As Swedish as Äppel Paj

We spent this afternoon in our favorite Uppsala café, Ofvandahls. I say "our favorite" like it's some great secret we discovered, but the truth is that (according to the Swedish wikipedia entry) Ofvandahls has been a popular student hangout since it was opened in 1878. It's a cozy place, with at least a half dozen small rooms filled with mismatched tables and chairs, broad planked pine flooring, and a seemingly never ending supply of customers. It also happens to be a great place to go for a baguette sandwich lunch, a bit of pastry, or even a marzipan Linnaeus head.

Today, however, the sign out front read Valfri Äpple Paj, and while it may only have been optional, every Swede in the place was eating it. Now, I've never had äpple paj in Sweden before, so I can't say for sure whether this was a typical Swedish dish or maybe a special Ofvandahls thing; either way it was not what I expected. It was served in rectangles, and had a sweet top like a crumble, while the pie itself was a scattering of apple chunks in a lot of bread-pudding-like matrix. The whole thing was topped with a generous dollop of vanilla sauce (I thought it was generous anyway, but most of the Swedes in line in front of us got a second scoop, completely inundating their pie). It was tasty, but wicked filling.

Anyway, we sat for a couple of hours, Jennifer writing while I knitted (that hat I promised Jennifer for Christmas is almost done, honest). We had planned on staying longer, but it's mellandagar in Sweden right now, so naturally the café closed early. Honestly, I think we were lucky it was open at all.

Julgång

Naturally, we've been somewhat remiss in keeping the updates coming during the Christmas holiday. Never fear, we fully intend to make up for it over the next few days by covering Christmas one topic at a time. To start things off, a brief discussion of walks in the wintery woods. Once when discussing the Swedish national character, one of my professors, Anders, said, "Swedes think they walk in the woods more than other people. They may not actually do it, but they like to think that they do." I can't speak to the difference between the idea and the reality, but I can say that Swedes do seem to enjoy their walks in the woods. This has been especially in evidence this past week: on Julafton we got a light covering of snow, and since Christmas it's been cold and clear every day. There still isn't much light, but between the hours of 11 and 3 it has been gorgeous out, and every day there have been Swedes out taking advantage of it.

We've been taking advantage of the light as well. Today, for example, we wandered a little to our southwest to a large meadow, entirely covered in rime glittering in the light of the sun just peaking over the horizon (which is pretty much all that the sun does now, when it's up). The frost had formed the largest crystals either of us had ever seen, covering pretty much everything in sight. We passed maybe a dozen other people on the way, nothing compared to the pretty much constant stream of people who were out on Christmas afternoon.

The most interesting person? That would have to be a young woman taking a slow walk with her sheep, all the while conducting a long, occasionally animated, almost entirely one-sided conversation (the sheep did make a loud comment once) in what sounded quite a lot like Finnish. As Jennifer said at the time, "This country is funny."

Nerd jul party

A lot of social stuff has been happening in the last couple weeks, along with the usual frantic increase in work as everybody tries to get projects completed before the holiday break and the new year. I was as busy as everyone else, but did manage to turn two manuscripts over to two completely different sets of co-authors on the day before Christmas eve. So here's some catching-up.

For reasons that are not quite clear, there was no official holiday party in our department this year. Danish student K.-M. declared that this was silly, and that we should just make a pot-luck sort of event. She was going back to Denmark in early December, but then she was coming back, "... and for the party I will bring paper and we will make Danish paper stars," she announced at fika one morning. "Can't you get the right paper here?" someone asked. "In Sweden?" she asked, scornfully. "No, no, no!" I had no idea what "Danish paper stars" were, but I thought the party would be a good excuse for me to force my eggnog on a new set of people ("Egg... what?" people asked. "Nog? What is that? Does it have eggs in it?"), so the two of us became the de facto jul party committee.

On the evening of the 19th, I had the eggnog ready to go, K.-M. made a big pot of glögg, and somewhere near twenty people crowded into the upstairs break room. Everyone got a glass of something, then K.-M. passed around the paper, and started instructing people how to make Danish paper stars. "It will be easy, I teach children to do this every year at home," she had said earlier in the day. Perhaps so, but it's not clear if she had ever tried to teach this skill to a roomful of nerds. Nerds, if you are unfamiliar with the species, tend to be proud perfectionists, unwilling to admit that they don't understand something right away, but more than willing to work like slaves in pursuit of that understanding. Within 10 minutes, the room fell almost silent, and "Ultra-Lounge Christmas*" blaring from my iPod was the only sound to be heard, as almost everyone bent over the table, peering intently at their projects. No, I take that back, there was one other sound: that of people occasionally saying questioningly "K.-M.?" and of K.-M. hustling around to their seat, and saying "No, other way," or "No, almost, but go under that flap not over," or even the devastating "No, no, you had better rip it up and start all over."

No one was talking, no one was drinking. ("Would it help to drink more?" someone asked hopefully. "No, I don't think so," said K.-M. sadly.) Technician A.-S. finished her work and came to the party a little late; she helped herself to a glass of glögg. "This is a party? You all look like you are studying hard for an exam," she laughed. There was a smattering of self-conscious giggling that quickly faded as everyone bent back to their work.

I managed to complete one star and then start another before becoming caught up in conversation with a professor from another department; Joe made three of his own and then finished my half-star. "The first one takes an hour," he reports, "and then the second one takes an hour and a half because you think you know how to do it." Most people made at least two. Ours now hang proudly on our tree. Perhaps they're not quite as intricate as Grandma's tatted stars... but they're ours, all ours!

*By request, I had brought the very cheeziest American holiday music I could find. Believe me, it's a lot easier to take this stuff when you don't hear it all the time!

Julbord

Now that finals are over (whew!) it's time for me to start catching up on what's been going on the past couple of weeks. So, in celebration of the Jul Season, I'll jump back a couple of week's to a Sunday afternoon when we took part in a long-standing Swedish Christmas tradition: the Julbord. The Julbord is basically the Christmas version of the smörgasbord, the Swedish version of the buffet. It refers to the large meal that Swedish families normally lay out on Christmas Eve, but in more recent times it's also been popular for restaurants to have Julbord seatings around the holiday season.

Jennifer had been told by co-workers that we should really try to go to a Julbord sometime, so when she found a couple of coupons to the Julbord at Odinsborg Restaraunt it seemed like we should go. The coupons were only good for the first week in December (high Julbord season doesn't really kick off until St. Lucia on December 13, so I guess they were trying to drum up some early business), so despite being crazy busy that week we made the time to go out to Odinsborg on the weekend.

Actually, we had planned on going Saturday afternoon, but while getting ready we began to wonder about some detail or another and decided to look at their web page, which in turn led us to call them, which was a good thing: they were actually booked up for the afternoon, and what's more it isn't the sort of thing you can just wander in to any old time. There are three seatings a day on the weekend, at noon, 3 and 7. Feeling a little foolish, we booked a table for two at the mid-afternoon seating the next day.

Odinsborg has been a local favorite for decades, primarily due to its location right next to the burial mounds at Gamla Uppsala. It used to be quite a bit closer to them: before it was decided that the mounds merited preservation and a museum, the restaurant occupied the best piece of real estate in the area, with a panoramic view of all three main burials. Its location was so good that when it came time to build the museum, the restaurant got the heave, although a protest from the locals prevented its being demolished. Instead, it was shifted off to the north a couple hundred meters. Its big picture windows don't have much of a view anymore, but it's still the same cool old building, and to all appearances it's still serving exactly the same menu.

When we got there, a few minutes after three, there was a line out the door of dressed up people waiting to get to their Christmas feed. For a few minutes we felt distinctly casually dressed, but then a couple more families showed up looking even more casual than us, so we felt OK after that. Anyway, it was quite a crush at the beginning, and it took us a good half hour to get in, get our coats squared away, and be shown our table. We were kind of far removed from the food, but on the other hand we had a cozy little corner with a fireplace, and it was much quieter than the big room. Anyway, I went off to try to score us some quick food to nosh on while the line died down. I picked the shortest line I could find, and then stood in it for the next 4 hours. OK, maybe not that long, but I was hungry, and the line I was in never seemed to move despite the continuous stream of people coming out of the next room, each of them laboring to get their massively laden plate back to their table.

However long it took, I was very glad when I finally made it to the front, and even more glad when a new supply of plates showed up and I could begin. I made my way past the eel (I'm not completely averse to a little smoked eel now and again, but when confronted with a dish which appears to be nothing more than a large eel with its spine ripped out, chopped into rounds—well, I'm going to pass on that, even if I am hungry) and got down to the important stuff: Jansson's Temptation (sort of potatoes au gratin, but with herring and Christmas spices added for good measure), julskink, meatballs, and of course several kinds of potatoes. I almost got to the potatoes, anyway—just before I could reach them, a group of half a dozen well dressed older ladies walked into the room, ignoring the line completely, grabbed plates and set to the potato dish right in front of me. I decided that, in this case, eating was the better part of valor, and retreated to our table with what I'd managed so far.

By my next trip I was feeling a little more daring, not eel daring exactly, but enough to move over to the unidentifiable meats line. This whole side of the buffet was covered in dishes of sliced meats, which included some ham and salami, but also a variety of elk sausage, some smoked reindeer, and a variety of paté like things all of which, on sampling, seemed to have been made of ground herring. I suppose that somewhere in this mix there must have been the julkorv, another Julbord required item, but I must have missed it somehow.

Also worthy of mention, of course, was the dessert table, found naturally enough just past the fireplace with the stuffed badger. It (the table, that is, not the badger) boasted a selection of puddings that rivaled even the most sumptuous of Norwegian buffets, a variety of cakes and ice creams, some pomegranates (mmm…), and a selection of tiny, chocolate dipped marzipan pigs. Ahh, the sweet melancholy of the marzipan pig…

Done!

Had my second final yesterday (at 8 am, ridiculous, sun was barely up by the time I finished at 9:30), and have been working all day today on my last thing for the semester, a take home final for Human-Computer Interaction, had two questions to go after dinner, answered the first one but then was feeling tired, so I had a cup of coffee, which I never do anymore, answered the last question in like an hour, 'cause caffeine makes me smarter! So now I'm all done for the semester. Guess I'll stay up and watch late night television. What's on Swedish television tonight? "Who was James Bond?", "Love Actually," and the "The Net." Wow, from that I might as well be living in Cleveland…

Every Swedish girl's dream

As we were driving back from Harkeberga Church a few weeks ago, the conversation turned to the approaching holiday season, and I asked about what were particularly Swedish things to do and see. "You must be sure to see the Lucia celebrations," said P., "It's very beautiful, and quite a big deal." A pause. "I was never chosen to be Lucia in school," she added morosely. "It has scarred me for life. I sometimes think my whole academic life has been an attempt to overcome this."

Every year across this great nation, on 12 december, a girl plays S:t Lucia. The duties of this girl are to wear white robes and a crown of candles, sing the S:t Lucia song, and look angelic. What girl? you ask. Mostly it's a school thing—every class chooses a Lucia, and generally every city and town does too. But Lucia's not just for little kids. There's an official, country-wide Lucia, who is the winner of a combined talent and beauty contest. This year, Sweden's Lucia is a student from the ag school just down the road, so she's an Uppsalabo, a fact that the local paper went to some pains to point out at every possible opportunity.

For most people, Lucia means music. Each department at the University has its own Lucia concert, in which the students of the local music schools dress in the traditional white robes and sing Lucia songs and Christmas carols. The concert at the EBC was performed in the stairwell of the old Zoology building, now the Evolution Museum. The wide marble halls give a lovely sound, and the echo is not bad at all because the place is crammed with the staff and students from the entire complex. They turned all the lights off to better see the candles, so the picture at right is blurry but maybe gives you a little bit of an idea of what it looked like. (There was a Lucia pageant at the computer campus, too, but Joe didn't get to see it because he had his exam at that time. Just for fun, you should ask him how he feels about having a data mining exam instead of getting to observe this most traditional Swedish custom.)

Earlier in the week, a vague email had gone out about getting the "newcomers" to "entertain us" at the afternoon fika. No one ever said anything more about it, so we "newcomers" figured everyone had forgotten about it. I had lunch with B. (a student in her mid 20s) and L. (a postdoc in her mid 30s, mother of two). "So what are you newcomers doing for the afternoon fika?" B. asked. "Well, nothing," I said. "Oh." she said. Several moments passed in silence. "But you could be Lucia," L. said. "And?" I said. They looked at me blankly, then exchanged a glance with each other. "Well, it's very important," B. said. "There are big contests and everything. I was never chosen to be Lucia." "Neither was I," L. said. The both stared at me.

Now I understood. Here I was, about to pass up the chance to achieve every little Swedish girl's dream. (I'm often a little slow, but I usually do get there, eventually.) I'm not really into these girly-girl sorts of things—when my long-suffering mother reads this post, I will know it, because I will be able to hear her laughing hysterically from across the ocean—but I was suddenly inspired to make a last-second effort. I enrolled fellow newcomer G.'s help, and he had the brilliant idea of red tape on a lab coat, mimicking the white robes and red belt. While I frantically searched the web trying to find the Lucia lyrics in English, he also found a candle motif and printed it on a couple pieces of paper, bending it 'round and taping it to make a sort of a crown. I taped the flashlight I carry in my bag to the inside of the crown, turned it on so that the crown glowed slightly, and voila! Instant Lucia.

I looked like a burger flipper at Max.

But never mind: G. was bringing Swiss chocolate to fika anyway, so that covered his "newcomer" obligation, and therefore it was my duty to make a total fool of myself in front of my co-workers. To borrow a phrase from Mark Twain, let us draw a curtain of charity over the rest of the scene.

So there it is. I've been Lucia, and lived the dream. What's left for me to accomplish now?



(Jennifer, the most ghetto Lucia in the whole history of Lucias, trying to look pious. Don't worry, there were more people there to witness my humiliation, they're just out of shot. Lab coats are not very flattering, are they?)

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Want to learn more about Lucia, the way it's supposed to be?

The "official" Lucia for Sweden is chosen in a charity event called Bride of Sweden. Note that the title was awarded by such notables as Princess Christina, Saul Bellow, and Astrid Lindgren. If you want to see the the 2008 lineup of finalists, and I'll bet you do, here they are. Emma Johansson was this year's winner. Note that they must sing as well, and the winner and her court do have a rather busy schedule of visits to hospitals and things, and spend pretty much the entire day singing. The local newspaper interviewed Johansson, in case you want another look at her. And you can see a Lucia court sing the song on youtube, of course.

Sometimes boys want to be Lucia too! (P. and I joined an on-line group in support of their cause.)

I'll leave you with this quote from the official Sweden promotional website.

The Lucia tradition can be traced back both to St Lucia of Syracuse, a martyr who died in 304, and to the Swedish legend of Lucia as Adam's first wife. It is said that she consorted with the Devil and that her children were invisible infernals...

Please do read the whole article and note that they kindly allow that these days the Lucia need not be beautiful and blonde... although, somehow, they almost always are...

And as a footnote, I would like to add that it occurred to me right before I went onstage that I do have some Lucia in me after all, from my maternal grandmother. Thanks, Gramma Lucille!