Smultron!

Here's another Swedish specialty: smultron, or the woodland strawberry. I had been hearing of this fruit ever since I got here. Swedes adore them. Advertising that wishes to convey a sense of summer often shows a bunch of them strung on a piece of grass. I first asked about them a long time ago: what are those tiny strawberries I see in pictures? "Oh, those aren't strawberries, those are smultron. They are very very good." Where can I buy some? "You cannot. Some people claim there are cultivated varieties but those are not real smultron." Where can I find some? "They are very rare, and quite special. You might not find any."

Or, alternately, there might be a big patch of them growing about a hundred meters from my apartment.

I wish I could say that I found them myself, but truthfully I had to have them pointed out to me. I was walking to the bus stop yesterday morning, when a guy approaching me suddenly made a 90-degree turn to the right and stepped off the sidewalk and into the rough. I thought that was perhaps taking Swedish shyness a bit too far. I mean, I know now that when passing people you do not make eye contact, you do not say good morning, and so forth, but really, leaving the sidewalk to avoid someone? So I kept an eye on the fellow as I passed, and noticed that he was staring intently at the ground, then bent down to pick something up. I resolved to check it out on my way home that evening... and there they were.

The berries are tiny, about the size of a pea, and a very dark red with red seeds. The flavor of them is extraordinary: intense, and strawberry-ish, but sweeter, and with additional notes that are unique. The aroma is heavenly and well worth the mosquito bites one picks up while standing still to breathe it in. Were it feasible, I would suggest that any fellow fruit fancier out there stop what they are doing right now and come visit... except that then I'd have to share. And I'm already behaving like the natives, checking furtively that no one's watching when I go to get some, pretending to be tying my shoe when someone does happen by, answering questions like "Where did you find them?" with a guarded "Oh, you know, just in the woods..."

(See the same nickel starring in last year's post about bilberries.)

By the way, if you Google "smultron," probably your first hit will be to a OS X text editor of that name, written by (you guessed it) a Swede. The icon for the program should look familiar by now.

BAGECO and my night at the castle

I've covered now the FEMS conference in Göteborg, but I should also mention the conference that I went to June 15-20 in Uppsala. The name of the conference was BAGECO, which stands for Bacterial Genetics and Ecology. This conference was quite a bit smaller than FEMS, maybe 400 people or so, and geared more specifically toward my interests than was FEMS (which included lots of clinical and industrial stuff), and I met some potential future collaborators. Post-doc E. from my department also attended, and we had a good time talking at lunch and during the breaks.

BAGECO was quite rigorous, time-wise (starting at 08:00, lasting until 19:00, fortunately only a single bus ride away), but it was also quite plush. It included an opening reception with food drinks, two lavish coffee breaks per day, lunch every day that was quite good, and more drinks on Tuesday and Thursday evenings, which was probably intended as incentive for people to stick around for the poster sessions (a strategy that worked quite well, and perhaps had the added bonus of making people a little bolder about approaching and talking to strangers).

The highlight of the conference, though, was the official dinner on the evening of June 17. At 500SEK, it wasn't exactly cheap (my department paid), but it was worth every öre. The dinner was held in the big hall at Uppsala's castle, and no expenses were spared. There was a pre-dinner glass of sparkling wine, and a modern troubadour with a guitar singing to us (including "Sweet Home Alabama!"). Empty wine glasses were quickly refilled, and the food included smoked salmon, lobster mousse, tuna ceviche, large shrimp with mustard sauce, duck breast, Parma ham... "I want to try a little of everything," I said to the handsome young waiter who had been assigned to carry my plate. "I like the shrimp best," he said. "Then I'll have a couple shrimp," I said. (I hate shrimp.) (But he was right, they were delicious.)

My dinner companions were newlyweds F. and R., who were treating this conference as part of their all-around-Europe honeymoon. F. is Italian, a young professor now in Australia, and R. is American. It was fun to talk to a stranger American, and the older British professor to my left, C., also had fun goading all three of us about being "colonists". R. and I nattered on about Barack Obama; F. and I, who do similar sort of work, discovered a mutual affection for the movie "Priscilla, Queen of the Desert"; C. brought me a plate of cheese and crackers after dinner. Our talk ground to a halt around 10pm as the troubadour turned into a DJ, and the disco started up mere meters from our table. (I'm very glad to be able to say that I have now seen people dancing to Abba in a Swedish castle, but it's hard to talk over.)

As I wandered out of the dining hall, intending to head home, I ran into M., another postdoc, whom I had met at the poster session. She insisted that I at least see the famous portrait of Queen Kristina (who abdicated from this very castle in 1654) before leaving. M. is Swedish, but she works in Norway, where she's happy to be so close to nature and outdoor pursuits; she dreams of going to work in Antarctica. We sat in a candlelit nook, with a view of the city, and talked about Antarctica, and kelp forests, and lakes, and bacterial ecology. Around midnight we looked outside at the constant twilight, and I mentioned how difficult it was sometimes for me to get to sleep when it never gets dark. "I grew up with it like this, and it didn't bother me at all when I was young," said M., "but as I get older, I find that all the daylight makes me nervous and unsettled." We chatted until almost 2am, well past the time that the last bus had left, and I ended up calling a taxi for a ride home.

What a great evening; Romantic with a capital R. Of course it's true that I get fascinating conversation and a handsome young man bringing me delicious food all the time at home, and I like my home very much, but it isn't a castle, now, is it?

FEMS, fun, and handball

I presented my research at two conferences in June— I'll take the second one first, which was the FEMS conference in Göteborg. FEMS stands for "Federation of European Microbiological Societies," and the group has a conference every other year, much as ASM ("American Society for Microbiology") does. (Some of you may remember that I went to Toronto in 2007—that was for the ASM conference.) The meeting is big, with an announced attendance of 1700 participants. The participating countries were a little differently distributed than they were at ASM—FEMS had far more African and Middle Eastern delegates, but perhaps fewer from the Far East. Since I hail from a Swedish university, I officially counted as a European delegate (I had my picture taken with the US flag as well, see the gallery). The conference ran from Sunday afternoon to Thursday; I dutifully stood by my poster during the Monday afternoon coffee break, then gave a short oral presentation about it on Wednesday. I got some good questions, and caught the interest of some other microbial ecologists, so I will count this conference as a success.

The meeting was held in Svenska Mässan, a large convention center that is part of the hotel complex. Modern convention centers all look rather alike, and there was nothing particularly Swedish about this one, although the views of the nearby early-20th century brick buildings was quite nice. The hotel itself, Gothia Towers, is Scandinavia's largest, a glass-and-steel sort of place that fits in surprisingly well, possibly because the high reflectivity of the glass makes it almost disappear against the sky. It's a modern business hotel that also does a brisk tourist trade, as the large amusement park Liseberg is just across the street—families with young children probably outnumbered conference goers when we were there. In the picture to the right, I am standing on the balcony of the convention center and waving hello to everyone.

The most visible component of hotel guests this week, though, were the handball teams. The block that the hotel is on also includes an indoor sports arena, and an international youth tournament, the Partille Cup, was going on at the same time. Every morning we had breakfast right next to the men's team from Turkey, and the youth national teams of Norway, Finland, Morocco, and Austria were also staying in our hotel. It usually wasn't too hard to tell who was here for the FEMS conference, who was here for the amusement park, and who was here for the handball...

The most fun I had, though, was probably going the soccer game right before the conference started, and I finally managed to write up a game summary and little travel log for my soccer blog.

Tiny Boats

Wednesday afternoon found Jennifer with some unexpected free time, so we decided to make a trek to Göteborg's Sjöfartsmuseum. This is a very different affair from Maritiman: the Maritime Museum looks and feels like it was built by money from the industries of the harbor, back when there was money to be made there. It's full of exhibits about fishing, shipping, and the harbor itself, none of which appears to have been updated since the early 80s (at best). In other words, it's a fascinatingly quaint museum, with room after room of lovingly crafted little dioramas, most without a shred of English explanation.

The elevator (which also dates from a number of decades ago) took us direct to the third floor, despite our rather explicit instructions to the contrary (unless that button labeled "2" holds some other meaning on the west coast…), so we started our tour in the fishing exhibit. Here the history of Swedish fishing was recounted in a series of display cases demonstrating in miniature commercial fishing techniques over the centuries; each case had a few model boats up near the top, while the bulk of the diorama showed the configuration of the fishing nets under the water. These were strangely compelling, but they in no way prepared us for the Wes Craven-worthy horror which lurked at the far end of the hall: an automatic cod filleting machine (image may not be suitable for younger readers).

The shipyard displays were complete with functional models of large ship engines constructed here in the past, and layouts showing the way the shipyards looked before they all got turned into housing developments (I suspect a number of decades of urban decay fell between the former and the latter, but no need to dwell on that I suppose). The harbor room had not just models of all the individual quays, but also maps of the harbor dating back to the mid-1800s—showing, incidentally, that the "Red Stone " I mentioned in the gallery for the Älvsborg fortress post has been called that for at least the past 170 years.

The museum also has a somewhat notable collection of ships' figureheads, but these are displayed without comment along the walls of the temporary exhibition space. The current exhibition was interesting, though. It was a collection of reminiscences by the gay men employed by the Swedish-American cruise line as stewards and waiters during the middle part of the century. Apparently it was something of an open secret at the time, the line going out of its way to hire attractive young men who were clean, interesting to talk to, and unlikely to get any of the wealthy young female passengers into a family way.

The museum also touts its aquarium—the literature includes the line, "For many people it is the most memorable part of the exhibit!"—but there the passing years have not been so kind, I fear. No doubt I was influenced by having spent that very morning at Universeum, the city's new science museum with its own impressive aquarium. The older aquarium looks quite distinctly as though it's been looted of all its more interesting inhabitants to stock the new one, leaving it just a sad, oddly overlarge couple of rooms (the first room was thoroughly blessed with air conditioning though, which may have caused us to linger a bit). My favorite exhibit: a large tank displaying the "bounty of marine life in the Baltic," currently occupied by a single rather bored looking trout.

frutti di mare

We didn't actually know much about the area we would be staying in before our arrival in Göteborg, beyond the fact that Liseberg was located just across the street. Fortunately, sometime on Tuesday Jennifer noticed that our location at Korsvägen put us just a few short blocks away from one of the city's more famous spots: Götaplatsen, a square surrounded by the art museum, symphony hall and city theater, with the broad Kungsportsavenyn running down hill from it towards the old town.

What Götaplatsen is most famous for, however, is the large statue of Poseidon at it's center. It's a Carl Milles statue (the same fellow responsible for the fountain on Rackham Mall at U of M) in which Poseidon crushes a large fish while the rest of the ocean's denizens cavort about him. When the statue, which is a nude, was revealed in 1931, the good citizens of Göteborg were a little put off by his, erm, somewhat oversized attributes. So much so, in fact, that they eventually had his… attribute replaced with a rather more modest one.

Coincidentally, Götaplatsen was featured in Sunday's Göteborg-Posten, as number five on the list of Göteborg's best buildings, in which a local architect wrote, "Götaplatsen är det Göteborg Göteborg drömmer om att vara." After we had sat there for half an hour or so, we were led to the conclusion that, if that's so, Göteborg has fairly modest dreams. The art museum is certainly on a grand scale, but not what you might call appealing, and the city theater seems oddly out of balance. The concert hall, tucked away in one corner, is a little better, with some great lion statues high up on the facade facing the square.

By this time, what I was dreaming of was food, so we wandered off down Kungsportsavenyn in search of a good meal. The street is lined with restaurants on both sides for blocks, so it seemed like a good bet, but we had, naturally, picked the most expensive street in the city. We eventually wandered a couple blocks to the south, where the streets were also full of eateries, but where the prices were significantly lower. We finally settled on a promising looking Indian place which was not terribly busy, and tucked into a nice meal of curried fish and crab (having ordered the crab, the house specialty, why was I not expecting to be presented with a whole crab?), along with a pepper chutney that was easily the hottest food we've encountered since arriving in Sweden. By the time we were done it was quite late, and the temperature had finally begun to drop, which was a relief after the combination of hot sun and hot food. We wandered back over to the avenue and sat for a while, people watching mostly, before catching the tram back to the hotel.

City Museum

My plan for the afternoon was to go to the Aeroseum, a relatively new aircraft museum located in what had been a secret, underground hangar on the (now ex-)military base outside Göteborg. It was also on the north side of the river, if somewhat further outside of town, so it seemed like a good idea to combine the trips. I had a carefully orchestrated route between the two museums, involving two city buses and a regional bus in between, which should have gotten me there in just under an hour. Unfortunately, I cut one of the connections a little too closely, and missed the last bus by a minute. Since the next bus wouldn't be along for an hour, I decided to pack it in and catch the next tram back into the city.

So I wound up spending the afternoon at the Göteborg city museum, instead. There was no photography allowed, hence the lack of gallery. It was a decent museum, though, housed in the former headquarters of the Swedish East India Company, about which… OK, I know nothing, because the wing with the 17th and 18th century exhibits is closed for renovation until next spring. So I browsed the prehistoric room, looked at the remnants of the only Viking ship ever recovered in Sweden, and read about the founding of Göteborg. The problem with that last bit is that the city is staggeringly young: it was founded only in 1621 as a fortified trading city, replacing a couple of earlier settlements further up river which had become a little too isolated. The museum did have a nice model of the city from the time before the defensive embankments were demolished, which helped to give a better feel for the way things are laid out. Oh, there was also a somewhat bizarre exhibit of the 700 chairs the museum has collected over the years.