Changing by degrees

"Hey, what's the temperature out?" I hollered at Joe this morning from the bedroom, as I was trying to decide whether to wear warm socks, or really warm socks.

Sounds of a keyboard being typed on. "37," he hollered back.

37? I thought to myself. 37. Umm, 37, 37. "Uhhh..."

"You need that in Celcius?"

"Uhhh... yeah. Yeah, I do."

37F is 2.7C, a number I now find much easier for calibrating clothing. I feel that I have reached some sort of minor milestone here.

Now that's a walk in the woods

Friday night I attended a National Dish Dinner with a group of International Masters students from my department. Sometime between the borscht and a famous Chinese dish whose name translates directly as "Sugar Vinegar Cabbage," the subject of orienteering came up. K., the sole Swedish student in the program, was going to be a volunteer at a large orienteering competition here in Uppsala over the weekend, and he was explaining the competition. Apparently anyone can compete: you just show up, they hand you a map, and you head off into the woods. M., the Italian, wanted to know if you were allowed to use a GPS, and K. explained that you weren't allowed to use them, but most people brought one along so that they could check their route against the map afterwards. When M. asked what would prevent you from looking at your GPS during the competition, K. thought for a moment before suggesting, "Morals?", to which M. simply shook his head and said, "That's so Swedish."

For me, though, that wasn't the most Swedish part of the whole thing. K. was going to be working at the "Water Distribution" center, which he put in air quotes. When we all gave him puzzled looks, he explained that the "water" was actually aquavit: "You're trying to find your way in the woods, and you get mad at the trees and mad at the map, and so you just come to 'Water Distribution' and then you feel better."

When someone suggested that getting drunk was not the best solution to getting lost in the woods, K. admitted, "Every year, we lose a few competitors."

Alla helgons dag

2 novembre was Alla helgons dag, which in Sweden is dedicated not to saints, but is observed more generally as a memorial for the dead. The day is a röd dag in Sweden, which means that it is an official day off of work, but it fell on a Saturday this year. Friday was therefore technically supposed to be a half day, but somehow everyone stuck around for the whole day. I'm glad I did, because it wasn't until afternoon fika, surrounded by the jack-o-lanterns from Thursday evening, that my advisor suggested that we go to a cemetery sometime the next day, preferably in the evening, because many graves would be decorated with candles. So off we went to the large cemetery (last seen in this blog from the #2 bus) near Uppsala Cathedral.


We left Blodstenen at 16:00 to take advantage of the very last moments of light in the sky, and walking through a nice neighborhood we saw a porch with a tiny jack-o-lantern on it! (No picture of it, though, because there was already someone there taking a picture of this strange apparition.) A couple blocks later, we were standing at the southwest entrance to the sprawling Uppsala gamla kyrkogård, which is the newer portion and had some very fresh graves. I feel that I can't adequately describe the setting visually, and of course it's hard to take pictures in the dark, but please see the picture gallery to help get a feeling for the ambiance. I just kept saying to Joe "This is sooo cool!" and anyone out there with an affection for the macabre would agree with me. As the sky darkened, bright stars could be seen through the naked branches of the trees, with the north star being nearly directly overhead (and therefore less useful as a compass point). Lots of people were hustling to and fro, which feels strange when it's completely dark (it felt more like a game of "Ghost in the Graveyard" than anything else). Everyone was dressed casually as usual, and most people were in groups of threes and fours, and could be heard talking and even laughing, although plenty of people were standing silently and contemplatively. The atmospheric conditions contributed mightily to the mood: the air was crystal cold, with no wind at all, which meant that your exhalations took several second to disipate. Strange enough when it's you, but very odd looking indeed when everybody around you also has a halo of fog about their heads.


It was very dark, even in the middle of the city, and the deep twilight that we started in turned to night quickly. There were more lights in the newer portion of the cemetery, where we started our walk, than there were in the older part, both because recent graves have more relatives to attend to them, but also because the newer graves are smaller, and there are more of them and they are closer together. The new part was beautiful, with so many lights; the old part, beautiful but also downright creepy. In the area where the new was transitioning to the old, I sat to rest on a bench (which I found by nearly tripping over), while Joe wandered off in a different direction—he got a little bit lost within moments.

Did I mention it was cold? The whole tour took only about an hour, but that was enough. I at least had dressed more for a cold autumn day rather than a mild winter day, and by the time we reached the cemetery exit, I was happy to get myself to the nearest bus stop and head home for a welcome hot chocolate and leftover Halloween candy.

Three Museums

With a little time off in between study periods, I felt like I needed to take the opportunity for a little sight-seeing. Late October is not, however, the ideal tourist season in Sweden, at least not if you like things like being outside, or going to places that aren't closed for the year. The solution? Stockholm, of course, where most of the museums are open all year, and nearly all of them have some protection from the elements. So this Tuesday I headed down to Uppsala Centralstation to catch a train to the metrop, for some serious museum hopping.

The day did not start off on a promising note: I was trying to make the 9:09 train so as to be in Stockholm at 10:00 when museums start to open, but I pressed a wrong button on the automated ticket kiosk at 9:07, and by the time I'd corrected it the thing was convinced that the train had left the station, so I had to get a ticket for the 9:35 train instead. This turned out to be a good thing, however: while I was waiting on Platform 1 for my train (and eating the tuna sandwich I'd packed myself for lunch), a woman in an SJ uniform came running down the platform to announce something, the only words of which I caught were "Stockholm" and "Platform 0", after which everyone standing around me began sprinting to the other end of the station. Turns out the 9:09 train hadn't left yet, so those with more flexible tickets were hurrying to board it. Over the next 20 minutes, I watched commuter after commuter walk out of the station, peer at the departure board, and then suddenly start running for Platform 0. Despite all of the excitement, that train appeared still appeared to be sitting at Platform 0 when my train pulled out of the station a mere ten minutes late.

So I got to Stockholm by 10:30, and walked through the pouring rain towards my museums of choice. Now, Stockholm has plenty of museums, the best of which (Vasamuseet) we've already been to, so I'd spent a few hours with a guidebook over the weekend deciding what my strategy would be for this particular trip. I ruled out some cool sounding museums for the moment, either because they were under construction (such as the Museum of Medieval Stockholm) or because Jennifer especially wants to see them (such as the Matchstick Museum). Eventually I decided on the Architecture Museum, which is one of the four major museums on (or next to) the island of Skeppsholmen, all of which are open late on Tuesdays. I figured I'd head that way and museum until I couldn't stand it anymore. In the end, I wound up covering three out of the four. With apologies to both Frank Stella and the Rocky and Bullwinkle Show, here's what I saw:

Nationalmuseet, or "What You See Is Not What You See"

My first stop was the country's biggest art museum, which would not normally be at the top of my list museum-wise. At the moment, though, it has an exhibition on trompe-l'œil art throughout the ages (hence my subtitle) that looked like fun. It had all the usual stuff, the "looking out a fake window" trick, the "bunch of objects lying against this wall" trick, and then also some more modern tricks. The one that stood out for me the most was a roughly built driftwood crate, which was actually cast bronze.

As for the rest of the museum, about half of it was a typical collection of European paintings. The main hallway does have a couple of large works made by Carl Larsson specifically for the space, including his controversial "Midwinter Sacrifice" which depicts a Viking king about to be sacrificed outside the temple at Gamla Uppsala. I say that it was painted for that space, but the museum never asked for it; Larsson just decided he wanted to paint it, and was then deeply embittered when the museum refused to hang it. They didn't relent until the late 90s.

Slightly more interesting than the paintings was the design floor, which has a large exhibit of Swedish design in the 20th century. I was pleased to note that the red Ikea end table we have in our living room was there as an iconic piece of modern Swedish furniture. I guess we chose well.

Arkitektmuseet, or "What You See is a Wee Model of a Big Building"

My next stop was the excellent Museum of Swedish Architecture. I have sort of a love/hate relationship with architecture: I love looking at buildings, and I can spend hours reading about styles and techniques (such as the five hours I spent reading every panel in this somewhat diminutive museum); on the other hand, I find architectural writing to be just about the most pretentious form of writing on the planet. I was probably better off only being able to read the (no doubt more restrained) text in translation here. In any case, there were plenty of model buildings and explanatory diagrams to peruse while listening to the roughly 45% of the English language audio guide entries that were functional (to be fair, the audio guide was free, and I was warned up front that there were some "technical difficulties").

There was also an exhibition on modern Catalan architecture, about half of which focused solely on the Sagrada Família in Barcelona—that place creeps me out more and more the closer I look at it.

Modernamuseet, or "What You See Is What You See"

… and what I see is a bunch of galvanized steel boxes bolted to the wall. Seriously, writing about architecture may be pretentious, but at least it's being pretentious about something. In Modernamuseet the free audio guide was working, and having paid good money to get in (mostly because it's cheaper to get a dual ticket with the architecture museum, with which it also shares a building) I decided I would go through all of it. So I grabbed a stool and sat myself in front of each and every piece that had an audio description, and listened to all of them. OK, I gave up halfway through the somewhat breathless bit on Munch. The one that just about made me fall off my foldy stool was the description of the piece I mentioned above. I listened patiently to the explanation of how the artist's choice of a material not normally associated with art removed our expectations, and how the material gave no clue as to technique, or indeed any indication that it had even been worked by human hands. The part that got me went a little like:

By arranging identical pieces in sequence, instead of causing them to interact in some way, the artist is removed from the situation of having to say something to the viewer, and the viewer from having to listen.

I'll only mention two other things from Modernamuseet. The first was the Video Corridor, a dark room with a large video screen and two very comfortable couches. It was late in the day when I got here, so I probably spent more time watching this than I otherwise would have. Imagine West Side Story set in the Baroque period, if the Baroque period had been inhabited by hippies, anyway. Then remove all the music, singing, and, indeed, dialogue, leaving nothing but large groups of masked figures dancing in unison. Finally, imagine that the cinema has lost the last reel of the film, and that instead they keep playing the next to last reel on endless loop while they search for it, before finally giving up and simply running the whole movie in reverse. At some point I was having trouble telling whether or not I'd drifted off, so I gave up and left.

The temporary exhibition at Modernamuseet was a retrospective of Max Ernst, and they had an impressively large collection of his works. The Dadaist stuff didn't really grab me, but he did some etchings as book illustrations that were pretty interesting (especially the stuff for his "Forbidden Astronomy" book). It was the abstract painting he did in the 70s that really caught my eye, although possibly not in a good way. A couple of them I found deeply unsettling, by which I mean that they made me almost physically uncomfortable. I actually had to leave the room at one point. I'd hoped to be able to link to an image here (specifically to either "The Good-Humored Ravens" or "The Cardinals Die Here"), but oddly none of his later stuff seems to be even mentioned on the web. Actually, I think that's probably even more disturbing than the paintings themselves: if they aren't on the web, can I be sure that I really saw them?

Pumpor natt

You know, I really can't believe that they don't do Halloween here. What do you do at Halloween? You dress up, eat candy, and, if you're an adult, perhaps you have a party at which you drink beverages that cause you to loosen your inhibitions. As far as I can tell, Swedes excel at all three of these things. Europeans, though, know it more as the day before All Saint's Day, when "... we go around to graveyards in the freezing cold and and rain and then go home and talk about dead people all day. Not so fun," explained Polish student Z. American-style Halloween has been creeping into Sweden somewhat, to the dismay of the youngish parents ("One more thing to do, and more things to buy..." groaned one of them to me) and traditionalists. Swedish student N. said that within the past couple years, there have actually been protests against stores displaying Halloween items, from people who feel that All Saint's Day is solemn and sacred and should not be associated with children running around having fun.

Well, I like Halloween a lot, and I knew I'd be grumpy if I didn't do anything to celebrate, so I decided to risk a little cultural imperialism and host a pumpkin carving party at work last night. Pumpkins are available in supermarkets (at roughly 60SEK for a big one); I had one, Joe got one, and three others (Swedish staff artist L., and student B. and her boyfriend, and new Danish student E.) showed up with squashes. German student M. was sorry that she didn't bring one, but confessed that she had mis-heard the word "pumpkins" as "pump-guns," and had been quite alarmed at my suggestion that everyone should bring their pump-guns to work, and we would drink some beers and light up the pump-guns to scare away the evil spirits.

Plenty of other Swedes stuck around after work to observe, and take the excuse to raid the departmental beer stash and help with the big bowl of godis that we brought. I had neglected to think of music, so I appointed student V. (who has the best computer speakers) as DJ for the evening. (He was able to play music all evening from his mobile phone. The nerd in me was deeply impressed.) I don't think I've ever had to actually teach anyone how to carve a jack-o-lantern. Joe and I did a tag-team demonstration of techniques, and everybody got up to their elbows in pumpkin guts pretty quickly. They all did a fine job of carving, I think, especially for first-timers. B.'s boyfriend squinted at mine. "I just now figured out that yours is Bootsy Collins," he said. We lit them all up and lined them up on the table, and everyone ooohed and aaahed at the effect. "It's like having a camp fire right in the room!" said N.

N. was also celebrating some good work-related news, and the beer was being consumed at a rapid rate. A liter of white wine was also drained. L. left to get more beer, and came back with a bottle of champagne, and then some rum that a friend had brought him from Thailand, and... well, let's just say people relaxed into the evening pretty well. It was still a Thursday, though, so we wrapped it up around 22:00, and cleaned up the bottles and pumpkin guts and candy wrappers in short order. The jack-o-lanterns were stashed in the lab cold room.

Next morning, the lanterns were retrieved for morning fika, and then again for afternoon fika, and thereby helped to cheer up an unrelentingly dark and dreary Friday. Joe put ours on the steps up to our apartment, where they still are sitting, still are sitting, hopefully keeping the evil spirits away for another year. And a welcome sight they were, when I came home an hour later, trudging through the snow... but that's another story. Happy Halloween!

Even More Weather…

I had this week off, so naturally the whole week it's been hovering between 1°C and 3°C, with near constant rain. We're done with that now, though: as the sunlight has faded over the past 30 minutes, the rain has finally turned into snow. Maybe this weekend is the time to put those studded tires on the bike…