by admitting that he didn't get it. So I explained, and there was the sort of half-hearted "Oh yes, oh yes, I get it now" that you always get when you have to explain a joke.

Fast forward to today's afternoon fika. Out of the blue, V. says to me "It's very funny, but none of my students got your joke either." Students, what students? It turns out that V. that is the technical coordinator for an undergraduate bioinformatics class, and they sometimes have discussion meetings in the virtual world. He told this joke to his class... and now the joke is being passed around the department, and to their friends, and etc. etc. as an example of a Pun. And I now probably have a reputation as a teller of really bad jokes. So I'm appealing for your support now—I need more bad puns! If you've got some, please feel free to leave them as a comment.

On another bright note, somebody finally said something to me that I've been secretly wanting to hear for a long time. Another postdoc, VP., came by my door at about 3:15 as I was deeply in the middle of a fascinating analysis, and said "Come on, come on. Coffee, coffee. You are not very smart. You've been here more than a month now, and you still don't understand fika? You must have fika. You Americans work too hard. You're in Europe now."

Ahhhh.

Vasaloppet

Today we got up bright and early to watch the televised coverage of Vasaloppet, a 90 km cross country ski race held once a year in Eastern Sweden. The race commemorates Gustav Vasa's flight from his cruel Danish overlords in 1521. He had been traveling the countryside of Dalarna seeking support in his bid to overthrow the Danes. When the people of Mora turned him down, he was forced to flee towards the Norwegian border, but a couple of days later they changed their minds and sent a delegation to catch him. They caught up with him in Sälen, and he returned with them to Mora, where he started his two year campaign to win Sweden's freedom from Denmark.

In 1922, a local newspaperman proposed a long distance ski race over the same course, both to commemorate the deed and to take advantage of the growing interest in skiing. The first race was held that same year, with 119 competitors. Now there are about 18,000 entrants each year, with the race being held at the end of a week of competitions and festivities. So, at 8 this morning, 18,000+ people were lined up at the start line in Sälen, most desperately re-waxing in the face of the rather unexpected snowfall. The first few hundred entrants are numbered in the order they finished the race last year, and grouped at the head of the mass, but behind them are thousands upon thousands of eager amateurs, many of whom will no doubt be struggling to cross the finish line before it closes in twelve hours. In between is 90 km of snow covered pine forest, broken only by the tiny villages which have been turned into giant blueberry soup depots (the traditional refreshment of Vasaloppet, handed out in little paper cups as skiers race by).

The start was fun to watch, everybody racing off to get stuck in a huge mass waiting to get up the first hill. The leaders are just entering Evertsberg now, the 47.1 km mark, so about another hour and a half to go. In the meantime, everyone has spread out, and the television coverage is mostly just a bunch of people skiing through the woods, broken by rather breathless reporting from people in the race calling SVT on their video capable mobiles, and one of the reporters trying desperately to get someone to talk to her at the pit stops.

Now they're interviewing some guy in a sheepskin tunic and a viking helmet, whose best finish was 10,754th place in 2004.

I'll report back with details of the no doubt riveting finish in a bit, or you can check it out for yourself on the Vasaloppet YouTube channel.

… but the men, they were kind of cheesy.

Since reading an article in the Local a couple of weeks ago about a recent reinterpretation of medieval Viking women's clothing, we'd been wanting to go to the University Museum in the Gustavianum building to see the exhibit. Today was too cold and wet to make our planned trip to the Vaksalatorg outdoor market sound very appealing, so we decided that today was Gustavianum day.

Our first stop, though, was the main University Library, the Carolina Rediviva. Jennifer just got her library card, so we wanted to check a couple of things out. It's a huge library, but unfortunately virtually the whole collection is kept in closed stacks, so besides the reading rooms there isn't too much to see. Still, we got a copy of Culture Shock Sweden so that Jennifer can read about all the things she's been doing wrong, and I got a Napoleon bio I've been meaning to get around to for a few years. We had a light lunch in the strange little library cafe (baguette sandwich, mineral water, day old semla and a cup of tea for 70 SEK), stopped off to see the Codex Argenteus once more, and then were on our way.

The Gustavianum is one of the University's oldest buildings, built in the 1620s, with a very distinctive cupola designed to admit light to the anatomical theater added by Olof Rudbeck (for more nattering on about the building, the curious reader is directed to our Sweden 2006 site). Today's destination was, however, the basement, wherein resides the temporary exhibition "New Thoughts on Old Vikings" (OK, I admit it, I just made that last part up). Anyway, it included the new vision of Viking Age female formal wear. It's basically the same as the old vision, except that prudish (male) archeologists have been putting the dress on the poor Viking women backwards. A recent analysis of grave finds, relying mostly on the position of the buckles, coupled with a strong sense that Scandinavians can't have been as frumpy as all that, has led to this new revelation.

The men, on the other hand, do not appear to have fared so well.