Weenie Call

Last night, I set my alarm clock to go off at 00:30 (a.k.a 12:30am) so that I could make a phone call to a longstanding family tradition: the Summer Weenie Roast.

Since well before I was knee-high to a grasshopper, my family has had at least one Weenie Roast in the summer. When at all possible it has been held at the beach, although in cases of bad weather, it has been held at the Farm instead. Ideally, family from out of town are around for the Weenie Roast, and family friends who happen to be around sometimes attend as well. The absolute and unvarying staples are weenies, buns, big bags of various kinds of chips, and the raw ingredients for s'mores: graham crackers, marshmallows, and chocolate bars. In the old days, bottles of pop were kept cold in the lake water, but the more sensible and sanitary coolers have taken over. Most times we remember to bring ketchup and mustard and relish (a couple years ago, when Joe and I were in charge of the dogs and their fixin's, we forgot the condiments, and Aunt P. (whose house was closest to the beach) went back to get hers (we're still embarrassed about this, by the way)). In the old days, we used to cut branches from trees for roasting things, but nowadays the eco-friendly but devilish steel implements are used instead.

In recent years, the Weenie Roast has included the Utah relations, who come to visit for a week in the summer: Aunt J.B. and any of her children (my cousins) who can get a week off, and their children (my first cousins once removed, or FCOR). This year the cousin list included A. and her daughters C. and R., and D. and her daughter S. and son Z. It is unclear to me how many of my in-town cousins were there, but at least my other youngish FCOR G. and J. were there. Of course in-town aunts P. and J.A. were there, uncle R., and my parents, and Gramma, who had her 92nd birthday earlier this month.

Apparently it's hot and muggy in Michigan, but the water must be good, because everyone except Aunt J.B. and Gramma was in the water (and reportedly performing some sort of impromptu ballet) when I called their mobile. The modern miracle that is Skype is not infallible—I could hear everyone perfectly, and even the kids all shouting in the background, but I guess everyone was hearing me with a bad echo. I tried to fix it by putting a blanket over my head, to reduce the echo in my bare-walled apartment, but to little avail. So mostly they talked to me, and the fire was going so people took turns roasting weenies while the phone was passed around. The day before, some number of them had gone into Chicago to see "Wicked," which everybody enjoyed. Gramma blamed the Dramamine she took against the train ride for putting her to sleep during the show; she protested that she has never ever fallen asleep in a theater before. Aunt P., just back from California, reported that cousin C. and my newest FCOR A. are doing well. Cousin A. was disappointed that they had to fly to Michigan instead of taking the train, due to the flooding in the Midwest. FCOR Z. says playing the net is the best part of tennis.

Of course Michigan is 6 hours behind Sweden, and you can't start a weenie roast in the early afternoon, so it was going to be a late call for me, with work to go to the next day, so at about 10pm, once it was clear that Spain was going to beat Russia in the semifinals of the European Championships, I headed for bed. Now waking yourself up in the middle of the night is never fun, but once I stumbled out of our heavily insulated bedroom, I just stared out of a northward facing window for a few minutes, where the sky looked like dawn (see picture to the left), and this woke me up pretty well, I think.

I don't yet know too many particulars of this Weenie Roast, but here are some good bets: By the end of the night all the the chip bags were opened and half full of sand; at least one bag of marshmallows got the same treatment; Gramma finished off the Doritoes when no one was looking; my father made several freakishly perfect toasted marshmallows; oddly, the chocolate bars were the first s'mores ingredient to run out but my mother disclaimed all knowledge of this; at the end of the night, the kids had fun putting out the fire with pail-fulls of lake water because of the great gouts of steam and wonderful hissing noise. Hope you all had as much fun as it sounded—thanks for the "wish you were here" hollers—I wish I had been there too! Happy Weenie Roast!

Another Month, Another Meeting

We're moving to our new apartment on Tuesday, so this week has mostly been spent getting ready for that. I've reserved a truck, made a conscious effort to use up the food in the fridge, and started packing. I don't think I realized just exactly how stressful our 3 months of moving this past winter was until I started having the flashbacks this week. Of course it's a very different experience this time. The fact is, we have so little stuff, it's been hard to find anything I could pack a week in advance.On Thursday afternoon I shifted gears, and attended the most recent in my long string of informational meetings about my theoretical Swedish lessons (by which I mean that the lessons are theoretical in that I'm not sure I believe they will happen, not that I intend to study theoretical Swedish). This meeting actually came as quite a surprise to me, as not three days before I found out about it I received a letter from SFI (Svenska för Invandrare) which said:

Vi vet inte säkert om du tänker läsa Sfi i höst och vilken skola du ska gå i. Därför måste vi få veta hur du tänker göra. Sfi-mottagningen på CVL har öppet hela sommaren utom vecka 27–29 och du är välkommen hit för att prata med oss om dina Sfi-studier.

Which I think means:

We don't know for certain if you are thinking of studying with SFI this autumn or which school you will go to. Therefore must we get an idea what you think you are doing. The SFI desk at CVL is open the whole summer except weeks 27 through 29 (editor's note: yeah, open every Tuesday and Thursday between 10:00 and 11:30 in the morning) and you are welcome here for to talk with us about your SFI studies.

Despite the fact that the above makes it sound like I'm all the way back at square one, at the beginning of this week I got a letter from Liber directing me to a meeting this week about my lessons, which apparenty are scheduled to start August 4 (which was news to me). Actually, the letter wasn't from Liber, but from it's parent company, Hernod. Liber was supposed to be one of the three companies taking students from SFI this autumn, but in the month since my last meeting Liber has parted ways with Hernod, and it's actually Hernod that will be giving the classes. At least that's what they're claiming this week, I'm sure it will change by early August.

The meeting was held in a classroom in Polacksbacken, an old barracks complex which has been renovated into the very modern home of the Computer Science department at the Uppsala University; in other words, my new home. It was not, however, in the classroom it was supposed to be in, but rather in another building all the way across the quad, so it took me an extra ten minutes to find it. The format of the meeting was similar to the last one, in that the instructors, who spoke very good English, ran the whole thing in Swedish, while an interpreter who spoke English not quite as well did the translating. Maybe it's some sort of government requirement for SFI meetings. Regardless of format, this meeting did actually have some useful information:

• The classes will be held in Polacksbacken, which would be incredibly convenient for me of course.
• They pride themselves on being the flexible school, so in addition to guided group classes they offer structured individual study time and online classes.
• Since this course is intended for University-level immigrants, they offer vocation specific help which can include placement within your field to help you learn the vocabulary.

Of course there's a problem. The whole thing is intended to be used by people moving to Sweden for good, so it's an 18 month to 3 year course, full time, in becoming Swedish. Insane. I mean, who are these people that can study Swedish full time for three years? Obviously I can't take 30 hours a week of Swedish while going to school, but right now I'm signed up for a class starting in August, in the hopes that I can go full time for three weeks or so, after which perhaps they'll take pity on me and let me do an evening class or just the online class or something.I rode my bike to the meeting, so after taking the bulle that was forced upon me (which I had forgotten about until this very moment... ugh, that's a little stale) I decided to bike home by way of our new place in Eriksberg, to get a feel for my upcoming commute. After stopping to admire the high tech lawn mowing system at the Angstrom lab across the street (see photo, left), I set off through Stadsskogen. I'd done this once before, in the other direction, so I figured I'd just backtrack and wind up in Eriksberg. Well, I must have taken a wrong turn somewhere around the Troll's Forest, because I wound up some place I'd never seen before. After reading a couple of street signs and looking at the sun, I set off in the direction that seemed the most promising, and soon found myself on a street with a name I knew. Unfortunately, 15 minutes later I was in Gottsunda, which is way south of Eriksberg. Long story short, it took me over an hour to get home, but I eventually made it without major incident. Maybe I need to start carrying a map with me…

Midsummer Day

The biggest and most Swedish celebration of the year is Midsommarafton, or the day before the shortest evening of the year. This day should technically coincide with the solstice, of course, but some time ago it was decided that Midsommardag (observed) would always fall on the Saturday closest to the solstice, and so Midsommarafton falls the Friday before that. In 2008, these dates just happened to not just technically, but actually coincide.

You are supposed to have your big parties on Midsoammarafton, so in practice, the Thursday before is often taken as a vacation day, and even people who don't take the day off tend to leave a little early. Therefore attendance at Thursday afternoon's fika was a little sparse, consisting mostly of foreigners. Last week, I had proposed to my advisor a meeting on the next Friday afternoon as usual; she looked at me with something like incomprehension. "But it's Midsommarafton," she said in a kindly voice, after a few moments of stunned silence. Someone else later confirmed that what I had done was analogous to proposing a meeting at 9am Christmas morning.

So Midsommar is a big deal, and we decided to celebrate with fellow foreigners G. and D. (the friends who took us out to their stuga last weekend). On Friday, though, everyone was tired or sick, so we decided to celebrate on Saturday instead. Gamla Uppsala has an outdoor museum called Disagården that consists of old farm buildings, and is meant to more-or-less replicate a medieval Swedish village. So for Midsommar, they erect a maypole and have dancing and traditional music and so forth. I suspect this is done mostly because Uppsala has such a large population of foreigners and people like hospital workers who cannot for some reason leave town this weekend; all other Swedes have left the city for whatever countryside they can get to, to celebrate with their families and friends, and I have never yet seen the city so deserted as it was yesterday. All the bus drivers on duty were obviously recent-ish immigrants, probably getting triple-time pay for working on this holiday. Everybody who was left in town was obviously an "other" of some type. And of course, that includes us.

Undaunted by our status as "others," the four of us went out to Disagården yesterday afternoon, watched some dancing around the maypole, listened to some traditional songs, and watched a little folk dancing, including the famous Frog Dance. (See the video at the end of this post to get an idea of it.) Honestly it wasn't all that exciting, but it was nice to sit out in the sun for while, and it even got warm enough to take off our fleece jackets at one point. We ended up sharing a bench with a quite elderly man, who turned out to be somewhat friendly; after an hour or two saying nothing, but listening to G. and D. speaking French, and all of us speaking English, he actually talked to us and asked us if we spoke Swedish. "Ja, lite," G. and I said (G. and D. are actually quite good in Swedish, having had more lessons and being already multilingual). His English was not so good, he claimed, and while it was noticeably more halting and lacking in vocabulary than the English of younger people, it was still plenty good (if my Swedish is ever as good as his English was I will be quite pleased indeed). Anyway it was fun to speak with him in Swedish a little, and he was kind enough to speak slowly with us. He said he was in Kalifornien in 1980, to visit his brother who worked for IBM at the time. He remembered "badade i stilhavet" (that is how I remember it, and he meant swimming in the bay, I'm pretty sure, but I can't find "stilhavet" anywhere... maybe it's dialect, or I remember incorrectly). Anyway I felt happy to understand him, and was even more pleased that he apparently understood the very basic things that I said to him ("Hon är Schweiz,"Gillar du Kalifornien?" "Jag arbeter på Universitetet, med biologi," and, upon our departure, "Tack för prata. Vi måste till hem och äta nu. Glad Midsommar!")

So back we went to G. and D.'s flat, not too far from Gamla Uppsala, and had a cold beer which was very welcome after the warm sun and all that culture. We had decided to do as close to a real Swedish midsummer feast as possible, so the beer before dinner was a good start, then we had pre-dinner elderflower cocktails (perhaps not strictly traditional but yummy and refreshing), then dinner: knäckebrod, gravad lax, potatis med dill (both cold and hot, we brought the creamy dill potato salad), kräftorsalad, and three kinds of sill: sill i senapsås, sill i midsommarsås, och sill in vitlöksås. We had also brought a bottle of O.P. Andersen, a traditional aquavit, with which you are supposed to wash down the herring. And we did use it for that. And it helped. (Actually the herring, which I had been dreading, wasn't really all that bad. At least not when you've already got potatoes and several forms of alcohol in you... and everything else was delicious).

After dinner we played cards for a while, with another cocktail. We decided that a complicated game like chibre was a bit too taxing for our current mental states, so we played hearts instead, which I haven't played in years and was lots of fun. Then Joe and I made dessert, strawberry shortcake (apparently anything with strawberries is fair game for Midsommar dessert), with which we had Italian brewed coffee and cream. We sat and chatted for a while after that, and looked at some pictures of their respective homes and travels in Switzerland (good heavens, what a gorgeous country). We took our leave at about 9pm, with the sun still strong in the sky, and arrived home in time for the sunset pictures from yesterday's post. Even though we were exhausted and stuffed full, we still didn't manage to fall asleep before midnight because it was so light out, and so pretty. And fortunately of course we had today, Sunday, to recover from it all.

A very successful celebration, I think, and a hearty Glad Midsommar to all of you reading this!

Longest Day of 2008

Well, the sun has just gone down (official sunset time is 10:16 PM), marking the end of the longest day of the year for us. In a couple of hours it will actually start to look darkish (see below), but no worries, it'll stop doing that by 1:45 in the morning.



I don't mind the light so much, but every night 10 PM catches me off guard. "10 o'clock? I could have sworn it was 7:30."

Midsommarafton

It's Midsummer Day, the biggest holiday in Sweden. This is the day when everyone heads out to their cabin in the woods, eats lots of pickled herring, drinks too much aquavit, and then hops around a May pole singing:

Little frogs, little frogs are funny to look at.
They have no ears, no ears, no tails.
Croak! Croak! Croak!

Well, I don't yet know what Midsummer holds for us, but yesterday, along with everyone else in Uppsala, I went shopping for some of the required ingredients. Needless to say, Systembolaget was a madhouse, although not too many people were buying aquavit, which is what I would have expected. Instead most people were buying cases of beer, with maybe some hard cider to wash it down—hard cider is a very popular traditional drink here, and there's a lot of it, ranging from 0.7% to 7.0% alcohol (anything below 2.5% alcohol can be sold in the grocery store, and isn't taxed as heavily as more alocoholic beverages, so low-alcohol cider is one of the cheapest and tastiest bottled beverages available in Sweden, going for roughly the same price per volume as mineral water).

If Systembolaget was crowded, the mega-grocery store next to it was a nightmare. It was so packed in some sections that people couldn't move, and I wound up getting stuck for 5 minutes in the middle of an aisle, completely snarled in a shopping cart traffic jam that went as far as the eye could see. That particular hold-up was caused by the strawberry station, a large kiosk set up just for the day, where three employees were dishing out strawberries by the kilo. There was a similar scrum at the source of the next requisite midsummer ingredient, the new potatoes. These at least were self serve, and better distributed to avoid the mess. There were six boxes of them, each about a cubic meter in size. My favorite part is that the potatoes are packed in fake dirt (a loose blend of potting mix and packing material), I presume so that when you manage to get to the box you get the experience of digging for your potatoes yourself. Whatever the reason for doing it, the result is one filthy pile of tiny little potatoes. I rounded out the days purchases with some crispbread, some cured salmon (yum!), and some pickled herring in mustard sauce (uggh!).

Now if tradition holds, it should start raining all over the country right around mid-day when everyone is starting their smorgasbords. No matter how the weather turns out or what we wind up doing, though, we've got fresh strawberries, so apparently we're set for the day:

Giant Elk Alert!

Sweden has passed a major milestone this week. Officials in Arvidsjaur have finally, after three years of wrangling, approved the construction of the front half of the world's largest wooden elk* (right thinking council members in Skellefteå, the next kommune over, approved the construction of the back half of the world's largest wooden elk last year, so no worries, it won't be sittin' there on its own). Just how big is this wooden elk? Well, the concert hall in it's belly will seat 350, as will the restaurant below that. Seriously. Ärlig Lättantändlig Grubblandrare Ansluttningen Reproduktion, or ÄLGAR, has released the following informative (or possibly just disturbing) video:

* Yes, OK, it's a moose, not an elk. But moose is a Native American name, and there were elk (I mean moose) in Sweden long before that famous Norwegian discovered America (I mean that Columbus chap, of course). Elk is an old Germanic word, and the New World colonists used it to refer to an elk-like animal they encountered, the thing we now think of as an elk (which Europeans call a wapiti). So when someone offers you an elk burger in Scandinavia, they mean moose burger, not a wapiti burger.