Midsommar 2012

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JenniferYesterday was Midsummer's Eve, in some ways the most important holiday of the whole year. Sweden.se, the official website about all things Sweden, has put up a variety of informative texts about it in English, like this one here. Or, you can watch this slightly snarky video, also made/endorsed by the official website (so you know it's not too off-base...).

Midsummer remains a somewhat perturbing holiday for us poor immigrants, because the cities shut down completely (the street scene of Stockholm on Midsummer's Eve in the video above is not an exaggeration!) and all the natives disappear. Nevertheless, we had a very pleasant day. The sun was shining, and we packed a picnic of spice-rubbed chicken, dill potato salad, grapes, strawberries, and homemade lemonade, and took it to a nearby field. Joe leaves soon for a workshop in Turkey, and it was nice to just hang out and relax for a day.

Language notes part 7: A strange moment

Just a quick note, in the midst of finals. I had a odd language moment the other day, courtesy of Joe, my visiting cousins E. and S. (more on their visit later), and the fact that the four of us ran into one of my Swedish teachers from last term, at random, on the street.

Teacher T. (she of the 'we have nothing better to do in Sweden other than compare our hands' incident) and I saw each other and I said hello, then I started to introduce people... in Swedish, because that's all I've ever used when speaking to T... Joe and E. and S. stared at me... And then I suddenly realized that I should speak English, but wait, I had never heard T. speak English, and oh my gosh, what do I do now? What language should I speak? Using English just felt wrong, like it would be cheating or something, and I became briefly (but truly) tongue tied. I think this sort of thing has happened to T. before though, and thankfully she quickly took over and introduced herself to all (of course she speaks English, better than I do probably, don't be silly).

We all talked briefly about Uppsala and the weather, but I found myself switching back to Swedish when talking to T. I don't think I was intentionally showing off — in retrospect I suppose one who is studying something obscure (like Swedish) is glad to when an opportunity comes along to display one's knowledge, however imperfect.

(Quick, someone ask Joe about separation logic.)

Anyway, learning and using a foreign language certainly has its odd moments. I guess I expected it to be more like history or something fact-based — you study it, and then you know more about it, and that's nice. I've never studied/learned something that results in moments of pure disorientation...

The Witches of Easter

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JenniferAnd now to start catching up on some of the stories and fun things that have happened in Sweden in Spring of 2012.

First, Easter, or in Swedish, Påsk. (Quick refresher: in Sweden, Easter is the holiday (well, Skärtorsdag, to be precise) when the witches come to beg for candy... and a couple years ago, a father came by with his two adorable little girls dressed in their adorable påskkärring costumes, and said, 'You can always give them a little bit of money, 5 or 10 kronor. Or fruit. Fruit is good.')

So this year, the witches came early. Before noon!, which is hardly fair. Needless to say, we had not yet gone out to get candy. I tried to delay the påskkärringar at the door while Joe frantically hunted about for something to give them. We had a couple wrapped chocolates sitting around but that seemed a little light, so Joe grabbed a couple of blood oranges to give them as well.

They took the oranges and looked... a little dubious.

I wanted to sneak a picture of them because their costumes were so fun, so I nipped out on the the balcony and looked back toward the door that they would come out of. I was therefore in plenty of time to see the older one, who was holding the door open for her companion, pick the orange up out of her bag, and give it a look that I will generously describe as one of disapproval.

Right. Note to selves for next year: "fruit" is not an appropriate present for the Easter witches. Do not listen to the advice of their dads!

I just hope we haven't earned ourselves a curse or anything.

For Easter dinner on Sunday we went over to our Swiss friends, and were joined by three other friends and a visiting mother (French, Swedish, French-Swedish, and French, respectively). Their citizenships are important because it meant a whole new group of people to introduce to cascarones! It's always entertaining, introducing this custom to new people... there are about ten seconds of hesitation, between picking up a cascarone and choosing a victim... and then the victim realizes that maybe they would like to avoid getting a confetti-stuffed eggshell broken on their head, and so they run away, and then the chase is on (see picture to the left). (And the exercise was welcome, because it was just above freezing outside, and started to snow a little bit while we played a very poor game of kubb.) This was also Baby N.'s first Easter, and I'm only too glad to have seen to it that she — a Swiss national born in Sweden, with a temporary French passport — should have enjoyed a Mexican Easter tradition that my Irish grandmother picked up America.

Många stulna saker

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JenniferThis post is in progress, and functions at the moment mostly as an excuse to put a link to our visit to the National Gallery (aka the "Crap Sweden Stole during the Thirty Year's War" museum) in Stockholm last February. To the left, Carl Larsson's famous art nouveau-ish 'Midwinter Sacrifice', made to fit in the main hall.

School daze

JenniferAt US universities (well, in the Midwest anyway), a 'student fair' usually means a chance to get candy, leaflets, pens, and maybe cheap or free condoms from your school's safe-sex organization. In Sweden, at the 'student fair' you get candy, leaflets, pens, and free condoms distributed by several state-sponsored safe-sex groups. Here's a picture of the swag I was handed at last week's Humanities Day fair in my classroom building. I think it is a pretty accurate representation of student life here.

Clockwise from upper left: bookmark from the Studies in Arts, Languages, and Theology; Linnaeus bookmark; student government sink scraper (it says "You don't have to take the shit alone" on it) holding a condom from the Condomera, or 'More Condoms' (they do nothing else except distribute condoms at the university); 'hon-han-hen', advertising for the debate about gender pronouns in Swedish; the red thing, a postcard for the government-sponsored sex-ed organization (they distribute condoms both at the university and to high schools); postcard of a moose, with a chocolate from the local cultural museum sitting on it (the chocolate is an ad for their current exhibit about coffee breaks); a postcard for Culture Night with a teddy-bear face reflector and yet another condom sitting on it; a bicycle trail map for the city; yet another condom; yet more chocolates (the square black things saying 'Uppsala' on them).

A study visit to parliament

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Jennifer This term's Swedish class is going full steam ahead. At the end of this course we will be allowed to take something called TISUS, which is the Swedish equivalent of the TOEFL; passing TISUS also certifies that the holder has a high-school equivalent knowledge of civics and society. Therefore, on top of the language work, this term of class includes a once-a-week civics lesson. And last week, we took a class field trip to Sweden's parliament, which is in Stockholm and is called riksdagen. (Note that lack of capitalization; they did that on purpose so the the politicians won't get above themselves.) My assignment for Tuesday is to turn in a short summary of the visit, including what I learned or found surprising, and after that, a brief commentary. So here, for your reading pleasure: Version 1 of my assignment in its entirety.

JenniferMy translation of the local newspaper's review of the recent movie "The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo":

Despite a slight surrealistic feeling when the actors speak English while the surroundings and everything else is in Swedish, the American version of "Men who hate women" is really good. Rooney Mara and Daniel Craig have chemistry between them and Drottninggatan in Uppsala has an important role.

Right, let's take that last part first, the part that reads "...Drottninggatan in Uppsala plays an important role." As readers of this blog may remember (here's the relevant post), we who live in Uppsala, and especially those of us who travel by bus, were inconvenienced for more than a month last year by the filming of this movie. People I met on the bus were happy to grump about it a little, but also seemed secretly pleased of course. Who isn't pleased when one's beloved hometown gets some face time in a Big Hollywood production?

Except... Drottninggatan doesn't play Drottninggatan, and for that matter Uppsala doesn't play Uppsala. The three-block stretch of Drottninggatan that appears in the movie plays the entire small town in which a parade happened in the early 1960s. (Hence a little bit of extra time was needed to remove modern road markings, street signs, etc.) The existence of the street is important to the story, sure, but the events don't take place in Uppsala, and in fact these scenes could have been filmed almost anywhere (anywhere that the architecture was right, of course). To say therefore "Drottninggatan in Uppsala plays an important role" is perhaps a wee bit of an exaggeration... if not wishful thinking...

(Don't get me wrong, I fully intend to see the movie in the theater, and to cheer, only inwardly and silently of course, when Uppsala shows up!)

(And allow me one quick "I'm showing off my Swedish" note: on the movie poster above there's a tagline at the top: "What is hidden in the snow comes forth in the thaw." In Swedish it is an aphorism and sounds better because it's shorter and rhymes: "Det som göms i snö / Kommer upp i tö."

(Oh, and two further bits of amusement: Haven't or don't want to read the book? Check out the New Yorker's parody, "The Girl who Fixed the Umlaut," which focusses on the heroine's technical genius. Haven't or don't want to see the movie? I recommend "The Girl with the Tramp-stamp Tattoo," which imagines the heroine as a ditzy Valley Girl type rather than a punk-goth type.)

Snow, Runes

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JoeIt was a crisp, sunny day in the midst of a grim, muddy winter. We celebrated by tromping through a bit of horse pasture to see our pair of local runestones. It turned out to be a good time to see U 897 (pictured, on the right): the light dusting of snow was enough to bring out its rather faded lines but not enough to make the field impassable. In the summer, the stone is covered in dense vegetation; in the spring and autumn, the pasture is treacherously muddy.

Coincidentally, just yesterday morning I wrote up a bit on the other runestone in this same field.

New Year's Booms

Joe I think we mentioned previously that New Year's is one of the big three annual fireworks days here in Sweden. New Year's is unlike either the first Sunday in Advent, when Uppsala has a large municipal fireworks show, or Walpurgis Night, when large neighborhood associations all over town have medium-sized displays. Swedes, or at least Uppsalabo, ring in the new year with a barrage of individual displays. There's generally a light peppering one or two nights beforehand, then on the day itself we'll hear increasingly frequent booms in the distance. But when midnight hits, suddenly there are fireworks going off everywhere.

Living right on the edge of town as we do, it's a pretty impressive display even from our balcony. This year, though, the night was cold and clear, and there was no snow on the ground, so it seemed like a good time to check out the nearest little gathering up close (we've previously seen evidence that the local football field sees pretty heavy use as a launching pad, we've just never gone over there as it was happening).

Video of the proceedings is above. The cluster of lights in the lower left hand corner is the local neighborhood children, who marched up to the field bearing torches just five minutes before the stroke of twelve. The foreground is the (semi-official?) neighborhood display at first, with some random locals joining in as it progresses. In the background there were at least half a dozen other displays going at the same time (you can see bigger stuff from at least two other locales in Norby in the video, plus a few small items from the farmhouse down the road). The best part is the unintentional ground display that starts at about 20 seconds in — don't worry, no one was injured!

The Works

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JenniferRural Sweden has its surprises, and one of them is a fantastic art gallery in the small town of Avesta. Verket ("The Works") is a 100+ year old iron smelting factory, a remnant of Sweden's heavily industrialized late 19th century. The metal-working industry became so large and important that it outgrew these old structures, and the factory was abandoned around the middle of the last century, with buildings left intact and large equipment left in place. What do you do with an old smelting factory? You turn it into an art gallery, of course.