Stuga and Chibre

On Sunday we were invited by one of Jennifer's coworkers, G., and his girlfriend, D., to do something quintessentially Swedish: spend a day at a stuga. Not that G. and D. are Swedish themselves, mind you, they're Swiss, but they know a Swede currently working in France, who offered them the use of his stuga while he was gone.

The stuga seems to be the ultimate goal of the typical Swede: a little cabin in the woods to which they can retreat from city life, breathe in the cool clean air of the pine forest, maybe go for a swim in a nearby lake, and basically spend a couple of days roughing it. Mind you, these days roughing it does not mean going without running water and electricity, or even in most cases satellite television and wireless internet. In fact, the Swede who owns this particular stuga is part of a recent trend of people who, in the face of rising real estate prices and the expanding highway system here, are abandoning their apartments altogether and moving full time into their stugas (which does necessitate some winterization for what has traditionally been a summertime-only dwelling).

Aside from the increased insulation and the heating system, this seemed to be a pretty typical stuga. It's a one-bedroom cottage painted bright yellow, with a big wood burning stove, some knotty pine panelling, furniture and decor straight out of 1973 (including a massive and, alas, no longer functional cabinet hi-fi). It's located in the sleepy hamlet of Krägga, near Bålsta, about an hour's from Uppsala (but thanks to the E18, only 45 minutes from Stockholm). The neighborhood is all stugas, but each has a yard lined with trees tall enough that you can't see any of your neighbors from the front porch, so you do get a certain feeling of being out in the woods.

Anyway, we got there a little before noon, and started the day with a lovely lunch on the front porch. D. made a salad topped with bits of chevre wrapped in bacon, followed by a course of stuffed zucchini and eggplant. For dessert, G. made a strawberry tort. Mmmm. After lunch we wandered down to the lake for a bit. The cabin's only about 200 m from a nice little beach on Lake Mälaren, with a sandy-bottomed swimming area we waded around in for a few minutes. We even had a water snake sighting! After half an hour or so we could see the rain coming, so we headed back to the cabin.

We rounded out the afternoon by learning a Swiss card game called Chibre (or Schieber in the German speaking cantons). Chibre is one of the many variants of Jass, a card game which originated in the Netherlands but which became so popular in Switzerland after it's arrival in the 18th century as to virtually eclipse all other card games there. It's a trick taking game played with a 36 card deck, characterized by a distorted ordering in the trump suit (suits normally run A-K-Q-J-10-9-8-7-6, but the trump suit runs J-9-A-K-Q-10-8-7-6). After playing a few hands I think Jennifer and I had the mechanics down fairly well, although it was obvious that our respective strategies were different enough from the expected that G. and D. were somewhat bemused by our odd plays.

It was a wonderful day, at the end of which I feel a bit more Swedish (and a little bit Swiss). Oh, and when we got home, we were rewarded with a huge, vibrant rainbow over Flogsta.

Birthday Fika

Some weeks seem to just fly by, despite the fact that looking back at them it's hard to identify why they seemed so crazy. By way of excusing the fact that neither of us managed to get a single post written this week, I will submit that this past week was just such a week. No time to write a post, despite the fact that we didn't really do all that much worth reporting.

Not that we did nothing, mind you. This week was Jennifer's birthday, so she wanted to take in a special treat for fika on Friday. People often supply something special for fika to mark significant occasions, like a birthday or graduation. The trick is that you really need to bring in something homemade. For her birthday week fika, Jennifer wanted a treat both rare and exotic here in Scandinavia: chocolate chip cookies. They don't have chocolate chips here, you see. So, armed with a bag of chocolate chips and a bottle of vanilla extract sent by Jennifer's parents, I spent a chunk of Thursday afternoon making a huge batch of chocolate chip cookies. On Friday Jennifer took them, along with two liters of milk and some decaf, to work. She had a really big turnout for afternoon fika, especially considering it was a Friday a week before midsummers and the boss was gone for the day.

I have to admit, I was dubious that chocolate chip cookies would be viewed as esoterica, but they really were. There was a period of a few minutes when people just stared at them, but once they got started they plowed right through the whole batch. They were equally fascinated by the idea of dipping the cookies in milk. I honestly don't think anyone there had ever had one before. There were even prolonged discussions on the melting properties of chocolate chips and the etiquette of dunking in milk. It was enough of a hit that there was still a bit of a crowd after an hour, and a handful left after 90 minutes, which is a pretty long fika even by Swedish standards.

And with that, I declare blog hiatus officially ended!

June 6, Sweden's National Day

Today is Sweden's national day. Nothing is happening.

No, really, nothing is happening. The holiday is a new one, having only been recognized as a "red day" (that is, a day off of work) for the last couple years or so, and so there are no traditions built up around it yet. We discussed it at fika a few times this week—the other international students and postdocs and I asked repeatedly, "What should we do to celebrate the day?" and got no answer whatsoever. "When in doubt, eat herring," suggested someone once, rather halfheartedly. But that's what they do for every holiday. "Errr... do we come into work, then?" we asked. No one answered, but they avoided our eyes. So... I guess that's a no, we foreigners tacitly decided.

We listened to the national anthem a couple times in Swedish class Wednesday night, and our teacher told us that if we wanted, we could go into Stockholm and see the royal family on parade, but she isn't much of a royalist and didn't think it would be worth anyone's while.

So we celebrated by sleeping in and lazing about (except for a brief excursion to check out Joe's new bike and laze in the sun for a few minutes), and having blood-orange ginger sorbet, which was delicious. Maybe by next year, the leaders of the country will have come up with something more exciting to do... you know, like something involving explosives!

Graduation Day

Looks like today is high school graduation in Uppsala. How could I tell? Well, the truckloads of students in their white graduate caps being slowly paraded around and around the city whilst drinking, screaming, and singing was a hint. I only had a phone camera with me, but these should give you a rough idea of the mood:

Fire safety training

Sometime in early April, in the wake of the fire that destroyed my advisor's office and a good chunk of the second floor of our building, Professor F. came around to my office with a sign-up sheet for the University's fire safety training course. He pressed it upon me rather insistently, saying that I should really think seriously about attending, and then repeating himself, which is a rare thing for a Swede to do. (My officemate S. seemed slightly jealous at all this attention I was getting, asking after Professor F. left, "Why doesn't he want me to do it?")

I was sort of ambiguous about the whole thing—sure it would be a good thing to do, but it would take up a lot of time, the training grounds were far away, etc. etc., and I had already decided that my response to any fire indoors would be for me to get myself the hell out of wherever I was immediately. I was carping to Joe about my dilemma mildly, but thankfully Joe looks out for me and always has my interests in mind. "I can't believe you're even debating this," he sighed, with a pitying shake of his head and roll of his eyes. "I have two words for you: Swedish. Firefighters."

"Say no more!", said I, and signed up the next day. The class itself was last Wednesday, and fortunately transportation was provided. A bus picked us biologists at 8 a.m., and swung by the Ångstrom laboratory (to pick up the chemists and physicists) on the way out to Viktoria, one of Uppsala's three fire stations, and the one with the training grounds and indoor meeting space.

The first half was held indoors, by a firefighter named Thor (how perfect was that?) and featured various information about fires and fire prevention, and scary movies about how quickly fires spread, and why you shouldn't use gasoline to start fires (are you listening, woofa?), and so forth. It included a fire box for the ignition of various chemicals that are used in laboratory settings, and I was impressed at the amount of flames they felt comfortable producing indoors. "Don't worry," Thor said, "For outdoors we have gasoline and we will make much bigger fires."

After a lavish half-hour long break (including sandwiches, cakes, tea, coffee, juices, many fruits... these government employees really know how to fika!), we were ready for the hands-on part of the training... you know, the fun stuff! We got to use the different kinds of extinguishers on different types of fires, to see the relative merits of each kind. Everybody got to try an extinguisher at least once, and two or three times if you wanted, so Thor set about 30 fires, each one getting bigger than the last. To my intense mortification, I was unable to completely extinguish an E85 fire with a powder extinguisher—Thor kindly excused me on the grounds that the canister was almost out, so the pressure was too low. I think he was just being nice.

The next thing we did was to simulate getting people out of a smoke-filled room: how to find them, and how to drag/carry/do-whatever-it-takes to get them out. They have a little apartment set up that they fill with completely harmless white stage smoke for duffers like us. The first team went in knowing there were three victims but with no training, and it took forever for them to make it out. Thor then gave a quick lecture on what went wrong and why. Then the second team, armed with new knowledge (work in pairs, holding hands to extend your reach, feel around the walls for doors, yell your head off when you find someone, etc.), went in. I had volunteered to be a victim for the second part, so I settled myself nicely on the floor by a couch... and waited. And waited. Two rescuers came by and found the other guy in the room right away, but possibly they thought there was no one else in that room. They did come back eventually, and passed within inches of me several times without seeing me. Scary! They finally found me by swatting around and kicking me in the side and hitting me in the face, then they dragged me out by my arms. Wheee! Truthfully, it was lots of fun and informative, and I'm glad I did it, and I sure hope I never find myself in a burning building.

One further observation: you think a gasoline fire is scary? A cooking oil fire is much worse. After extinguisher practice, Thor lit up an iron Dutch oven filled with canola oil. He then filled a pitcher with water—a pitcher welded to the end of a 5 meter long pole. He then showed us what happens when you dump water on an oil fire. I had thought that a 5m pole was being a little over cautious, but oh no. Not pretty. A huge hot fireball, then flaming gobbets of oil flying in every direction. (Wish I'd gotten a picture of it.) If your cooking oil catches fire, run away! (Well, okay, turn off the burner, cover it with something like a cookie sheet if you can, etc., but for heaven's sake don't put water on it!)

Also, I now think that firefighters (secretly) really, really like starting fires, maybe as much as putting fires out. Maybe that's not such a big secret...

More about our stuff

It is of course a great relief to have all our stuff at last; everything arrived in order and unbroken. I had cheated on the shoe front by having a pair of sneakers sent in the mail a month ago, but Joe had been suffering in winter boots and shoes up until now. Seasonally-appropriate footwear has been a very welcome addition to the household.

On the other hand, my reaction to the arrival of more clothes has surprised me. I have been wearing exactly the same three pairs of pants and maybe 10-15 shirts that I arrived with, every day, since January, and I have gotten used to it. At work, everybody wears more-or-less the same thing all the time. To repeat and clarify: I have seen colleagues literally wear the same shirt and pants every day of the week, and while that's an extreme example, wearing the same shirt two or three times in the same week is very common, for women and men, students and professors. Whether this is a Swedish thing or a computer guy thing is a question I cannot answer yet. But it was really kind of nice, not having to think so much about what to wear every day. My thought process in the morning amounted to little more than "Those pants are clean; pick the clean shirt that goes best with those pants, and that is what I will wear today." End thinking.

The shipment approximately doubled my amount of clothing. Now when I go to my all-in-one wardrobe/closet/chest-of-drawers, I am confronted with a bewildering array of choices. It's oddly stressful!

Can't figure out why we sent: About 5 water bottles.
We sent some camping gear: So why didn't we send our little tent too?
So funny it bears repeating: We sent the iPod car charger. Why???
I really wish I had sent: My kite. Lots of big empty fields around, plenty of strong breezes.
You should come and visit us because: We now have a spare set of sheets!