Monday, September 27, 2010

Election time

Jennifer The big election day was the weekend before last— we had a few other things on our minds so didn't pay too much attention at the time I'm afraid— but I did get into town to take some pictures of the campaigning and the little huts ("valstugor") that each political party had put up to be a center point for distributing literature, have rallies, etc. The huts were set up in the main square in town (the one that the buses don't go through just at the moment!). They split themselves up neatly and by color coding: the left-leaning (Rödgröna, the'redgreens') parties on one side, the center/right folks (The Alliance, the 'blues') on the other side. Rödgröna are what you might expect: the communists, the social democrats, and the environmentalists (although the greens do not always hold with the reds in voting). Joining the redgreens were Sweden's famous Piratpartiet, the Pirate Party, who value freedom of expression and bandwidth above all and appear to have claimed purple as their color.

Saturday, September 18, 2010

The Girl who was Annoyed by Stieg Larsson

Jennifer I have heard that the Stieg Larsson thrillers have been all the rage in the US; of course they were popular here a little beforehand. Hollywood has taken notice, and they are filming the first book now ("The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo" in English, "Män som hatar kvinnor" på svenska). (Of course it was already made into a perfectly decent movie in Swedish, but never mind.) And... they have decided to film parts of the movie in Uppsala! (The line at the bottom of the sign says "Uppsala. Borrowed by Oscar. Every day since 1984 [when the last movie, "Fanny and Alexander," was shot here].)