Home, A Finale

I've been back in the USA for 8 days now. It's been something of a blur. The return trip was precise, boring, and otherwise uneventful. Starting at 5 am local time in Umeå, the travel began with a 1 hour flight floating above the clouds and a Baltic sunrise,

This makes me sleepy.

Then a 9 hour flight sitting next to a photographer from San Diego. Then this guy driving me back to Madison from Chicago:

My chariot awaits.

With appropriate Swedish colors.

Since then I've been fighting sleep deprivation, drinking and eating too much, worrying about work, and travelling some more to Michigan. I've watched an MSU basketball game and football game.

Good seats. Thanks Pops

I've seen new and old friends.

Thanksdrinking:  tradition, courage, respect.

It's been a really good time, though now it would be nice to settle into a routine once more.

I think I at least owe it to my faithful readers to finish up this stunningly mediocre blog with an equally extraordinarily ordinary synopsis of my time in Sweden. Everyone should have to experience cultures different from the one they know best, at the very least to imbue some perspective into their lives. This naturally doesn't have to be across an ocean, as the USA is a melting pot of personal ideals and their (im)practical implementations. But it does help to have legitimate geographical distance and linguistic differences feeding the formation of one's outlook. My time in Sweden was productive in terms of work. My interactions with the Swedes reminds me of being in a big city:  people can be friendly but generally keep to themselves, so you need to take the initiative. My travel experiences, though infrequent (weekend each in Copenhagen and Stockholm), were fun yet expensive. Travelling alone isn't always easy, and my time in Sweden reminded me of how lucky I am to have the support of such great friends and family back here. My advice to anyone who might get to experience something similar:  be open and expand your horizons.

Thanks to all of you who have slogged your way through my first attempt at serial journal writing.
Be well and Skål!

Lessons in the Absurd: Swedish Oddities Vol. 2

Back by popular demand, or because I'm running out of things to write about, let's explore the things I still find particularly strange about Swedish culture. This will be a fast-paced, point-by-point, seat-of-your-pants, apparently dash-friendly ('-'!) post.

- Fun versus funny. Swedes confuse these two English words all the time. 'That football match was quite funny.' Really? Because I wasn't laughing, but I did enjoy myself.
- The Swedish Mile. Converting from miles to km in my head all the time makes me loathe the US system of standard units. It's dumb. Decades of numbers makes more sense because, ya know, ten fingers. To add to the confusion, in northern Sweden where things are ridiculously far apart, the concept of a Swedish mile exists. 1 Swedish mile = 10 km ~ 6.2 miles. Stupid units of measure!
- Random street signs. They are sometimes odd and often hilarious:

'Don't drive a 1960s British Mini into the water' 

'Warning:  man shoveling from large pile into small pile ahead' or 'Mogul building ahead.'

- Personal public bathrooms. This is actually a really convenient thing. You always get the calming privacy you come to love in your own bathroom.

Yeah, I took a picture of a closed bathroom door.

- Julmust. A holiday staple that they begin selling midway through October. Literally means 'Christmas sap.' Over the past month I've heard this phrase twenty times:  'Julmust, it's a must!' Swedes think they are so funny (or is it fun, argh!)

Creepy Swedish Santa approves.

I'm sure there are others I'm forgetting, but in the end Sweden is pretty similar to the US.

Skål!

Ahh, sustenance

As my time in Sweden draws to a close, I think it's fitting to summarize a few things. My US compatriots, which is all of you reading this blog, often ask about the food over here. Well, in many ways, Swedish cuisine is the same as American. For students, the only affordable staple is pasta and anything you can mix with it. I'm a pretty parsimonious person at my core, so I have been eating a lot of pasta to save a few crowns here and there. But I've also ventured into the more traditional Swedish food. And when you go out to lunch at work you can't really avoid it. This includes all the stereotypes:  meatballs, moose stew, pickled herring. But to get a taste of what the everyday Swede eats, you have to go to a Pizza/Kebab/Saladbar Restaurant. These are everywhere, and they are the closest thing to American fast food that you can find in Sweden. It's equal parts Pizza Hut, late night Falafel/Gyro stand you would find on any European street corner, and McDonald's. This basically means that they serve all of those varieties of food (pizza, kebab, burger) at one location. It would be pretty preposterous for any American restaurant to do this, but somehow it works here.
I've previously shown this picture of kebab pizza, yum:

Eat with knife and fork.

Gyro med brod (Gyro with bread). Simple, delicious:

Pile of meat obscured by lettuce. This is probably the best bang for your buck at any restaurant.

Ahh, that's better. Excellent drunk food in Stockholm.

I've been particularly impressed with the Swedish interpretation of salad. Here, if you have any concoction of more than two cold ingredients mixed into a bowl it can be considered a salad. In that sense, leftover nachos = salad.
Take this for example, a pastry covered with a lingonberry-based relish, Swedish meatballs, and pickles. This is served cold and deemed salad - nice.

Perfect workday lunch.

And then there's the Swedish sweets that are served with coffee, like the aptly named Chokladboll:

Gotta love that large grain sugar too.

Finally, these 4 pics should tell their own story:

Huh?

'Brandy pickled herring'

No! Wait, you don't have to do this!

Ooof. 

Those pictures were taken over 6 weeks ago. I haven't really touched that herring since then.

To sum, Swedish food is eclectic and generally pretty good. Sometimes you long for a taste of home though:

Yes, this is a Corona, scrambled eggs, and sliced apple with peanut butter. Some people never grow up.

Okay, maybe that's not really a taste of home.

Skål!

Scandinavian Sunsets

As the sun descends toward the horizon, ushering in the black of night, its rays are refracted more and more toward the red end of the visible spectrum. Anyone who has watched a sunset closely can see the progression through all visible colors, which happens multiple times and increases in frequency as dusk approaches. I never really cared for my optics class, but was always happy I learned the basics of light physics so that I could appreciate sunsets even more than I already did. That isn't to say, of course, that one needs to know anything about the bending of light to really enjoy a good sunset.
Looking through my camera the other day, I realized that I have a ton of unpublished photos of sunsets, all taken in the last three months in Sweden.

First, in Stockholm, outside a metro station:

If there was a Swedish equivalent of the word 'Murica I would type it here.

And this guy:

In another life I could see myself walking around the islands of Stockholm fishing with this view

Sunsets in Scandinavia, particularly this time of year, can last much longer than at lower latitudes. With short days come much less daylight. The sun hovers precariously on the southern horizon for 6 hours, generating a burning sky with oranges, purples, yellows, and reds of varying hues for the last 60 minutes of the day. It makes for some pretty damn spectacular and gasp-worthy sights.

Riding across the bridge to the airport.

One of those situations where you're unsure if on the other side of those trees the sun is setting or if it's just a giant tire fire.

The next three were taken at the same spot on the same night, going from SW to NW:

If I didn't have the river bank in this photo and I flipped it upside down, would you know?

I mean, wow.

The city, from afar, braces itself for the apocalypse.

Skål!

Stockholm Part III: More Scenery

Stockholm is a beautiful city. I'll try not to cloud that fact by writing much more, so here is some more photo-documentation (decided to make images larger for this post):

 Just a short metro ride north of the city is Stockholm University. It's old, and it has a botanical garden with some grazing geese.

Last bit of green before the plunge into winter. Why are you still here you stupid geese? Also Scandinavian geese are cooler looking than Canadian geese. 

And some nice footpaths around a local lake.

Ahh....

Back into the city.

The one truly heavily (automobile) trafficked road downtown.

The weather dictates that any desire for color must be met with colorful architecture. I don't mind.

You can't really beat the view across the water at dusk in Stockholm.

Seriously.

Skål!

Stockholm Part II: Auto-motion

I used to think escalators, subways, elevators, and moving sidewalks to be enthralling. Really any form of movement in which each beginning and end is fixed, the transit time rarely (if ever) alters, and I am actively inactive (inactively active?). I remember a day spent with my mom, aunt, and cousin at a mall when I was maybe 10 or 11. My cousin and I rode the single one-story escalator maybe a hundred times that day, partly because we both despised shopping, but also because I knew that the smooth inclining motion was masking the complicated mechanisms under my feet. That's pretty cool.

And then I became an adolescent, naturally interested almost exclusively in the opposite sex.

Stockholm has an excellent metro system, probably due to its relatively large land area and inaccessibility by car coupled with frequently interspersed bodies of water. It's just more efficient in the long run to construct dark, deep, and dank mass transit tunnels than to build hundreds of pedestrian and motorist friendly bridges that are appealing to the eye and don't interfere with water traffic. I decided to partake in the metro system and bought a 72-hour pass, allowing for fast exploration of a new city.

Don't get me wrong, I still find the engineering behind successfully efficient metro systems to be a thing of beauty. I just wish I didn't have to ride so many damn escalators:

Going up. Can't see the end.

Inclined 300 meter long moving sidewalk?

Taken moments before this man was dragged to his death deep into the plethora of cogs. Stick to Velcro kids.

I understand I could make this all go more quickly if I walked, but that would ruin one of the reasons I enjoyed this type of transit in the first place.

Seems an odd thing to complain about when it conveniently transports me to outskirts of the city and vistas like this:

Couldn't have painted it better myself.

Or this:

I mean come on..

Or especially this:

Ferry ride at night, which now begins at 3 pm thanks to daylight savings.

Okay, based on this photo-evidence, I redact my earlier frustrations. Hurray for public transit!

Skål!

Bonus:
This bush-shaped tree looked like it was on fire:

I guess I should go free some Hebrews or something now?

Obligatory horse picture:

This is a horse.

Stockholm Part 1: Old Ships and Young Physicists

A full weekend in Stockholm, the self-proclaimed 'capital of Scandinavia,' for me was three things: exhausting, expensive, and totally worth it. 

I arrived late Thursday night, coming off several days in which my body attempted to adjust to frigid temperatures 6 weeks earlier than it was used to. Stockholm, a multitude of islands spattered across vast lakes, inlets, and Baltic bays, stays tepid much longer than its northern neighbors. But all I saw when I arrived was dark and empty streets; I navigated my way to the apartment of my second-ever couchsurfing (CS) host, Frida.

Except for breakfast at a nearby cafe on Saturday morning, Frida and I didn't get to chat a lot, but she seemed really personable and interesting. She's a trained engineering physicist who works for the Swedish government doing risk assessments on nuclear power plants. This topic obviously has garnered much more interest in the last few years following Fukushima, and to me it's totally fascinating. So at breakfast it was just two wild and crazy physicists talking radiation levels and statistical theory. She also is very into rock climbing (often taking long weekends to go for climbs in Turkey and Mallorca, among other places), travelling (is driving from the western to eastern end of Australia with a few friends over Christmas), painting some pretty incredible paintings (see below), and the Swedish version of American Idol (uh, yeah). Despite being completely different from my Copenhagen CS experience, it was still pleasant, a good way to meet a local, and financially efficient.

Living room: sunset painting and 'starburst' paintings on the wall are Frida originals.

But she was busy all day Friday, so I did a pretty extensive walking tour of Stockholm on my own. Friday began with a dense marine-layer type fog hanging low in the city, clearing up by mid-morning to reveal Stockholm and all its archipelagian majesty.

Well away from the city on the island of Djugårten.

Some fancy building across the water. Note:  'Murica represented far left.

All my Swedish coworkers, and my boss back in Madison, insisted if I were to go to one museum it had to be the Vasa Museum. In the early 17th century, Sweden was at war with Poland. The Swedish king wanted a flagship to take into battle, and commissioned the building of the Vasa. He was unhappy with the master shipbuilder's plans, wanting it bigger. Unfortunately the ship's hull was already completed, so the only additions could be made upward. You may be able to guess what happened next:  on the maiden voyage, only a kilometer from shore, the Vasa was hit with a slight gale, listed heavily to one side (filling the cannon ports with brackish Baltic water), and sank. Oi! After 3.5 centuries it was successfully raised and restored to remarkable condition.

No wide lens feature on my camera.

Roar.

Giant map of Scandinavia. I want.

It was a really neat and unique museum; I certainly recommend it to anyone finding themselves with time to kill in Stockholm. 

More to come in following posts.

Skål!