Vasaloppet 2009

"I fäders spår för framtids segrar"
—In the footsteps of our forefathers for the victories of tomorrow, motto of Vasaloppet

Vasaloppet was this morning, the 90km cross-country ski race commemorating the return of Gustav Vasa and his followers to the city of Mora (Joe wrote a summary of the history of it last year). We did our Patriotic Duty and got up early to watch the mass start, which is quite entertaining when the "mass" numbers thousands and thousands of people—it takes well more than ten minutes just for everyone to get past the starting line, and of course there are tangled poles, improperly fastened skis coming off, bags of discarded outerwear that must be navigated around, and so forth. (In the picture above left, the clothing is being shoveled into a front-end loader after the starting area cleared out.)

The serious competitors are seeded and placed in the front of the pack, so that they can focus on their race and not be distracted by the far more numerous skiers who are perhaps hoping merely to finish. TV reporters find most of the people willing to be interviewed at the back of the group, including a couple fellows dressed as faux Vikings, in furs and horned helmets (and, incongruously, bright red fanny packs); a guy who had to do the race wearing a Swiss hockey jersey because he lost a bet on a hockey game; a pensioner whose starting number was 19,082 and who was skiing this race for the 30th time (his best finish was 6,265th). Performance-enhancing chemicals, in the form of blueberry soup, are freely handed out along the course, and race officials estimate that thousands of liters of the stuff are consumed. This year we had some blueberry soup for breakfast, in a gesture of solidarity. I guess the soup works as a stimulant for athletes working hard in the cold; however, for this observer (ensconced on the couch under a blanket in a nice warm apartment), that cup of blueberry soup was a one-way ticket to nap-ville.

But I did manage to wake up in time to see the winners, who finished around three hours after starting. In the picture at left, the female winner is being greeted by a rosy-cheeked handsome smiling youth dressed in historical costume, who is about to hang a laurel wreath around her neck as she skies past. The finish line remains open for 12 hours past the start time, and as I write this, at 8 hours past, skiers are still streaming into the finishing gate in downtown Mora, each pumping a fist in the air in joy, or relief, or both...

Rättslig Igen

The end of January was also the end of of our first year in Sweden, a fact which carried a significance beyond the purely personal: Swedish Residence Permits are only issued for one year at a time, so we had to apply for another year. The application process had the sorts of ups and downs we've come to expect from the Swedish bureaucracy. You can apply online, so there's no need to wait in line; on the other hand, to get help with the online forms you have to send an e-mail, and getting a reply takes a little while (four weeks, to be precise). There are customized instructions for each kind of application; this would be helpful if we could figure out what kind of application we needed to make, as Jennifer is sort of an employee, sort of a visiting researcher, and sort of a student.

Ideally, I would be able to list an upside of the online form itself here, just for the sake of parallelism, but I cannot in good conscience do it. In this day and age, there is no excuse for making a form which:

1. flat out will not work with any browser other than MS Explorer running on Windows,
2. is 8 pages long, but doesn't validate your information until you reach the end of page 6, at which point it simply informs you that you did something wrong somewhere (for example, you might have included a punctuation mark in a field somewhere, like when you reported your birthplace as "Greenville, Mississippi"), leaving you to figure out what is wrong for yourself,
3. throws away everything you've entered so far if you click "cancel" on any one of the dialogue boxes that pop up with some regularity,
4. immediately crashes the browser if you type a single Swedish character (ö, ä, å) anywhere,
5. will not let you continue past page 6 until you have attached copies of all required documentation, despite the fact that the documents listed on page 6 are different from the ones listed on the "Have this ready before you proceed…" page, and are not in point of fact the documents you actually need to submit to Migrationsverket.

Anyway, after each of us had filled out the online form at least a dozen times, we finally got everything to work, and we submitted our application (along with our fee of 1000 SEK each). Then we settled in to wait. And wait.

I feel like I should have something insightful to relate about our 30 days as illegal immigrants, but the truth is that we've both been so busy we haven't really had time to think about it. Oh sure, when sitting around the odd evening discussing whether or not we might go to Copenhagen over Easter break one of us would say, "Of course, that's assuming they'll let us back into the country if we leave…", but beyond that we didn't really give it too much thought.

Well, this week the waiting ended when Jennifer got an e-mail stating that our permit had been renewed. So on Thursday afternoon we headed back to the local Migrationsverket, a trip we haven't made in over a year, to get our pictures taken and have new permits stuck in our passports. I tend to give Migrationsverket a hard time, but the truth is that it's remarkably efficient: I can't imagine U.S. Immigration giving an answer to anything in under 6 months, and I certainly wouldn't expect to be only 6th in line for the walk-in hours at the local branch office. In fact, we would have been done with the whole process in under an hour if the sticker printing machine hadn't been broken. As it was, in just under two hours we had our new permits, and I was able to get back to campus before my afternoon class started.

The best part? They back-dated the permit, so while we weren't legal residents when it was actually February, now we were legal residents then. Try saying that in Swedish.

Fear of Falling

While my first try at Nordic skating had kind of a rocky ending, it was nevertheless a lot of fun. So when word came down that Jennifer's coworkers were planning a Saturday afternoon skating excursion I joined up right away. I was especially glad to hear that this time there would be a number of beginners in the group.

We all agreed to meet at Fjällskog, the place we rented the skates from the last time, when it opened at 10 on Saturday morning. I was waiting outside the door when they opened, and had already gotten my pair of size 44s by the time the next batch of people showed up: Z., one of Jennifer's coworkers, along with her two visitors from her home in Poland: her boyfriend, who we'll call X. (too many collisions on the initials, bad bucket design I guess), and a friend who is working in Stockholm for a few weeks, T. Unfortunately for them, it turned out that I had gotten nearly the last pair of skates in the shop1, and all that remained were two pairs of 43s, which did no good for anyone. T. had purchased a pair of hockey skates the day before, and was eager to go, so they collectively agreed that they would come along anyway and hang out at the lake (which had been Jennifer's plan all along, so that worked out pretty well).

After a few minutes, the rest of our party arrived: Jennifer's coworker N., and our Swiss friends G. and D. (in other words, the skating party from our last outing). We loaded up into a couple of cars and took off. Our destination this time was Skarholmen on Lake Mälaren, and to give you an idea of just how far away that is let me just say that when we got there we were immediately confronted with an Uppsala city bus stop. Yes, the #20 runs all the way to the lake, as it turns out.

After negotiating the somewhat treacherous steps down to the ice, we spent a little time getting set for the skating, while Jennifer, X., and Z. prepared to head off on a walk along the edge of the lake. By the time we were actually ready to go, it had become clear that this was not going to be as smooth an outing as the last time. In fact, except for N., the native, the rest of us had all picked up a more or less significant handicap. G. had just received a pair of vintage skates, which had both cool leather straps and boots that were two sizes too big for him; D. had gone and gotten herself a pair of nice skates secondhand, but they were clap skates and hence a new experience, and T., as mentioned before, was on hockey skates, not ideal for the occasionally rough natural ice. And me? Why, I had developed a sudden fear of falling, as a result of which my skating abilities, limited as they were to begin with, had largely evaporated.

As a group, then, we were not feeling as ambitious this time around. We went out about 3.5km (unlike Norrviken, there were no markers around Skarholmen, but it was pretty clear where we had been, looking at a map later), at which point we all agreed it was time to head back. Also unlike Norrviken, the track from Skarholmen isn't a big loop. Skarholmen is at one end of a 6 km track that leads to the little village of Hammarskog, and from there it continues on the next 74km to Stockholm (with three little overland crossings along the way). As it was colder this time, conditions were quite a bit different. On the plus side, there was no inch of water on top of the ice (a fact which I was grateful for the one time I did fall), and there was absolutely no wind, so going back was just as easy as going out; on the negative side, it's later in the season, so the glassy smoothness of the ice is gone, and things were a little rough in parts. It was also a beautiful, sunny day, which made for much better pictures than the last time around (see the gallery for the complete collection). And this time we had a soundtrack: every now and then, the whole lake would reverberate with a deep "Boom" as the ice cracked—very impressive.

Back nearer the shore, Jennifer and company had a nice couple of hours strolling the ice, which other than the path was covered in a nice bit of snow so as to not be treacherous (there were actually quite a few people just out for a stroll in the middle of the lake). They passed by some ice fishers pulling tiny fish out of a tiny hole in the ice, watched the high tech snow plow clearing the trail, and Jennifer sat for a while on the iced-over pier and started a letter to her mother.

When we got back, quite exhausted, we met at some rocks on the shore for lunch. We had packed egg salad sandwiches, coffee, and a thermos of that ultimate Swedish wintersport concoction: blueberry soup. Unfortunately, I poured most of the soup on my leg, which was not, I gather, how the locals do things, but the part I did manage to drink went down something grateful. Anyway, the original plan had been to head back out after lunch, but it turned out that we were all too tired. N. took a carload of folks back into town, while Jennifer and I took a last, short stroll with G. and D. before heading back in ourselves.

To celebrate a successful day of skating, we went back to G. and D.'s place for a bit of Guitar Hero and some yummy crepes. Then it was home, and a well earned rest.

1 Why the shortage of skates? Sunday was the day of the annual Uppsala–Stockholm skating race, Vikingarännet. This is an 80km race held on some Sunday of February (the organizers pick two likely looking days in advance, then declare 5 days out whether or not it looks like the weather will hold; some years the ice just isn't good enough and the race is called off), which starts in either Uppsala or Stockholm (again, announced 3 days in advance, and picked so that the race runs downwind) and ends in the other. There are usually about 4000 entrants, and the competitive class this year finished in the 2 hours and 40 minutes range. In other words, they skated 80km in roughly the time it takes me to skate 10km. Oh, the ignominy.
Oh, right, the point. Fjällskog is the only place in town to rent skates, they don't take reservations, and they aren't open on Sundays. So most people who needed to rent for the race probably rented on Friday.

Teaching Part 1

One of the nice things about being a post-doc is that one doesn't have to teach. One of the downsides is that it's easy to underestimate how much research can get done in a given time, and it seems like there is always too much to do. So when my boss asked me at lunch last last week, "Do you think that part of your project would be suitable for a class project, for students of evolutionary genomics class?" I thought about it for a second, then said "Sure! They could test these new primers I made, that would be useful," and I went on to enthusiastically describe various parts of my project that could be easily accomplished by a student in two weeks. See, I had thought that this would be a class with a laboratory already in place, and that I could just turn over the ingredients, maybe check in on them once or twice, and then get back the data they had gathered for me. What a deal!

The first warning that it might not be quite as simple as that came a couple days later, when fellow post-doc K. and I were carbon copied on an email that was sent to the whole class, and we noticed that we were listed as project leaders. Our projects were described with nothing more than titles (mine was "Nucleotide diversity in Swedish lakes"). "Project leaders?" I asked K. "What does that mean, exactly?" Don't worry about it, probably no one will choose our projects anyway, K. said, as there were other projects to choose from as well. Two days later K. asked me whether I had heard anything from the course leader A., and I said no, and since she hadn't either, we decided maybe we ought to go to him and find out what was going on. So we did... to find out that we would be entirely in charge of the students. Full time. That's eight hours a day, five days a week, for two weeks. Furthermore, if there is lab work, they will be doing it in our lab, not in a class lab.

Having never taught Swedish students, I pressed K. for more details about what to expect. I have gotten the feeling that students here are somewhat different: they tend to be more mature, and the fact that no people don't go to college unless or until they really want to means that they may be a little more self-motivated than an average undergrad at, say, some large American state university. "Well, it just depends," she said. "Maybe we can give them some options, either for lab work or for computer work, and then they'll be doing what they want. I wouldn't worry about it too much." (Officemate S. was a little more pessimistic, and suggested that I should take a project that would take me an afternoon, and that that should keep some students plenty busy for two weeks.)

And then the next day, the emails started coming in. I got an email from a student who wanted to work on my project and specified that he wanted to do something "with meaningful output." I was then carbon copied on an email to the course supervisor by another student who was asking to join another group of two who wanted to work on my project. Then the first student wanted to know if it would be okay if he had a partner too. I haven't even prepared the short spiel to tell the class what my project is about, and now I have five of them!

K. came by Friday at the end of the work day. "Two students have chosen my project," she said worriedly. "Yes, I have some too," I said. "And I think they want to work in the lab." "So do mine," said K. I laughed a little, and reminded her that she had told me repeatedly not to worry about it. "Yes, but I didn't think anyone would choose them," she said.

So now we're both a little worried, K. and I. With little advance preparation and no particular plans, we have the whole class. How will we all fit in the lab? Are Swedish students different than American students? Will they manage to produce any "meaningful output"? I don't know the answer to any of these questions. A whole new adventure awaits me!

Language notes part 4

I am enrolled in Swedish classes again, this time not from Folksuniveristet, but from SFI, the official bureaucracy in charge of teaching immigrants how to speak and be Swedish. The advantage of SFI is that it's free. The disadvantage of SFI is that you have no idea what you are going to get.

Joe started an SFI class last spring, but had to stop when his course work at the university began; he had a little bureaucratic adventure trying to get signed up.* My experience was quite the opposite of his: I went in in the late afternoon in mid-January and was seen by a very nice lady after only a 5 minute wait. She took my particulars, filled out a couple forms for me, assessed my Swedish skills quickly, and described the different types of classes I could take. We settled on the Lernia program, which is mostly geared towards language (the other programs include cultural assimilation classes), and is theoretically aimed at "the more educated immigrant." When can I start? I asked, remembering that Joe had lag time of a few months. She looked at the calendar. "This Thursday," she answered.

The first night of class was not inspirational: the building seemed dingy (it isn't, really), and the fact that there's a gospel church in the basement (see the picture at left and please note its name translated into English, under "Gospelkyrkan") worried me a little. There were only three other students, two Pakistani boys who are studying ecology at SLU, and a Ugandan woman a little younger than I. The Pakistanis were complete beginners: the Ugandan (let's call her AB.) had completed the same course I had at Folksuniversitet. That meant the the first night was an endless repetition of "Hej, jag heter..." and such elementary stuff. It had to be done, of course, but I was not impressed (too slow for me, I thought). Nevertheless, I went back for the second class the next week, to find the situation completely turned on its head. Gone were the Pakistanis, to be replaced by an Armenian and a Eritrean, both of whom sounded pretty darn fluent to me. Again, I thought I had better cut bait and drop this class (whoa! 'way too advanced for me) but then AB. showed up, and the teacher (a different one than last week) set the two fluent ones to learning the alphabet at the computer, while she talked to us and gave us our textbooks.

The teacher, M., is a character unlike anyone I've dealt with in Sweden so far. She's older than my previous teacher, who was definately in the young-and-hip crowd. She dresses somewhat theatrically and wears makeup. She makes no bones about separating people into "educated" and "uneducated" (which she considers the Armenian and Eritrean to be, despite their better language skills). She said something to AB. that at first I thought might be horribly racist (but I now think was not). She has eagerly told us that she hoped that we were "more ambitious than most of her students," and she's the first Swede I've met who seems to have any expectations of me at all. Interesting, in other words.

So the way it is now, AB. and I are getting twice weekly 2-hour semi-private tutoring sessions, while the "uneducated" others use the computers to catch up with things like spelling. Strange. But free. Which is a pretty good deal, and worth sticking it out for a while, I think, just to see what happens next if nothing else.

* I ran into German G. from my Folksuniversitet class the next day, and, based on my experience, urged him to go to SFI right away and try to get into my class. But G.'s experience was exactly like Joe's: a long wait at SFI only to be told impatiently that there was no time to interview him properly just now, and in any event he couldn't possibly start a class before March. The lesson? Some bureaucrats are better than others.

Groundhog Day

Last year Groundhog Day passed more or less unnoticed by me; this year, I had thought to describe the peculiar custom. It turned out to be a busy day, though, and I didn't get a chance to bring it up. But I watched the ceremony on my computer live via a webcast, and recorded part of it. As my officemate S. was on his way out, I stopped him.

"You know, it's Groundhog Day," I said.
"Oh?" he said.
"Yes," I said.
"It's real?" he said.

I played for him the climax of the ceremony, in which a fine fat specimen of Marmota monax is brought out, held up to receive the accolades of the thousands who are chanting his name, and then put down onto his sacred stump to snuffle around for his shadow before whispering to his tuxedo-clad oracle which scroll to choose, and thereby deciding whether winter is over yet.

S. at the screen, speechless. "He's more than a hundred years old," I said. "This is Punxsutawney Phil, the original Groundhog, you know. They give him a potion every summer that prolongs his life force."

S. stared at me. I stared back, doing my best to maintain a poker face. But he beat me, I confess, and I started to giggle and had to look away first. We agreed that the whole thing is, well, somewhat Lovecraftian.

"But it's real?" he said again. He had seen the movie, and he had thought that the holiday had been invented solely for the movie, as a way to make fun of a holiday without offending anyone. Nope, it's real, I said. Complete with souvenirs.

S. stared again at the screen, which had been stopped on a frame of Phil leering evilly over the shoulder of one of his Inner Circle. "Don't have nightmares," I said. "Best stop thinking about groundhogs entirely. Just put them right out of your mind."

"Oh, that's great, telling me not to think about them!" he said. "I think I am glad that there are no groundhogs in Sweden."