Magic Songs in the Borg Cube

The Uppsala Kammarkör had another concert last Sunday, and I now know two of its tenors, my officemate S. and Swiss postdoc G. The title of the concert was "Magic Songs" after excerpts from a piece with the same name by Canadian composer R. Murray Schafer, and the theme was magic-inspired music from around the world. Included in program were a tune by 16th century composer Tielman Susato rearranged by Jan Garbarek, and a short piece by Estonian Arvo Pärt. The concert opened with Raua Needmine, a challenging piece by V Tormis (challenging in this case to the singers; two of the baritones looked like they were going to pass out at one point, but we enjoyed the piece hugely). The eponymous Magic Songs were intended "to make magic work in the real world," and included chants for calling wolves, keeping bees warm, making bears dance, making stones sing (there were some lovely vocals for that one, with one note sustained while others fell in turn, making me think of meteorites), and finally, an all-purpose chant to make magic work. The concert ended with a yoik, the Lapp song that captures the essence of a human or other living being. In this case the living being was joyful, and as the choir sang they bent their bodies about, almost as if they were singing a traditional American gospel.

The concert was held in the Uppsala Konsert och Kongress, the opening of which, in September of 2007, was surrounded by controversy. The building was expensive to begin with, and then of course costs ran well over what had been projected. The style is a modern cube: some like it, some hate it, but everyone agrees it stands out architecturally (whether that's good or bad depends on you). The acoustics in our small hall were fantastic. The view of the city, from the solid bank of windows that runs around the building at about two-thirds the way up, is fabulous, and anybody can come into the building during the day just to see the view. The interior feels rather uncomfortably like an airport. There is a water feature outside so unobtrusive that pedestrians routinely fall into it, and even a taxi drove into it once.

Worst of all, in the minds of some: it was designed by Danes.

Glad Tacksägelse

Thanksgiving is not an official holiday in Sweden, but despite this fact Swedes have a traditional Thanksgiving Day menu: split pea soup with ham, and pancakes with cream and strawberry preserves. If that doesn't sound much like a Thanksgiving Dinner, that's because it isn't really, it's just that Thanksgiving happens to fall on a Thursday, and that's what Swedish families are supposed to eat on Thursday. I don't suppose that there are too many people these days who actually cook split pea soup and pancakes every Thursday, but that doesn't stop it from being a cultural touchstone. The lunch restaurants where I go to class and where Jennifer works both put this on the menu every Thursday, and there are always plenty of takers.

Turkey, on the other hand, is a dish generally reserved for Easter in Sweden, and the rest of the year it's pretty hard to find. That being said, I did manage to find a single turkey leg, so this weekend we're roasting the sucker and serving it with mashed potatoes. For tonight, though, we're sticking with tradition: split pea soup. Oh yes, and pancakes, too.

And so it begins

Construction on the annual Julbock, the world's largest straw goat, has begun in the small city of Gävle (about 100km north of Uppsala). According to the newspaper, they Goat committee this year has opted to forego the highly successful flame-proofing used in the past two years. They say it's because the chemical caused the straw to absorb water and turn a dull brown instead of the goat's natural proud yellow coloring. I suspect it's because they secretly want the goat to burn every other year or so.

Either way, the webcam is up, as is the goat's blog (only in Swedish this year, by the look of it). You can keep an eye on the goat's progress off to the right.

I can't resist posting this charmingly unintelligible machine translation of the goat's first blog entry:

So it was finally time for a world celebrity to wake up from its summer slumber. On Friday the whole I should be place on the Palace Square in winter white Calcutta1. Follow the building via web cameras! New raiment has bock Committee cost of an old man too. Ah, the smell luscious malt indeed - straw will apparently from whiskey production in Mackmyra. And some, it is nice to regain its former glory. Unfortunately, the flame retardant (used in recent years) that I lost stinget total. Nobody likes of course, a dirt brown CHRISTMAS GOAT, which most resembles a roller cured terrier. But this year I am irresistible again with the New barley straw! Although I am not as eldsäker night, but I hope you will help me to look out for FIREBUG industries. Now is the ZOMBIES!

1 For some reason, online translators generally mistake the Swedish town of Gävle for the Indian city of Calcutta. Go figure.

Låt det snöa, låt det snöa, låt det snöa

Turns out that the snow we got on Saturday was just the start. Sunday evening saw some more, but then things really took off on Monday, and now we've got about 30 cm of the stuff. The picture above was taken Tuesday morning—I guess some people don't have their snow tires on yet. Biking to school Monday morning was dicey in parts (and I did watch a couple of people wipe out), but fortunately the majority of my route goes through the woods, so I didn't have to contend with traffic outside of a couple of blocks at each end.

Now that the snow has stopped falling for a couple of days, the maintenance crews have had a chance to catch up. Interestingly, they don't actually plow all of the snow; they pack a bunch of it down into a nice hard base that covers the sidewalks and the streets, and then they spread gravel over that. It doesn't make for a great walking surface right after they do it, but once it gets roughed up a bit it seems to be fine. There must be a tiny version of the big snow clearing equipment I've seen around town, too, because someone has gone through the forest trails and made a 45 cm wide path of packed snow down the center of each.

The forest, incidentally, is gorgeous in the snow, so much in fact that after getting home earlier than expected Tuesday I felt the need to go and walk around in the woods for a while. I didn't have too long, though: I got home at 1:45, and the sun sets now at 3.

That's all for now. Thursday we're expecting highs around 5°C, so I suppose we'll be trading in all our high albedo cover for a new round of mud; meanwhile, I intend to keep enjoying the white stuff.

Snow Day, Sort Of

We woke up this morning to our first real snowfall of the year—not a blizzard, by any means, but a decent 5 cm or so. We had planned a lazy Saturday anyway, so it was a great day for us to have some snow. What's more, by the time we got up the clouds had cleared, so everything was bright and sunny, quite the welcome change from two weeks of unbroken dismality.

It was so nice, in fact, that we decided to take a walk in the woods. This is quite an easy thing for us to do now, as our apartment is completely surrounded by forest. So early afternoon we bundled up more than was strictly necessary—last winter was, after all, lame, and we never got to wear most of our cold weather gear—and headed off into the trees. We immediately picked up a walking companion, a young orange cat from somewhere in the neighborhood. As we moved out onto the trail, he started to pick his way alongside, and wound up alternately following and leading us for our entire 45 minute walk.

There isn't really much else to tell: it was pretty, we walked, other people walked, the cat cavorted alongside. Check out the gallery for pictures of us and the cat.

Härkeberga Church and Konditori Drott

Last Sunday morning I got an email from P., a friend from work, inviting me take a little trip with her, her husband, and two boys out to Härkeberga Kyrka. A few months ago we had talked about the art of Albertus Pictor, whose images had had a strong influence on ingmar Bergman's "The Seventh Seal." The famous image of Death playing chess is found in another church near Stockholm (Täby Kyrka), but his paintings at Härkeberga are well-preserved and quite lovely.

It snowed for the first time overnight—not too much in town, but plenty of snow was sticking to the ground as we drove through the countryside. It was a very pretty drive, with snow on the birches and spruces. Forest and farmland are interspersed, and all the barns and outbuildings are painted a very familiar red. The color is known here as "faluröd" after the town of Falun, because the copper smelters there also made a red-colored by-product, which was put to use as a weather-proofer for wooden buildings.

The church itself is very small and very old, with parts of the building dating from the 1300s. They have an old stave building out front, which may now be serving as the bell tower. The church is surrounded by graveyard with the typical gravel bed surrounded by a hedge, and even now, in the middle of the day and well past All Saint's, some grave markers have candles burning in front of them. I don't have good pictures of the paintings themselves, because it was quite dim inside, but here are links for paintings in Koret (the choir), Långhuset (the main building), and Vapenhuset (the weaponhouse, where people had to check their weapons before coming into the church proper) respectively. The Wheel of Life, the third one down in Vapenhuset, is particularly famous, and includes a porcupine.

After ambling around a church and graveyard in tempertures somewhat below freezing, P. quite reasonably declared herself in need of coffee, so off we went to the nearest town of any size, Enköping, where P. had lived before when she was a writer for the local newspaper's culture desk. We drove through town, which I duly admired for its small-town charm, and then over to the train station, by which stands P.'s old favorite cafe, Konditori Drott. The first nice thing to happen in Drott was that I managed to order my hot chocolate and wienerbröd in Swedish, and even though I have to resort to English in order to get one more pastry to take home to Joe, they kept speaking Swedish to me. They were also good natured, which is a bit of a rarity here among food-service employees. The second good experience was eating the pastry, which was absolutely delicious.

But the best thing about Drott is the decor and ambience (and I use those words ironically). P. describes Drott as being "completely devoid of any aesthetics whatsoever." Newer places that want to be retro strive for this atmosphere, but can never quite get it right. The plastic geraniums in the windows have probably been there for decades; the wall hangings are haphazard and have not changed since the 1970s; the mustard-gold vinyl of the benches lining the back wall of the smoking room (!) is probably original. Drott is unpretentious and cozy and the food is cheap and delicious, and I join P. in saying that it's my favorite cafe in Sweden.

Of course, it probably didn't hurt that by the time we got there we were freezing, starving, and caffeine deprived.