The red badge of courage

My ex-officemate S., who is into various sorts of gaming, started a mångkamp last year for students and postdocs in our department. The idea is that every participant comes up with some sort of event for everyone to compete in, and this then gives people a chance to share their interests (and also provides an excuse for people to stick around after work and socialize). Past events have included things like ping-pong (there's a table in the basement), poker, egg-balancing, cake-baking, Guitar Hero, Pentago... you get the idea.

Occasionally the contests have been direct combat. S. himself chose stick-fighting, and today was post-doc G.'s event, fencing.

To make a short story shorter, my informal and long-ago training in the sport, courtesy of my father, did me well against people with no experience at all and I actually beat my new officemate X. I came very close to beating another student, B., who danced and swung her epee about quite wildly. Now as you see from the picture, I declined to wear a glove on my crutch-hand, so that my grip would be better. And sure enough, B. fetched me a nice swat on the hand, no more than a sting, but when I looked down when we were finished, it was bleeding. I congratulated her on drawing first blood (I think she was horrified), then accepted my consolation shot of arrack punsch, and then had to run off to do an errand in town.

It wasn't until I was on the bus that it hit me: I have been wounded—nay, I have had my blood drawn—in a sword fight at a 500-year-old European university. How cool is that?

(I am such a geek.)

(Da, I hope you are green with envy! tack för hjälpen!)

A pleasant, lazy weekend

I am taking an online class this term about the life of Linnaeus. It occurred to me suddenly last week that I hadn't done any work yet, and it is already three weeks into the term, so I decided that this weekend would be devoted entirely to catching up with the reading, a good task for what I had thought would be a rainy, coolish couple of days.

Of the course the weather was gorgeous.

Well, no help for it, I still had to do the reading, so off I went on Saturday to the large lawn near our place, walking just a few steps further than I usually do, and found a nice nook in a rock that I had never noticed before, which looks as if it were made specifically for someone to sit and read in. I sat and read all afternoon in the sunshine, while people strolled around on the path behind me, walking their children or dogs or both, and a couple of young fellows fooled around with a soccer ball by the goals on the lawn. Someone went by on horseback once, and every now and then one of the sheep at the soldier's holt would bah-ah-ah, probably begging for sugary snacks from visitors. It was so very pleasant that I went back to do the same thing today. Happily the nook was unoccupied... again, the people strolled, the dogs barked, the horses whinnied, and I held still for long enough that a butterfly landed on my ankle and stayed for a time. What a very lovely situation, for reading about a botanist who believed that the best happiness is to be found outside:

Viewing nature gives a taste of the celestial bliss, a constant delight of the soul and the beginning of the complete revitalization that is the peak of human happiness.

An Afternoon at the Castle

With the sudden approach of Autumn, we've been left scrambling to manage a few last second acts of tourism. Things were looking grim after a tiny transportation snafu ended our planned trip to Finland ("What, exactly, do you mean by, 'The ship is out of service for September'?"), but then fortunately our friends G. and D. called last weekend to ask if we'd like to go to Drottningholm for a picnic.

Drottningholm is one of the several castles/palaces1 currently owned by the Swedish royal family, situated as the name implies on a medium-sized island 11 km west of central Stockholm. It used to be a country retreat, but its close proximity to Bromma Airport has assured the gradual encroachment of the city in modern times. Even so, the palace itself is set on the water in the midst of a substantial bit of parkland, so it's much more laid back than the Royal Palace in Stockholm itself; it was for precisely this reason that the King and Queen made Drottningholm their official residence in the early 80s, not wanting to raise their kids in the middle of one of the city's busiest neighborhoods. It's still the family's residence for most of the year (except in high tourist season, when they retreat to an island in the Baltic), although they obviously tend to stick to the private wing, so there's little chance of running into them when you visit.

Well, most days, anyway. By chance, we happened to go on a day when some of the Queen's relatives were having a christening in the palace chapel, with the family in attendance. The downside of this was that we couldn't tour the top floor, as they were using it for the reception; the upside was that, as we waited for the English language tour to start, Princess Madeleine and Prince Carl Philip walked right past us on their way to the chapel, followed a few minutes later by the King and the Crown Princess herself, Victoria2. No sign of the Queen (doubtless hanging with her visiting family members), but Victoria smiled at us and waved, so that was nice.

Anyway, the palace and the grounds were nice, if somewhat anti-climactic after all the royal-spotting that started the afternoon. Our tour guide, Lotta, impressed Jennifer by explaining that Marie Antoinette and that chap she was married to obviously deserved to have their heads cut off; the tour was interrupted as it approached the end of its allotted time when another functionary came in to tell Lotta that she would have to keep us busy for a while longer, as no one was allowed to leave the building for a while (apparently so that Madeleine and Carl Philip could stand around the back entrance holding candles for a bit). Other than that, the palace itself was home a fairly typical collection of baroque bric-a-brac.

More interesting was the theater, a restored 17th century opera house. It's a working theater, but the stage and interior have kept their original style and function, so they still use all of the original special effects machinery (they have had to update the lighting a bit, although they've done a good job replacing the candles with some impressive fakes). The seating hasn't changed, either, so it's remarkably uncomfortable; what's more, when the theater was built the seating capacity was limited by the size of the ladies' hoop skirts, which means that now it seats twice as many people as it was designed to do, with no concomitant increase in oxygen flow. A four hour opera watched from uncomfortable seats, with no temperature control and nothing to breathe? Where do I sign up?

1 The Swedish word is slott, which unfortunately covers a sort of broad range of concepts in English. The massive royal palace in Stockholm is Kungliga Slottet, but it can also mean 'castle.' It's also used to describe the manor houses which dot the southern Swedish countryside, some of which are large and impressive enough that they might merit being called a small palace in English; more often than not, they're what I would call 'big houses.'

2 Some time ago the law was changed in Sweden so that the royal couple's oldest child became the heir to the throne, irrespective of sex. So despite having a younger brother, Victoria is set to become Sweden's first reigning Queen since Ulrika Eleonora abdicated in 1720. Leaving Carl Philip free to spend his time driving race cars and taking pictures of flowers.

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.)