April Foo… aw, shucks

So I had this whole April Fool's post planned out, about how I'd gone to Ikea and found heir new line of Ikea Cola, where they sold the syrup and the carbonation in little packets and you assembled it at home. Yes, I know, hah very hah. Anyway, imagine my horror when, while perusing electric kettles at Åhlen's department store, Jennifer pointed out that they're selling home pop machines that let you do just that.

Better luck next year, I suppose.

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?