Karaoke, Swedish style

One advantage of living temporarily across from Liseberg (Sweden's biggest amusement park and its most visited attraction every year) is that there's always something to watch from the window. The park has a stage as well, and this evening we were treated to "Lotta på Liseberg," a sing-along pop show, in which some lucky lottery winners (that's the "lotta" part) get to do sing on a stage with a big audience and live-music accompaniment. It was also broadcast on TV, so we opened the window to listen live. If there's any thing in the world more Swedish than a drawn-by-lots karaoke (it's fair, and it's singing), I can't think of it.

Carlanderska

This evening I felt like exploring the neighborhood, so I set off to investigate an interesting looking building we can see from our window. Unfortunately, I quite missed it at first, leading to a much longer walk than I intended; fortunately, I accidentally stumbled on to the Göteborg University campus, which was quite nice. There were lots of people laying about on the lawn and sunning, and a nice näckrosdammen.

What my walk has taught me is this: the first way that Göteborg differs from other Swedish cities I've visited is topology. This is a city built on hills, lots of them. I spent most of time climbing and descending the steps that comprise the various pedestrian ways through the neighborhood. It paid off in the end, though: our cool building turned out to be Carlanderska, a private hospital from the late 20s.

Incidentally, I'm not the only one to have an unintended stroll around Göteborg today, although I very much doubt that mine will make the local paper.

I've gone to Valhalla...

... it's right next door to the hotel, you see. Today was a little light, conference-wise, so we seized the chance to wander around the corner to Valhalla Idrottplats, home of Kopparbergs/Göteborg FC, currently third in the Swedish league. Today they played Linköping FC, who now lies second. It was a really good game, and a nice park, and I will probably write more about it later.

It may take me awhile to write about it though, because of course I'm here on business. This conference is called "FEMS 2009: Microbes and man — Interdependence and future challenges" and is the third congress of European microbiologists. The meeting is quite large—much larger than the one I attended a couple weeks ago in Uppsala (which I still haven't written about...)—and I'm glad that we are staying in the hotel attached to the conference venue, because it's quite enough of a walk as it is. They had a welcoming reception for us tonight, which included a buffet dinner of a variety of tasty things including salmon, and a free beer and wine (after you've lived here for a while, you come to understand that the idea of free beer or wine signifies luxury). Tomorrow morning I put up my poster and answer questions about it, and there is a full day of other interesting talks to go to.

I'm off to do some research now, because the conference is so big that there are many parallel sessions—one must plan rather carefully, and I didn't have the abstract book and planner until today. If there is a Valhalla for me, this is close to what it will be like. A little science, a little soccer, a trip to a new city and a multi-day stay in a hotel with plush towels and a big breakfast buffet. Vad skoj!

Breakfast

When we first got to Sweden, and spent weeks in hotels, I sort of OD'ed on breakfast buffets, but apparently that was long ago enough, because this morning felt like a pleasant return to tourism. The Gothia's buffet is absolutely typical for a Scandinavian hotel: open-face sandwich fixings; muesli and yogurt selection; bacon, sausage and eggs for the foreigners; bread and rye crisps; fruit. With the exception of the scrambled eggs (powdered!?!) it was pretty good, and of course fulfilled it's critical role in that we now have sandwiches and fruit to eat for lunch today. There is, after all, just no way to get lunch for less than 60 SEK per person, unless you have you own kitchen, and that adds up fast. (Good news is that there is a massive ICA grocery store on the next block, so affordable eating should be relatively easily accomplished.)

Jennifer is off registering for her conference, and then it looks like she has the afternoon off, so we're off to watch the Göteborg v Linköping Damallsvenskan match which, coincidentally, is going on just around the corner at Valhalla IP. Hopefully the seats are in the shade, because it looks to be bloody hot again today.

To Göteborg

We're in Göteborg now (or Gothenburg, if you prefer), on Sweden's wild west coast. We'll be here for the next week, while Jennifer attends the FEMS conference. We took the train over this afternoon—one hour to Stockholm, then another three to get to Göteborg on the high-speed X200 train, which it must be said is quite comfortable, even if the high speed internet is only free for first class customers.

Anyway, by 5 we were in Göteborg train station at the end of a sweltering afternoon. Sweltering for Sweden anyway, as there was a high of 28°C today! I'll admit, I'm not fond of cities in the heat, and arriving in a new city on a hot afternoon tends to permanently color my perceptions of it. I'm sure that Piran is a cute little Mediterranean city, but I remember it primarily as hot, dry, and occasionally smelly. Likewise, first impressions of Göteborg: we spent over an hour in the train station trying to figure out the tram system to get us to our hotel, an hour full of sweaty, smelly, and possibly insane Göteborgare (disappointingly, the locals are not known as Götebo).

We're staying at the hotel attached to the conference venue, the Hotel Gothia Towers, a matched set of 18 and 23 floor glass and steel hexagons in the southern part of the city, which is incidentally Scandinavia's largest hotel. We are, naturally, on the 13th floor; on the other hand, we have a great view of the major tourist attraction across the street, Liseberg amusement park. It being high summer, it stays open quite late to take advantage of the light, but we are a bit further south now, so the sun went down (and the park closed) a little before 11. It's now midnight, and this is the darkest I've seen the sky be in months. I'm tempted to call it "night," in fact.

Anyway, dinner from a local pizzeria (the Obama special: mozarella, feta, provolone, and ricotta—so the message is, "he's cheesy"?), followed by a stroll around the block (huge conference center, soccer pitch, canal), and now a bit of blogging before bed. Oh, and a few minutes of CNN… gosh, thats a lot of talk about Michael Jackson…

One More Midsummer

Duka din veranda till fest
För en långväga gäst
I landet lagom är bäst
Vi skålar för en midsommar till
Färsk potatis och sill
Som om tiden stått still
        -"Sverige", Kent

This past Saturday was that most Swedish of holidays, Midsummer. It's a day when everyone abandons the cities for their familial stuga in the woods, to bask in the nigh on 24 hours of glorious midsummer sunshine while eating plates full of herring and potatoes, pausing only to sing traditional drinking songs and down yet another glass of aquavit.

What, exactly, you are supposed to do on a rainy and cold midsummer day when you happen to be a foreigner who owns no cabin in the woods, has not been so clearly explained. This is not an issue which appears to occur to Swedes. For example, the organizers of the conference Jennifer attended last week in Uppsala encouraged foreigners to attend by mentioning how wonderful Sweden was at midsummer; they neglected to mention that, as the conference ended the afternoon of midsommarafton, there would be absolutely nothing to do in Sweden in its aftermath. Friday night there was only one restaurant open in Uppsala (which somewhat grudgingly took those attendees who were not flying out until the next morning)—a bar or a nightclub is simply out of the question. Tourist attractions shut down for the weekend as well.

We spent midsummer with our Swiss friends G. and D. again,although it wound up being a much larger gathering. We started the day around noon with six of us, the other two being C., a new Danish post-doc (with an Irish accent) in Jennifer's lab, and M., a Québécois house guest of G. and D.'s. Despite the grim forecast for the day, it was sunny and relatively warm on our arrival, so we decided to start the day with a round of lawn games.

The local lawn game of choice (forgive me if we've described this in some detail before) is Kubbspel. This is, in fact, the game I referred to last summer as, "a bunch of people standing in two lines, taking turns throwing sticks at each other," or words to that effect. It is a game native to the Gotland region, but the implied antiquity of that statement is hard to support: in fact, despite its occasional billing as a Viking lawn game, Kubbspel appears to have arisen in Gotland in the 1990s when someone invented the game and began selling it. This does not detract from its entertainment value, however.

There are already some perfectly decent explanations of the game online, so I shan't attempt to replicate them. In brief, though, you divide into two teams, each standing behind a line of 5 wooden blocks. The teams take turns throwing a set of slightly smaller sticks at their opponents blocks. Knocked over blocks are claimed temporarily by the team that knocked them over, adding to their own collection until they are knocked down a second time. Once all the blocks have been eliminated, a larger block in the center, the "king," is knocked down as well, and the game ends. "A minute to learn, a lifetime to master," may be overselling it a little (OK, a lot), but it does involve more strategy than I'm implying it does, and we happily wiled away a number of hours throwing sticks and drinking beer.

Eventually though, the sun went away, and the cold dark clouds rolled in. So we headed inside, and channeled our competitive natures in to a bit of spirited Guitar Hero. Sometime in between my massacre of "On the Road Again," and Jennifer's rousing rendition of "Crazy Train" the remaining guests arrived: Jennifer's co-worker K., her boyfriend visiting from Poland, and their Polish friend along with her Swedish boyfriend (who was in town because he had to, gasp, work on midsummer—but no worries, his family called from the stuga to rub in how beautiful the weather was there).

Dinner was, of course, excellent: a whole poached salmon, färsk potatis och sill, a couple of shrimp salads, buttermilk cole slaw (hmm, if only I could tell what the Americans made…), home made bread, and a few other dishes which elude me at the moment. There was also, of course, a selection of appertifs, including aquavit, a spicy cherry vodka from Poland, Becherovka, and a Portuguese almond liqueur. This is where having a Swede in the mix started to show, as we were in fact led in a series of traditional songs between courses. By the time we had rounded off the entertainment with a couple of highly entertaining table games (like a local variant of Fuzzy Duck, which involves lots of hand waving and never showing your teeth), it was fast approaching 11 in the evening, and with the realization that the busses and trains would stop running soon there was a rather abrupt mass exodus as we all headed off towards our respective homes. Fortunately the clouds had cleared by then, so we had a bright and sunny bus ride back to Eriksberg.

Having opened with a quote from the ubiquitous Swedish folk group Kent, I would be remiss indeed not to provide a translation. There's a funny bit I don't quite get in the middle there, but this should be close enough to give the idea:

Lay the table on the porch
For a guest from far away
In the country, just right is best
We toast to one more midsummer
New potatoes and herring
As if time has stood still