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.