BOKREA

This week's foray into Swedish culture: the annual book sale. Every year, starting on the last Tuesday in February, all the bookstores in Sweden have a great big sale. I guess it started in the 1920s as a way for stores to sell off their overstock from the previous year, and over the years it has evolved into a bit of an event. Not surprising, in a country where the average person spends 55 minutes a day reading. Apparently many people save up, and plan their book sale purchases for months in advance, and publishers will run special, cheap printings of classic hardcovers just for the sale. Naturally, I couldn't let such an event pass me by, so I wandered down to our local Akademibokhandeln (Sweden's largest bookstore chain, and Uppsala's best English language selection).

Backstock wasn't on sale for the most part, but there was a pretty large selection of hardcovers at heavily reduced prices, stacked by subject all over the center portion of the store. I had to fight my way through the crowds for about half an hour before I found the English section: Bob Dylan bios, some History of Rock coffee table books, and a couple of art books, all priced about half of normal (which made them only a little more than I would have expected to pay for them full price in the States). The Swedish language selection was impressive, though. Anyone need a copy of Harry Potter och Dödsrelikerna for a low, low 99 SEK? Yeah, me either, although it is oddly tempting. The first few volumes of the Lemony Snicket books were there in Swedish, which surprised me—Scandinavian literature is so pessimistic and grim that the lives of the Baudelaire orphans must seem pretty run of the mill. There were some interesting looking cookbooks, and plenty of bar guides (as if anyone could afford to stock a home bar in this country), and lot's of Baltic history, plus a smattering of books I recognized but translated into Swedish.

My new goal: learn just enough Swedish to justify buying at least one decent cookbook next February.

My daily bus ride

I've always liked using public transportation. Public transport is a cheap and easy way to see people, and all sorts of people take the bus here. It is not uncommon to see kids younger than 10 taking the bus by themselves, and some of the city busses also serve as school busses, when you can get groups of up to 50 8-year-olds crowding on. (Actually, err, I will probably try to avoid that bus in the future.) In Uppsala, you are allowed to take bring your pet with you on the bus, and there are also spaces reserved for baby buggies, which are loaded in the back doors, and fastened to the wall.  

I love my bus ride into work. Every morning I walk over cobblestones to Stora Torget, the main square, which is ringed by bank buildings (Nordea is the reddish building to the right) and the old city hall (the white building, built in 1883). I have my choice to catch either the #6 or #7 bus, which follow the same route for a while, one of which leaves about every 6 minutes in the morning.

A block past the square, we pass over the river, and if the sun is shining, the view up and down the river is stunning.

As we head up Drottninggatan, the hill turns steep and Carolina Rediviva, the old university library (which houses the 5th century tome "Codex Argenteus," the only surviving text in Gothic) is at the top of the hill—it's the building at the very end of the street in the picture to the right (because of the hill and the way the streets run up there, it's surprisingly difficult to take a decent picture of it!) According to rumor, the building itself is sliding backwards down the hill at some fraction of a millimeter per year, because the hill is made of soft alluvial clay and is therefore unstable. 

Drottninggatan dead ends into the library (the picture at right is taken from the bus), so we hang a sharp left at the worst 3-way intersection in all of Uppsala. It's a fairly busy crossing point for University students walking and on bicycles, and last year, for reasons that are not clear, someone decided to take away all the traffic signs at this intersection. Fortunately most cars are going fairly slowly at this point anyhow, and everyone makes way for the busses that are charging up the hill... except, of course, for the pedestrians, who, acting on their privilege as a sacred species, occasionally put the bus's brakes to a severe test.

Having turned left off of Drottninggatan, we are now on Dag Hammersjöldvägen, and on the left, on top of an even higher hill, is the huge pink castle, now used mainly to house municipal employees, but which also hosts the formal ball for graduating doctoral students and professors who have been promoted. (The morning cannons for commencement are fired from here as well.)

If you can tear your eyes away from the castle, and instead look to the right, you (and the castle's inhabitants with westward facing windows) get a great view of the formal part of Botaniska trädgården, the University's formal garden with topiary and fountains (in the summer) and botanical samples from all over the world. The yellow buildings at the far end are the Linnèanum, which served as the hosting point for the 2007 city-wide celebrations of Carl Linnè's 300th birthday, and continues to house some part of the University's botany department.

Two stops later, when I get off the bus at the Evolutionary Biology Centre, the first buildings I see are the Museum of Evolution Zoology, the building on the left, which houses the public exhibits and is where F. had his Disputationsfest. The building on the right has classrooms, a part of the library, and the EBC's cafeteria, where Joe and I had our Valentine's Day lunch of split pea soup and pancakes (click here to see what's on the cafeteria's menu this week... Swedish only, I'm afraid!). 

When I cross the road, directly in front of me are the low brick buildings of the EBC's research departments, and hi-ho, hi-ho, it's off to work I go. (The Department of Physiological Botany has helpfully put up a picture of the EBC from the air, which gives a better feeling for the whole complex.)

The ride home is always in the dark at this time of year, so there's not much to see until one gets back to the river, where sight of the lights still hanging on the trees over the river is cheering after a long day of staring at DNA sequences.

Café Linné

When Jennifer was first introduced to semla a couple of weeks ago, one of her coworkers mentioned that there was a little place called Café Linné just across from the Linnaeus Trädgården which was famous for having huge semla. Today we finally made the trek over to see for ourselves, and of course things were more complicated than they seemed. There, across the street from the garden was the Café Linné, and on the corner next to it was another Café Linné. A quick glance inside each revealed that they both offered outsized semla, so we were reduced to picking more or less at random. We settled on the Café Linné Konstantina, not to be confused with it's doppleganger, the Café Linné Hörnan.

We had planned on going there for breakfast, but it was nearly 11:30 by the time we made our decision, so we had a lunch instead: two pieces of quiche, brocolli-skink for Jennifer, kött for me (yes, honestly, ground beef quiche… but good!), with salad, bread and coffee for 68 SEK each, and then another 27 SEK for a semla that was, in fact, somewhat monstrously huge. The cafe was very cute, built into a little house so there were a bunch of different rooms, each with divans and coffee tables, and the requisite adorable blonde pig-tailed hooligan delightedly stomping from room to room.

We lingered over today's edition of Aftonbladet, an only moderately disreputable Swedish tabloid which we did our best to translate—Princess Madeleine upheld the honor of the Royal Family by competing in Tjejvasan yesterday (that's a women-only version of Vasaloppet, a 90km cross-country ski race steeped in Swedish traditions, many of which appear to revolve around blueberry soup); your toothpaste may be killing you (antibiotics, don't you know); glamour photography is sexist; a seering exposé into the prosthetic devices professional athletes use to pass drug tests; what's John McCain's favorite ABBA song; and so on, and so on. This enlightening reading inspired us to stop at the city library on the way home, where Jennifer picked up a book of contemporary Swedish poetry that will I'm sure raise the level of discourse around the apartment for several days.

Upon reaching home, a little web detective work revealed that we made the right choice of cafes (probably): while the Hörnan is (I think) on the site of the original Café Linné, the Konstantina sells semlor made by the original proprietors at their new bakery across town.

On an unrelated note, I got to put my hard-won knowledge of Swedish laundry room reservation boards to good use this evening when, as I retrieved my laundry, I ran into the Serbian basketball player who lives downstairs, and showed him how it all works. Turns out that he played against EMU back in his days at University of Central Florida. Small world.

Language Notes Part 1

Everybody new that I meet asks me where I am from. I always say "Michigan," and they almost always ask, "Oh, you're American?" I would have thought that it was obvious I was American the moment I opened my mouth and spoke, but apparently not. Joe points out that to them I'm just one more person who can't speak Swedish, so I speak English, with some kind of accent. (And apparently several people who I had talked to before thought I was Brazilian, because of the pennants of two São Paulo soccer teams hanging in my office, which are visible from the hallway.)

Similarly, my inability to discriminate among Swedish accents surprises them. Early in the evening a couple weeks ago, it came up with my doctoral student office mate, S., and the student in the next office over, V., who had come over to visit. Since I didn't really know S. and V. well, I asked where they were from. They told me, and V. said "You really can't tell the difference in the way we speak?" I confessed I couldn't, and asked them to demonstrate, but they refused on the grounds that it would be fake to do it knowing I was listening for it. Then suddenly the Swedish Chef came up (for reasons that will become clear), when out of the blue V. said that the Swedish Chef is funny and all but that he just didn't sound Swedish. 

Applaud my forbearance, gentle readers. I bit my lip and did not say what I was thinking, which is that yes, Swedish does in fact sound kind of like that.

Thankfully, S. disagreed with V. on this point. He had heard that the Swedish Chef was based on an actual Swedish cook's guest appearance on American TV, long ago, who got nervous when the camera started rolling and started muttering under his breath in Swedish. V. said no, he didn't believe it. S. explained to me that the cook in question (Lars Bäckman) is from same state as S. is, and therefore has the same accent. V. said no, no, not even S. ever sounds like that. S. said that he could easily imagine talking to himself like that, if he were nervous, or alone and reciting instructions to himself. He proceeded to demonstrate, pretending to be mixing something in a bowl and muttering.

I laughed politely at this, but laughing politely also took self-discipline, because the truth is he sounded exactly like the Swedish Chef, and I was about to bust a gut. A "Muppet Show" writer denies that Bäckman was Henson's inspiration, but I think I'll believe S. on this one. Even V. admitted that S. sounded just about right. Whether Bäckman was the inspiration or not, there can be no further doubt: the Swedish Chef is from Dalarna, home of colorful wooden horses and a lovely sing-song accent. I just hope I can resist ever asking S. to do that Swedish Chef thing again.

28 Days Later

Uppsala, Sweden: Day 29. Our journey continues, despite the heavy fog that has descended upon the city this evening, swallowing all sign of not only the cathedral, but indeed the buildings across the street; while pleasant in a Whitehall sort of way, it spells almost certain doom for our plans to view the lunar eclipse at 4am. Meanwhile, supplies brought along from America are now exhausted, so we are reduced to trading with the natives to meet our basic needs. We've managed to find sources for most necessities, but some are, sadly, lacking. The lactose-intolerant among us had a dicey couple of weeks there, when it looked like certain remedies, easily obtained over the counter in the US, were wholly absent here in this, the land that invented lactose-tolerance. Fortunately, the ready availability of probiotic drinking yogurt and fil helped to ease the transition, and a plethora of lactose-free dairy products can be found at all the markets (supplied, no doubt, for the convenience of any visiting Finns, who rank among the least lactose-tolerant people in the Western world). More lately, we have located a source of over-the-counter lactase enzyme, which while painfully expensive is, nonetheless, a welcome supplement.

This weekend saw the end not only of our soap and shampoo, but also our laundry detergent, so we have begun experimenting with local varietals. So far, there have been no major incidents. The choice of shower soap was completely non-rational, but based instead on the fact that the company, LdB, recently bought the soccer team from Malmö (well, and the soap was on sale, too). Unfortunately, our quest for decent beer has been less successful. The local "dark" would best be described as an amber, and the rest of it were best not described at all. The tetrapak wine is something of an oddity, but we are trying to keep an open mind. Our stock of English language reading materials has been well supplemented by a trip to the city library; on the other hand, envelopes and file folders have remained elusive.

At least we have an endless supply of fish oil.

River Walk

The weather broke a little earlier than expected, which really should have been exactly what we expected. We've been, umm, dissatisfied with the quality of the weather forecasting we've been getting, so Jennifer asked a while ago at work if there was a better source, and I guess they all just laughed and said that there just aren't any reliable forecasts for Sweden. Yesterday afternoon the temperature was climbing fast enough that even though they kept revising the forecast high temperature for the day we were always over it. I think we topped out at 8° or something absurd like that.
Anyway, fortunately we decided to take a walk down to the river before the cold ended, and we got a few cold looking pictures of the lights and the water. Also a good view of the cathedral spires, which have been sort of eerily lit the last two Saturday nights. The nightlife is oddly restrained on the weekends. Weekdays see lots of post-work bar hopping, but Saturday night is a lot quieter on our side of the river. I'm sure the students are out having a good time, but they seem to mostly party at their nations (more about that later) so they aren't out wandering the streets so much. The downtown move theaters seem to do a pretty good Saturday night business (who doesn't want to spend 90 SEK to see Asterix at the Olympics in French with Swedish subtitles?).