Time of the season

What with our short vacation in early August, and the visit from Joe's parents, and the hustle and bustle to start the school year this week, our posts have been a little sparse of late. Meanwhile, summer is over and autumn is here.

Last year, this change happened quite abruptly. On the last day of the break, 29 augusti, my department had fika outside and the weather was quite fine for post-doc G.'s wedding the next day. Then, on the first day of school, 2 september, the temperature dropped, the wind picked up, and no one would even consider going out for fika. That's not quite true—I did go out once that first week, and was joined by a fellow foreign post-doc, but we were alone and did not repeat the experiment.

This year, exactly the same thing happened. Last day of vacation, 28 aug, nice and warm. First day of school, 31 aug, 12C, and windy: Joe, who is now back to riding his bike to school every day, notes that last part especially. It happened as if a switch had been turned. But last year, autumn was nice and sunny, if not exactly warm, so I and everyone else at work is hoping for a good season. Happy Fall, everyone.

Heinous Blog Failure!

…or rather, "heinous blogger failure," as I fear I cannot blame our recent disappearance on technical difficulties. No, just a combination of getting ready for my parent's visit (they arrived this morning), and the horrible Norwegian Flu (just a cold, really) that we brought back from our trip to Östersund in late July… which, unfortunately, hasn't even been written up yet! Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear, this simply will not do. Well, pictures of our recent trip will go up today, and hopefully some explanatory text as well, although I hope you'll forgive me if it's all a little rushed. As with Göteborg, I'll backdate entires to when they happened for the sake of clarity.

Mora or Less; or, "Vasa the matter w' you?"

Suddenly it seems that the summer is nearly over, leaving us with a long list of things we meant to do and little time left in which to do them. With that in mind, we set off this past weekend to check one item off our list: a trip on the Inlandsbanan railway through central Sweden. So on Friday morning we got up bright and early (note to self: 8:30 AM only seems an acceptable departure time when one does not remember to consider the two hours of prep and transport that lead up to it…) and hopped a train to Mora, the southern terminus of the railway.

Mora is three hours northwest of Uppsala by train, and almost immediately we could tell we were heading into a different area of Sweden. Up until now we've mostly stuck to the coasts—not counting Uppsala itself, but Uppland is sort of an oddly flat and agrarian portion of Sweden. Mora lies in the heart of Dalarna, the Swedish heartland, and true to its name it is a place of valleys, lakes, and rivers.

Mora itself lies on the northern shore of Lake Siljan, and it immediately felt a lot like we were in a northern Michigan lake town, with one major thoroughfare right along the lakes edge, and then a more pedestrian-oriented, slightly touristy shopping quarter spreading back from the lake. One thing it was not was peaceful: we had shown up just in time for some sort of classic American car festival, with concommitant speed boat race, and the periodic roaring of the boats in the distance made it sound as though we were being pursued b a particularly annoyed cloud of wasps.

Inlandsbanan may have been the reason for our visit, but it is not one of Mora's twin claims to fame, and our first stop in town was inspired by one of these. To most Swedes, Mora is with Vasaloppet, which ends in the center of town, under a permanent finish line marker right next to the spot where Gustav Vasa addressed the good people of Mora so long ago (for details see our Vasaloppet post of last year). Jennifer, true member of the proletariat, took one look at Gustav and declared, "Well, he looks like a prat." After taking the requisite photo of Jennifer crossing the finish line (complete with skis, pole, and bib provided by the city for just such an occasion), we headed across the park into the Vasaloppet Museum, where you can learn pretty much everything there is to know about the race while sipping your complimentary cup of hot blueberry soup.

My vision of this weekend had been a simple one. We would take the regular train to Mora, camp for a night, then the Inlandsbanan to Östersund where we would camp another night before taking the train home. With cheap transportation, hotels make up most of the expense of a trip like this, and in both cities there are large, well-equipped campgrounds with restrooms and showers available. Unfortunately, the campgrounds in Östersund turned out to be a long bus ride outside of town (with spotty weekend bus service, at best), so my three nights of camping got whittled down to one, and then the weight and bulk of our tent, bags and sleeping pads began to seem somewhat excessive. Especially considering the Inlandsbanan's official luggage policy: we recommend traveling as lightly as possible—which sounds like Swedish code for big bags not allowed. So in the end we wound up getting a room in a Pension in Östersund, and one night in a camping cabin in Mora.

It's possible that before the trip I may have grumbled somewhat about our inability to camp, and even gone so far as to price out some lighter weight camping gear, but as I hauled our luggage to the campsite late Friday afternoon amidst light sprinkles I had to admit that I was somewhat pleased not to be setting up a tent just then. By the time we had settled into our tiny room for the evening with our grocery store dinner, the heavens had completely opened up and the tent field was rapidly coming to resemble a new bay of Lake Siljan, and I was quite happy to sit drily on my bunk and marvel at our foresight.

Despite our dry surrounds, though, by morning Jennifer had the makings of a nasty little cold, which was to dog her steps for the rest of the trip (and mine shortly thereafter, but that's another story). Still, the morning was relatively dry and clear (in other words, it was only pouring down rain for the first couple of hours after we woke up), and we were determined to make the most of it. We checked out of our cabin and headed into town, depositing our luggage at the tourist info office for 20 SEK (!) before grabbing breakfast at a coffee place, called Kaffestugga, in Mora's pedestrianized shopping district. Not the most unwelcome cup of coffee I've had in my life.

Our train didn't leave until 2, so we had just enough time left to visit Mora's major cultural attraction, the Zorn museum and home. Anders Zorn was born in Mora, and went on to become such a successful artist that he died one of the richest men in Sweden. After his wife's death, their home in Mora and all it's contents were donated to the Swedish State, and became the basis for the Zorn museum. We split up for this part: Jennifer checked out the museum of Zorn's work, while I took the tour of the home. The tour was fascinating, I'm sure, from the little bits of it I understood, as it was alas entirely given in Swedish. Nevertheless, tromping around Zorn's turn of the century home with little plastic covers over my shoes was an entertaining way to spend an hour. What did I learn? Zorn had one of the first private telephones in Sweden, and his phone number was 4. He had the best billiards room I've seen, and he liked collecting stuff. Did I mention that the tour was a little hard to follow?

On our way back to the tourist info to collect our belongings, we stopped off to buy one of the two things you are supposed to buy when you visit Mora, a Dala Horse. The worst of the tourist traps sell the 3 cm tall horses for 150 SEK, but we managed to get a 6 cm horse for less than that. (The other thing you are supposed to buy is a Mora knife, but I already have one sitting in a box somewhere in Michigan.)

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.