They're here!

The berry monger downtown finally has them: Svenska körsbär.

Some wise person once said something like there is no ending without a new beginning, and with the end of jordgubbar comes the beginning of cherry season. A mere 35SEK gets you the half kilogram or so pictured here, which is enough to serve approximately 1 Michigander. Okay, one Michigander from my family, anyway. And they are tasty little suckers. Are they as good as Michigan cherries? Well, my papa always taught me "When you're not with the berry you love, love the berry you're with" (except that I can't think of a berry I don't love). So right now, yes, these are better than Michigan cherries. Because they're the cherries I have. And they're mine, all mine... I have to go now. More soon about our adventures today that ended with walking past the berry monger downtown, and this exciting discovery!

Movie Review

As I have been summoned, so I appear. Here is my official review of M. Night Shyamalan's "The Happening":

It really sucked.

Worst. Movie. Ever. (Yes, "Battlefield Earth," I'm talkin' to you.)

A "happening"

So I need to interrupt Joe's "Lord of the Moving Van" trilogy here to report a happening.

G. is attempting to start a movie club in the department, where we go see a movie in a theater once a month or so, because it's just fun to go to theaters. He has enjoyed the movies of M. Night Shyamalan in the past, so this week's email suggested that we go see "The Happening." So Joe and I met him and J., V., and another student from another department at the Royal 2 (which is the movie theater right underneath our old apartment on Dragarbrunnsgatan), at about 20:30 for a movie start time of 20:45.

When we went up to buy tickets, we were asked if we wanted seats "in the middle middle." I thought that maybe this meant there was a price difference in seats, but no: they ask where you want to sit because seating is assigned. Your ticket comes with a row and seat number on it. I don't know why this surprised me so much, but it really did. "Well of course there is assigned seating. This is Sweden," said V. But it was nice that we were able to get 7 seats together, and then he kindly reserved a seat for Z., who was running a little late, having accidently gone to the Royal 1 (fortunately only 3 blocks away). How much is one adult ticket? 90SEK. I think we won't be doing this too much.

There was only one guy working there; after he sold us our tickets, he ran around the counter and put up a tape across the hallway leading from the entranceway to the theaters proper while he ran downstairs to the toa, then he came back up, took the tape down, and took our tickets right back. The Royal 2 is small; it has 4 theaters in it, each of which seat no more than 70 people. I have not been in such a small theater for a long time. In such a place, the "middle middle" is very close to the screen, and the other 10 or so people there were all behind us.

Therefore we had a completely unhindered view of the following: first, there were 12 minutes of TV-style commercials, for everything from soft drinks to women's undergarments to cell phones to bandages specially made for blisters you might get on your Achilles tendon. Then there were two short trailers, one of which was for "La Zona," which is in Spanish, therefore the Swedish subtitles helped more than usual (I actually did understand some of the subtitles—this trailer involved short, simple sentences). Then the movie started.

At morning fika, B. (who always has opinions about things, and is willing to share them) had expressed doubt about this movie, but said no more, and declined to join us. I had only heard the premise, and thought it could be good, and it was a social event, after all, so why not? 'Take a leap of faith,' I told myself, 'When's the last time you went to see a movie without reading lots of reviews? A long, long time. Go on. Do it. Don't think, just go, you'll be with friends, it'll be fun.'

Well, it was fun. I haven't laughed so hard in a long, long time. As we were walking to the bus stop in Stora Torget, Joe said "That's the kind of movie that makes me want to be a movie reviewer," so I'll leave the official review to him.

We had a brief post-mortem outside the theater, where the evening air was warm and the sky still bright at 22:30. G., V., Z. and I discussed the possibility of trying to present a united front at tomorrow morning fika and convince B. that he should see this movie. Two problems: First, J. said G. is a terrible liar, and he agreed with her, that he could not say these things with a straight face. Second, I actually like B., and I would not wish this movie on my very worst enemy in the world.

Moving Part II: The Road to Eriksberg

As smooth as the preparations for moving had gone, I was apprehensive on a few fronts as we actually approached the day itself. Some of my worry centered around renting a moving truck in a foreign country I had never driven in before, but primarily my concerns were temporal. The problem is that Swedes appear to have no notion of pro rating; apartment companies expect you to pay a full month's rent for each calendar month you live in the apartment, so even if you keep the apartment for only one week in July, they want rent for the whole month. As a result of this, there are pretty tight tolerances on apartment-to-apartment moving here. If your lease is paid until the end of June, you have until noon on July 1 to turn in the key to your empty and cleaned apartment; unfortunately for you, the possessors of the apartment you are moving into also have until noon to turn in their key, so there's no period of overlap during which you can start to move some of your stuff.

We had it a little easier than most, as our Flogsta apartment was a second-hand lease, and our "landlord", F., didn't need us to be out before the evening of the first. However, truck rental isn't cheap, so we didn't want to have a truck overnight. So, we had to load and unload everything between 9 AM and 5 PM, while also cleaning, turning in our old keys and getting the new keys.

Truck rental turned out to be the easiest part of the day. Most vehicle rental in Sweden is done through gas station chains such as Statoil, Hydro, or OK (I chose the latter, as they sponsor the women's soccer league in Sweden), and rentals can be booked online. OK even had some information available in English, unlike their major competitors. I wound up with a mellanlast, which had a listed cargo capacity of 8 cubic meters. I had seen some OK trucks around the complex that looked just like the picture on the website, and they seemed plenty big enough to hold our various bits of Ikea.

A closer look at those trucks I'd seen would have revealed that they all were 12 cubic meter storlaster, not what I had rented at all. This I did not discover until the night before we moved, far too late to change the reservation. Would we fit in an 8 cubic meter truck? If not, we'd just have to make two trips, something I'd have preferred to avoid.

Tuesday morning dawned bright and sunny (early too, since the curtains had been packed away monday afternoon), which was a relief after 5 days of never ending grey skies and cold rain. I hopped on my bike first thing and made for the OK station where our truck waited, about 30 minutes away by bicycle (the marker for this post points to the OKQ8 station in question). They had no problem with my foreign drivers license, but they didn't care much for my Swedish credit card as it doesn't have raised numbers (car rental companies the world over seem to have strange ideas about credit cards). Fortunately my US card was handy, so ten minutes later I had keys, a bunch of Swedish instructions, and… well, a truck, in theory, although 10 minutes of searching on my part failed to locate it. Turns out it just hadn't been brought out that morning, so a few minutes later I was on my way.

It had occurred to me as I left the house that perhaps I ought to read a bit about Swedish traffic laws before driving across town. Luckily for me Vägverket maintains a small series of online traffic regulation brochures which cover dealing with pedestrians and bicyclists, roundabouts, and so forth. What they didn't mention was that the truck would have a manual transmission, although I suppose I should have expected it. Anyway, I mostly followed the bus route home, navigating the several roundabouts as instructed (the rules were essentially: signal to exit, but never to enter, choose the lane that works best for you, and don't run over anyone).

I did the loading myself, while Jennifer cleaned the apartment, and by 11:30 we were all packed up. It turns out that we currently own exactly 8 cubic meters of stuff. So Jennifer headed to the Studentstaden offices to get the keys while I finished up at home. This is when it turned out there was something we had failed to consider: when we had last been in the Studentstaden offices, we noted the huge, empty lobby, the many unstaffed workstations, and the complicated queue number machine, but we had chalked it all up to social over-engineering. Not so. On the first of the month, there are dozens and dozens of people who all want to drop off and/or pick up keys, all at noon. Jennifer arrived a few minutes before noon itself, and drew number 536, with 498 being currently served. They did seem to have a pretty good system though, involving at least three employees helping each person, checking info on the computer and matching it up with a ziplock baggy holding the appropriate keys, fetched from some sort of vault in the back. So by 12:45 she was out the door.

For the unloading we had the assistance of G., our Swiss friend of stuga fame, so it went remarkably fast, so fast that he hung around after to help reassemble most of the furniture. By 3:45 we were back on the road, dropping Jennifer off at the old place to finish up while I took the truck back, planning to meet F. to return the keys at 5. That would have been fine if I hadn't wound up in a left turn only lane at Drottningsgatan which took me across the railroad tracks, a situation which simply cannot be remedied any longer in downtown Uppsala due to the 5 year construction project on the railway station. I actually had to drive south all the way out of town before I could turn back right onto Kungsgatan, but I managed to get the truck back a few minutes before 5, and we had used so little gas that they didn't even charge us for it. Then I had to pedal as fast as my little legs would carry me back to the apartment. Turns out I could have taken it a little easier, because Jennifer, being more realistic than yours truly, had rescheduled the key exchange for 5:30.

Anyway, by 7 we were back at our new place. At 8, G. and his girlfriend D. came over and brought us dinner, which G. claims is a Swiss tradition after you help someone move. Tradition or no it was much appreciated, and we had a fun first evening in our new place, eating beer, drinking pizza, and then horrifying G. and D. by playing a few selected mashup tracks. No worries, though, as in retaliation, they introduced us to this little wonderment.

Moving Part I: The Scouring of Flogsta

Moving week is over now, and we made it successfully to our new place, which we like very much. That's the short version. The longer version will be told in three parts, and begins last weekend, as we packed up our apartment in earnest. Flashbacks aside, it really was not a traumatic packing experience, easy enough that we actually felt justified in taking evenings off and relaxing a bit. Maybe there's something to be said for this whole not having a ridiculous amount of stuff thing. Even with our limited quantity of belongings, as we cleaned out the apartment we did manage to generate a fair amount of trash and recycling. At Flogsta Låghus, as at pretty much every apartment complex in Uppsala, both of these are handled in tiny buildings next to each apartment block, and on days around the end of the month when there's a lot of coming and going these rooms are occasionally filled with interesting stuff. As I was making a recycling run on Sunday I was reminded of this fact (the wide-screen television sitting outside the trash room was a hint), and so as a break we decided to take a tour of some of the recycle rooms to see if there was anything we desperately needed.

The first two were disappointing, but the third was interesting. Unlike the other little buildings, the third one we visited had three rooms: one standard trash and recycling room, one room filled with old electronics, and a third full of furniture! I say full, but the truth was that on this particular weekend, with what seemed like every other apartment emptying out, the contents of the furniture room had spilled out onto the sidewalk. A lot of the furniture was in a bad way, but some of it was in good condition. When we first showed up there was a large pine dining table complete with four matching chairs, which would have fetched a not insignificant sum at any of the local second-hand shops—alas, no picture, as it had already been snagged by the time I returned with a camera. In fact, while we had the place mostly to ourselves when we first wandered by, this turned out to be an aberration, and on every subsequent visit the place was (literally) crawling with foreign students looking to score some free furnishings. Having just extolled the virtues of a limited possession existence, I have no doubt that you can guess what's coming next: we found some more stuff. Before everyone goes getting all worked up about it, allow me to assure you that we limited ourselves to a small handful of items, if not diamonds in the rough then at least shiny pebbles in the sand. There was a version of the Ikea chair I've been contemplating for a couple of months, a nice basket for corralling newspapers awaiting recycling, and a stainless steel colander. There was also a bright red end table I had under consideration, but when I returned for a second look it had vanished underneath a pile of broken furniture, as a clutch of exchange students had showed up and started to dig their way back to formerly inaccessible regions of the furniture room, turning up a couple of decent beds and a bookcase but utterly demolishing the room in the process. The next morning I headed over to see if the little table had resurfaced, and on the way out the door I grabbed the two spent light bulbs I'd been saving for the last couple of months as I'd noticed the night before that this new place had a recycle bin for them (I knew it had to be around somewhere). It turned out to be a good thing I grabbed them. When I got there, there was a man in a jumpsuit with a front end loader full of cardboard scowling at the building. After watching me recycle my two little light bulbs, he expressed his surprise that I had walked so far for such a small amount of recycling. It turns out that this guy's job is to go around all the various recycling rooms every day, gather all the stuff that's been just randomly dumped, and re-sort it to its proper destination. "Most of these kids won't walk two meters to put something where it goes," he explained, pointing out all of the cardboard that had, in fact, been dumped in the wrong room, just around the corner from its intended destination. He professed to be so moved by my random act of recycling (and, no doubt, so little eager to return to his pile of soggy cardboard) that he proceeded to give me a 15 minute lesson on where and when to find the best stuff. His haul over the last few weeks included a dozen 500GB hard drives, a 10 megapixel camera, a 10 m long tunnel tent (which his children, 10 years, 2.5 years, and 9 months, absolutely love), and an 80GB iPod! I agreed that it was amazing what people will throw away, while inwardly my pride at having found one Ikea chair started to seem somewhat unwarranted. In desperation to balance the scales, I dug through the electronics room until I came up with a nice halogen desk lamp, took one last look at the furniture (most of which was now utterly destroyed, having spent the night on the sidewalk in the poring rain), and then skulked away home with my tail between my legs. There was an interesting coda to this whole experience. At fika on Monday, Jennifer was talking about our packing up and mentioned that we had found this room full of discarded stuff free for the taking. Two of her co-workers immediately responded, "Yes, but it's illegal to take that." Jennifer explained that it was all obviously intended to be recycled, but they insisted that because of the wording of some Swedish law meant to protect the privacy of your trash, it was illegal to take anything that someone else had discarded. When she argued that there had been plenty of other people going through the recycling at the same time, they asked, "Swedish people?" to which she had to admit that, no, it had been all foreign students. At this her co-workers nodded, as if this had only proven their point. They probably should have told this to the two middle-aged Swedish women I ran into Monday morning, who were carefully picking through all of the recycling and taking every salvageable piece of kitchenware. I tell you, the criminal element is really taking over in Flogsta.

July 4 fika

"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all persons are created normal and equal, that they are endowed with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and Fika."

So even though I hosted a fika just a couple weeks ago, I thought I would do one again for the Fourth of July, in recognition of the fact that I have never in my life gone to work on this day of the year. But what's a typical American thing to have on the 4th that I can get here and that goes with fika? Ice cream was the best I could come up with. I didn't think it would work so well to bring ice cream on the bus, but graduate student Z. had volunteered to bike to the corner grocery and buy it for me during the day. She also picked up a box of blueberries (frozen—they're not in season yet of course) and I had brought in a half kilo of fresh strawberries to cut up and put over the ice cream. See the clever red-white-and-blue color scheme?

Before she left, I had carefully counted the number of people at morning fika; there were only about 12. It's July, and many people have gone on vacation already, some of whom I did not expect to see again for weeks or even until August. So we decided that 2 liters of ice cream was probably more than enough, but to be on the safe side we got 3. Here is the email I sent out to my department:

From: <me>
Date: July 4, 2008 11:17:00 AM GMT+02:00
To: allaevolution.uu.se
Subject: MOLEVO: ice cream

Howdy y'all,

Today is the 4th of July, American independence day. Therefore the theme for afternoon fika is red, white and blue, in the form of vanilla ice cream, strawberries, and blueberries. Hope to see you at 3pm!

<me>
Department of Molecular Evolution
018 471 6402

Acknowledgments:
Thanks to <Z.>, for doing the necessary legwork.

So, with that email going out before noon, how many people do you think turned up for afternoon fika?

The answer is 28 people, including three who are officially on vacation, two more who are no longer technically affiliated with the department (but very welcome of course), a spouse or two, and a grand total of five children, ranging in age from about a week (postdoc V.P.'s latest addition to her family) to 8 years (grad student P.'s oldest of two boys).

As I have noted before, I have never seen a Swede turn down a sweet treat. Fortunately however they do tend to moderation in this regard, and there was even some ice cream left over. The berries however were completely cleaned out. My office mate S. came down a little late, and had to make do with the very last drippings from the berry bowls to achieve the requisite color scheme. (P. apologized quite unnecessarily for her boys, who didn't seem to understand that the berries were supposed to be ice cream toppings and not an end in themselves; I just laughed and said how cool I thought it was for two little boys to go for the berries more than ice cream. As a berry hound myself, I completely understand! Her youngest boy, N., is a real handful; at an age somewhere between 2 and 3, when he was introduced to me, he looked me in the eye, then calmly and deftly stole my building key right off my pocket. P. was as mortified as I've seen a parent get here... which is not all that much, really.)

It was really nice to have so many people turn out—I really wish I had taken my camera, because the little kids covered in berry juice were cute of course, and watching various parents taking turns chasing them down is always entertaining. Grad student B. asked (perhaps somewhat sarcastically) whether I wasn't supposed to blow something up today, and I said yes, absolutely, is there some gunpowder around here? Where can I get some? I think my eagerness took him aback somewhat. There was some discussion of whether we should sing something, but there was no way that I was going to sing the national anthem in front of all these musically talented people, and of course no one else knows the words, so I managed to dodge that bullet. I had a meeting with my advisor and work group at 4, so we all had to leave at that point, but S. and postdoc E. and his wife cleaned up for me, which was much appreciated.

B. had a point, of course—I terribly miss setting off and watching the pretty boomy things. But still, fika felt enough like a mini-Fourth of July picnic, and that together with tonight's dinner of potato salad and hamburgers, I feel as if I've honored Independence Day pretty well.