Linnaeus weekend, 22 maj

I've mentioned before that I am taking a class about the life and science of the famous 17th century Swedish botanist Carl von Linné (Linnaeus). The class is web-based, so I had not met any of the other participants, but yesterday and today we as a class went on a couple field trips to various historical sites connected with Linné.

Yesterday, 22 maj, it seemed as if summer had finally come to Sweden: very few clouds, more than 20C, just lovely weather. The five of us met at EBC (my workplace) and drove south through the industrial part of the city to a region called Danmark, where Linné had his summer home Hammarby. We arrived before the place opened and so got a personal tour of the main house, which has been preserved quite well. We then took a walk through the grounds, with our guide Jesper pointing out various plants that the man may or may not have planted himself. The walk goes up a steep rocky slope up to a small building where Linné, afraid for good reason of fire, stored his collections. On the way back down, you can see a very fake-looking "runestone" that he had carved for himself. We picnicked in the cafe garden, then went to a lecture given by Åke, a rather jolly retired Uppsala professor, about Linné and his thoughts on food (in Swedish—he spoke slowly and clearly and so I understood about half of it maybe). Linné, who could not resist classifying everything, even put breads an drinks into different categories; he thought that semlor should be eaten not too much, and his view on spirits ("brännvin är förgift för dig") was shockingly primitive. He had opinions about everything, even the types of metal that various coffee-making implements should be made of (copper to boil the water, silver to serve it).

We then left Hammarby for town, back to Linné's University house and working botanical garden, now a Museum of course. I have been to both places several times before, but of course it is nice to get guided tours (and it's fun to compare how different tour guides tell the same stories, they're almost always a little different). Alexandra, our guide for the garden, is a relative of Anders Sparrman, one of Linné's disciples, and gave a good hour-long tour of the important plants (at least the visible ones, it's still a little early in the season here). Then we went into the house, which was nice and cool after our tramping about in the sun for so long. This tour guide, Audrey, was initially a little grumpy about having to give the tour in English, but seemed to warm to us as it went on—as a group just coming off a class, we were perhaps unusually informed (and genuinely interested).

It was fun day but quite exhausting, and that evening we went to a birthday party, as our Swiss friend G. turned 30 on May 23. That day just happens to be Linné's birthday as well—he would have been 303—and every year that we've been here, to celebrate this day, the town puts up ads and banners and flowers and generally makes a fuss. Are you aware that you share a birthday with Linné? I asked G., to tease him a little. "Yes," he said with mock seriousness, "It has been brought to my attention."

Unfortunately yesterday was the end of Swedish summer. Tune in tomorrow for a recap of what happened today...

---

A few extra details that I found interesting, put here for my memory as much as anything:

I know (finally!) know what the word "Hammarby" means: it means "rocky slope" in local dialect. Which also explains the name of the football club I follow in Stockholm, Hammarby, whose football pitch is located on quite a rocky slope indeed.

Linné, initially opposed to coffee, discovered that drinking it made his migraines better, and so he became a convert. He was not generally an empirical scientist, except in this case!

I never knew before that the pond in center of the botanical garden is full of newts, but it is ("The small kind not the big kind," the guide took pains to point out)—there are only two types of salamander in Sweden, which is at the northern extreme of amphibian range—these were mindre vattensalamander, and they appeared to be engaged in breeding behavior.

As early as 1400-something, and up until 1800-something, it was illegal to have a male hop plant in Sweden; the reason the part used in brewing beer is the female flower, not the seed; if the flowers get pollinated, they become very bitter and the beer is bad. I did manage to resist the temptation to make some snarky comment that maybe they should put that law back into effect because in general Swedish beer is not so good.

Other plants we looked at included dog's mercury (the first plant in which Linné was absolutely able to demonstrate sexuality in plants), sweet cecilia (tasty but looks just like another thing that is poisonous), snake grass (the guide seemed quite interested to learn this American name, she said it fits well), and the other plant whose name I can't remember, but it's sure not bleeding heart, which is what Linné was actually after. The flower is very sweet-smelling; ants are its pollinator, and its seeds look like ants, and the oil pods that the plant rewards the ants with look remarkably like ant pupae. In Sweden, bumblebees chew through the bottom of the flower to get to the nectar.

As it turned out, our little group included one person with my birthday, and two other football enthusiasts. Per, a high school teacher, and Stina, a student at UU, both had plans to watch this evening's Champions League final. I mentioend that I had watched the women's final on Wednesday, and the two of them at least knew what I was talking about, if not who had finally won, but then the Swedish contender had crashed out in the semifinals. Per shared some amusing anecdotes about travelling to Germany in 2006 to watch the men's matches and we all had a good laugh about the general state of football in Sweden (deplorable).

What I do for my country

So I have been amusing myself these days by trying to catch up with two months worth of Swedish homework in a week. This is not a good idea, and I don't know if I will be able to do it, but I am learning a lot of Swedish. We have to take self-administered computer tests: reading, writing, speaking (we speak into the microphones and make sound files that we then attach to the test), and... listening.

Normally I enjoy practicing listening; it is a real pleasure when I suddenly understand something that I didn't before. But the people who made up this test thought it would be good if we could understand Swedish being sung. Normally I would even agree with that. But this particular test... "Idas Sommarvisa"... and I have to listen to it over and over until I can get the words... oh god, please make it stop! Click here for a youtube video of it... the lyrics scroll along the bottom so no, I have not watched any more than it took for me to verify that yes, this is the version I am listening to about a hundred times.

Joe is sitting across from me working on his own stuff; I played a couple seconds of it. He winced. I complained. He said that it's kind of like that Dutch video they show to immigrants as a tolerance test— you know, the one showing mild drug use, homosexual couples, and topless women at the beach?— the punch-line of which is "This is the Netherlands: if you don't like it, don't come here." (Most people I know respond with "Netherlands— great! Where do I sign up?")

I am still taking the test so I don't have time to find that Dutch video for you. Instead, I suggest you försöker mina kläder and watch "Idas Sommarvisa" again instead. Joe's parallel is pretty good, so I'll stop complaining now and accept that this is just Sweden.

Still... are we sure this sort of thing is allowed by the Geneva convention?

Alpine Adventure

Well, there. The sun came out for long enough that the organizers decided lectures this afternoon were a losing battle, so they rescheduled the last one until after dinner—and given the amount of wine that gets drunk at dinner, I suspect the 8:30–9:30 lecture slot is going to be a rough one.

In the meanwhile, though, I have finally had my walk in the Alps. My roommate, D., (who is Sicilian by birth but has lived in Copenhagen for ten years) and I took advantage of the recess to walk up to the nearest mountain trail, which winds through something billed as an "Archeological park" on the basis of some pre-historic rock carvings which were discovered there in 1977, despite the fact that they all would have been in plain sight for centuries (is it wrong of me to assume that they are fakes, or have the "runestones" of Minnesota made me bitter and suspicious before my time?). Either way, we didn't see any rock carvings, but we did have a nice walk, and a bit of a cross country adventure to get back when our trail crapped out on us. One sheep farm and a number of donkeys later, we made it safely back into town, a fact which we celebrated by hitting the local fromagerie before it closed up again for the week. So I am now the proud owner of a block of Beaufort and a little bit of Tomme de Savoie, which (I think) are the two most notable local cheeses.

Incidentally: it's snowing now. The weather has been somewhat unpredictable all day—when I woke up, the sun was shining and there was not a cloud in the sky. By the time I made it to breakfast, you couldn't even see the village behind the wall of impenetrable cloud.

So tomorrow is the end of the class, and I'm scheduled to be up here from lunch until a few minutes before 4. If the weather is nice, I'll try to walk over to one of the local fortresses. If it's snowing like this, I'll probably have a nap, instead.

le Banquet

Last night was the "banquet" for this little shindig. Once again, I have no pictures, but I know some exist, so I'll try to get copies if possible. Anyway, the banquet was held in the same room as all the other meals, at the same time as every dinner every other night, and no one dressed up, so you would have been hard pressed to realize it was the special meal if you hadn't been warned going in. What set it apart was that we had to work more for our food: instead of prepared plates, each table had a plate of raw meat (chicken, pork, duck and beef) and a… well, a marble slab mounted to a gas burner. So you sautéed little strips of meat, then seasoned them with mustard or tartar sauce. Odd, but effective. Even the sole French person at our table thought it was weird and Asterix-y; then again, he was from Brittany, so he probably feels that way about most of France.

(They also replaced for the evening the pitchers of the quite respectable house red with smaller bottles of a mediocre local gamay…)

The pool table, despite costing 2 EUR per game, has been in pretty constant use every night, but after the banquet I finally managed to get on the queue, so I wound up playing eight ball for a few hours with Jean-Charles Régin (I suspect a significant proportion of the people in the world who would be impressed by that announcement are attending this conference, but I thought it was pretty cool).

It's the last afternoon now, and while I'm still hopeful that I'll get out into the mountains a bit before I depart, it isn't looking too promising. Maybe if I can get them to pack me a sack lunch tomorrow…

Just like home

My camera battery died last night, and the web cam on the computer doesn't have the resolution to pick it up, so until I can bum someone else's pictures you're just going to have to take my word for it: it's snowing. Hard. Looks unlikely to accumulate in town, but for now anyway it's coming down pretty fast.

Aussois: Day 2

We're on our morning coffee break now, and I've had two espressos, so I'm feeling like doing a bit of speed blogging before the next lecture. Woke up at 7 this morning to only light rain, so I decided to get in a little walk through town before breakfast. Not too busy a place at 7 on a Tuesday morning in early May, but cute. I'll let the pictures speak for themselves. Did find the fromagerie, and it's open on Thursday and Friday afternoon, so I'll have to try to stop by on my way out of town. Also about half a dozen creperies, but I don't know how likely I am to hit any of them this week.

No time (or bandwidth!) to link the pictures individually, so you'll have to follow the gallery link. Sorry!