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.