Cult of My Nemesis

New place, new set of washing machines to beat my head against. Actually, the machines themselves haven't changed that much this time, but the washing machine culture out here in Flogsta, well, that's something different. The fancy booking system back on Dragarbrunnsgatan meant that one could book the laundry room a week in advance, and then have it completely to yourself for a three hour block. Not the most efficient system, from a washing machine usage point of view, but awfully convenient—no trudging down to the laundry room with a full hamper just to find that there's no room at the inn.

Now we're washin' it Flogsta style, though. What does that mean? This is a pretty big complex, so there are four laundry buildings, each with 6 washers and four or five high-capacity dryers (plus and ironing board, and an electric mangle, just in case you decide you don't like having fingers anymore). That's one tvättstuga to just under 200 apartments, or if you prefer, one washing machine per 281 tennants. Nevertheless, it seems to work out pretty well; they are mostly students, after all, so they can't be doing laundry as often as they should. The first time I went, I tried the middle of a weekday afternoon, which up to now has guaranteed me a pretty empty laundry room. Again, though, students now, so naturally 15:00 Tuesday is a prime laundry doing time. There was an empty machine, and I proceeded to load into it, but then I encountered something you don't come across that often here: a chatty Swede. This fellow helpfully pointed out that the machine I was about to use "hadn't been working so well today," (indeed, upon closer inspection, I think it was completely broken), but that there was another one that was "on zero" (all the machines have countdown timers, so this was just a machine that had finished its load) which would probably be a better bet. It's a good thing he was there, actually, or I would have felt a little tentative about the procedure: apparently, when someone's wash is done you just take it out and put it in one of the dozen or so white wire laundry carts scattered around the room. The Swede said, "It's a very un-Swedish system actually, but it works. You just put the clothes in a basket, and no one gets mad that you moved their clothes." He then went on to detail his long standing feud with the crazy girl who uses all six machines at once to wash her equestrian gear and saddle(!?), which he doesn't think is allowed, never mind that you just can't take all the machines. He said that once she was using five machines, and when he started to load the sixth she said he couldn't because she was going to need that one, too, but he explained, "Look, I'm sure that works in southern Stockholm or wherever you're from, but you just can't do that here, even if you do use that tone you just tried on me that I'm sure used to work on your mother." I'm telling you, once you find something they're interested in, the floodgates they do open.

Oh yeah, almost forgot: see the little blue bag on the floor? The virtually ubiquitous laundry bag of Flogsta, better known as an Ikea shopping bag.

Well, many loads of laundry later, we're all clean here again. It's been a long and sort of trying week for a variety of annoying little reasons (such as Jennifer's recently contracted head cold), some of which we'll try to cover over the course of our quiet and restful (fingers crossed) weekend. In any case, we decided we deserved a treat, so tonight we ordered pizza from Luna, the little pizza place in the apartment complex. We've hesitated to do it, as the menu has some oddities, but tonight we figured we should just try it. We ordered a Mexico (ground nut, pepperoni, and bacon?) and a Tropikana (ham, bananas, and curry—verdad!).



OK, so by pepperoni I think they meant banana pepper, but the "ground nut" must have been a mistranslation, because it was Italian sausage! The bacon was in three inch long strips, odd but tasty. Oh, yes, the bananas and curry with ham? Well, it tasted like bananas and curry with ham, which really was pretty good. Live and learn, I guess.

By the way, Jennifer informs me that since this post is about infernal gadgets and our relationship to them, I am morally obligated to relate the final word on the little Husqvarna dishwasher. After the first week, it functioned only as the most expensive, awkward and inefficient dish drying rack we've ever had. Sigh. Farewell, little Husqvarna. Maybe someday you'll grow up to be a sewing machine, or if you work very hard, a chainsaw.

The "Lille Lennart Lottery"

Swedish names came up as a topic of discussion last week at some fika or another, as V.'s sambo is due to deliver their baby on May 5, and they haven't chosen a name yet. V. said he was thinking of the name "Lennart," which caused both K. and P., a female graduate student of a different professor, to make yucky faces and simultaneously say "Lennart?!" in the exact same tone of disbelief and disgust. I ventured my opinion that "Lennart" sounded okay to me, on the face of it, but apparently the name "Lennart" makes a Swede think of nothing as much as a 70 year old man who is both fat and disreputable.

So we discussed names for a while, and apparently shortening "Lennart" to "Lenny" is no good either, because for some reason Swedish jails are disproportionately filled with men whose names end in the letter "y." "You might as well just have the baby in jail, if you name him Jonny or Conny [which is a male name here]," said V.

At some point the conversation lulled, and into the silence I asked who was in charge of the baby betting pool. The what? said everyone. You know, when you bet on the date of the birth, I explained. No, no one here has ever heard of such a thing, they said. What a strange custom! How very American! Let's do it!

So yesterday I officially started the baby betting pool, which I have named the "Lille Lennart Lottery" because the poor child will always be Lennart to me now, I'm afraid. I asked around to get an idea of an appropriate amount of money for a friendly bet, and have settled on 20SEK to buy a day, which conveniently comes in a note. I have to say, for people who have never heard of the custom, they are throwing themselves into it with gusto. People are closely questioning V. as to whether he has any inside information that he's willing to share, and this of course is also generating some slightly bawdy humor at his expense. For his part, V. has announced that he could be bribed into slipping the mother various labor-inducing substances (pineapple is the food of choice in these parts) at the appropriate time. He himself is betting on a date a few days before May 5.

Running the pool is fun, but I am going to miss V., who intends to take his full 8 months of paternity leave at 90% of his salary (80% from the state with a 10% bonus from the University). Yes, you read that right: after the baby is born, he will be gone until January 2009, during which time he will earn 90% of what he is making now. Furthermore, the graduate school "clock" stops for child care (otherwise, you have five years to finish your degree). Isn't that civilized?

Meanwhile, here's another important lesson in cultural expectations: if you propose a course of action, such as a baby betting pool, you had better be ready to follow through. I will try to remember this before I suggest anything more onerous.

Ladies' Night Out

A graduate student in my department decided that it was high time the womenfolk of MolEvol went out on the town, in part, she said "to cheer us up after the fire." And so this past Friday the seven of us (two technicians, two graduate students, and three postdocs—the boss was invited but couldn't make it) went out to Katalin, a restaurant and jazz bar located in part of the old train station warehouse.

We sat at a table immediately, but was a good ten minutes before anyone deigned to give us menus, and another half hour after that before someone else came to take our order. As has been mentioned in previous posts, being "at your service" is not a high priority in Sweden, even for people whose job it is to serve you. The two bottles of wine we ordered came out first, and poor VP., a postdoc who is seven months pregnant, was nearly driven to eat the candle, as she had been hungry before we even sat down and her Pepsi didn't make it out for another ten minutes.

But the food, when it arrived, was tasty (I had a kyckling och baconsmacka, which came tastefully but oddly presented with the bacon on top of the bread, a handful of fresh oregano stalks for garnish, and a tiny scoop of coleslaw in a tiny square dish) and meanwhile conversation flowed very comfortably. This was the first time I'd seen these co-workers away from work, and we had a very good time indeed. Horror stories of previous labs were swapped (I told the BioBeer "Danger: Ebola" story, to great acclaim—that one's always popular with fellow scientists), as well as stories of previous departmental parties (VP. met her husband at one, finding out only much later that they had been set up with each other), and other various mishaps (the third postdoc, K., has a series of scars on one arm that look remarkably like a shark bite, but are not).

We also talked some about our family backgrounds. Z., a Polish graduate student, has some hard-line communist relatives who continue to rail against the modern times; VP., who is Latvian, is half-Jewish with some anti-semitic Russian nobility on the other side ("How my parents got together I never know," she said); I told tales of Irish criminals and dubious Germans. K. confessed to being entirely Swedish and said almost wistfully "... so I don't have any good stories like you do, they're all just normal people."

After dinner we all had dessert (I had the rababerpannacotta med apelsinsorbet), and I thought again, not for the first time, how lovely it is to be with people who always have dessert. No "Oh, no, I shouldn't" protests here! After dessert it was nearing 10pm, and so we started to think about breaking up. VP. and K. declared that we should not leave a tip at all, because the service had not been particularly good. A service charge is always included in the bill, and I know this, but tipping is a remarkably hard habit to break. We discussed this point for a few minutes, and Z. said that it is even harder to tip when you are not used to doing it. VP. and K. confirmed that tipping in a restaurant is entirely voluntary, and really only done if the service was exceptional, or if you've been difficult customers (such as when VP.'s two year old dumped a whole glass of juice onto a leather couch). "What about more personal things, like, oh, say, the person who cuts your hair?" I asked, thinking of Joe's recent experience and my eventual need for such a service. VP. and K. both laughed. "No, never!" Why not? "Have you gotten a haircut here? Do you know how expensive it is? Never tip a haircutter!"

So among the seven of us, with the inevitable confusion resulting from three people paying in cash and four paying by credit card, our server ended up with 10SEK extra, an amount so insignificant as to be perhaps more even more insulting than nothing at all. At an American restaurant, we might have been blacklisted forever. Here, no one gave it a second thought. And it must be said that the waiter sealed his own doom when he saw all the credit cards come out, and actually rolled his eyes and sighed out loud.

So our tjejmiddagen was a success, and I hope that we can do it again soon. Maybe somewhere else. A place where the servers will recognize a Ladies' Night Out for what it is, and flirt with us a little more (or at least not treat us like a nuisance). But most importantly, somewhere that will bring us our food a whole lot quicker.

Work Resumes

Work resumed this past week on the second floor of Building 18C, for the most part. The hallway still smells of smoke, the big lab has been gutted, and our break room has been taken over by the clean-up crew, so everyone is eating in the large room downstairs ("We must all make sacrifices, in times like these," one student sighed at lunch last Wednesday). On the other hand, "the stuff" seems to be out of the air now, after they ran large air filters continuously for more than a week. We are still keeping our office doors closed, due to the noise from the cleaning, but time marches on and the situation improves day by day.

The technicians are not too happy, as they are now crammed into a lab space about a fifth of the size that they are used to. The clean-up crew ended up tearing everything out of the lab that did not have a stainless steel surface, as "the stuff" would not come off of other surfaces, even with industrial-strength solvents. Gel rigs, chairs, cabinets, glassware, my never-used lab coat, any reagents or kits that were left out... all are now in the trash (and the kits, being consumables, were not insured).

Enough time has passed that people now seem to feel that awkward questions like "who's going to pay for all this?" can be discussed at fika. Some think that it may be quite a legal mess for quite a long time, and that the University (or its insurers) may sue the building contractors, because it turns out that there are no smoke detectors in the lab or offices in our building at all, only in the corridors (where a fire is least likely to start). If things here are at all like they are back home, I will be long gone from here before the situation is fully resolved.

Long Morning

When Jennifer left for work this morning, I tagged along down to Stora Torget, and then hopped a bus of my own to go to Uppsala Science Park, home of Humac, the sole Apple Authorized Service Center in Uppsala. Yup, our MacBook Pro, Surtr (better known as the hub of our digital lifestyle) went under the knife this morning. He's been having problems with DVD-R and DVD+R discs for a few weeks—burning them fine, but not reading them anymore after a while, even though they continue to work on other computers. This week it finally got to the point where the poor fellow just couldn't read recorded media at all. Obviously this is not an acceptable situation, as Surtr is not only our television but also our DVR (thanks to a wonderful little gadget called the eyeTV 250 Plus (or the Magic Dingus, as jennifer prefers to call it)), and it's no good trying to record Swedish television for posterity when your hard drive is getting full.

Fortunately, AppleCare includes global service, so all I had to do was look up my nearest service provider and head over there. After some 'hmm'ing and a few 'That's very strange's, plus a bit of Swedish techie humor (I told him that resetting the SMC had caused it to read a burned disc once before reverting to it's previous state, and he replied , "Ah yes, the solution is very simple then. Just Reset the SMC any time you need to read a disc" —since the SMC is reset by shutting down, removing the battery, and holding down the power button for five seconds, this was obviously not a genuine suggestion; we chuckled briefly, then moved on), he proceeded to try a few discs and had to agree that it shouldn't be doing that. Anyway, it took a day to get a replacement drive, and his morning I took the little fellow in for his operation.

I wasn't sure how long it would take, and Ikea wasn't open yet, so I decided to take care of some errands downtown. Most importantly, it was time for my quarterly haircut. Actually, a little past time. OK, I looked like a crazy person. Anyway, after window shopping salons downtown for a while, I settled on a nice, quiet frisör with no one waiting. Despite the lack of customers, I was told that 11 am was the earliest they could take me (perhaps I was interrupting fika?). So I made an appointment and set off to see what else I could accomplish.

By now it was nearing 10, at which point the shops would open, so I wandered around for a bit scoping out kitchen stores in preparation for my next task: locating a 28 cm oven safe stainless steel sauté pan with flat sides and a lid, with no teflon coating. Should be in the first place I looked, right? Well, apparently Swedes like their teflon, because there's hardly non-nonstick pan in Uppsala as far as I can tell. The exception is that there is some cast iron cookware about, and that would have been OK, except that all the cast iron I found was kind of odd: low sides, wooden handles, kinda froufy, and way overpriced. Plus I had may little culinary heart set on a nice stainless steel pan. By the time 11 rolled around, I was running out of stores, and having absolutely zero luck.

I got back to the frisör at the stroke of 11, and was seated immediately. The barber confirmed my worst fears by sort of pulling at my hair a moment whilst frowning, and then asking, "What would you like? You want it very short, yes?" He seemed surprised that I wanted to leave some hair on the top of my head. We discussed options for a few minutes, and then he quietly got to work. He didn't say anything for like the next fifteen minutes, during which time he gave me the most thorough haircut of my life. Not too short, mind you, just very thorough. I swear he cut every hair three times, and all of it by hand. He did finally settle in enough to ask where I was from, and then to tell me a story about a young client he used to have who went off to the US as a male au pair, fell in love with the neighbor girl, and got engaged. When the barber asked the lad what her parents did he said he thought it was something to do with raisins—turns out he was unknowingly marrying the daughter of the Sunmaid empire. Anyway, half an hour later, I found myself in possession of the best haircut I've ever had; darn good thing too, since it set me back 340 SEK. Ouch. Hopefully it'll last until September.

By now I had gotten a call saying that Surtr was all ready to go. On my way back to Humac, I stopped by one last shop, an overpriced designy looking place, in which I thought I detected the distant glint of quality cookware languishing against the back wall. Amazingly, they had exactly what I wanted, on sale no less. So, another 449 SEK poorer, but one extremely heavy-bottomed stainless sauté pan richer, I hied towards Humac, fortifying myself with a street sausage along the way. The replacement went fine, and now we can read all those pesky discs. Yay!

I should probably go back to Ikea now, but I think I'll have a bit of a sit down first. Maybe just close my eyes for a minute...

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.