Sabbatical in Sweden

2007-05-06T09:59:00.000+02:00

Second set of Spain and Morocco bonus pictures!

2007-05-03T17:18:00.000+02:00

First set of bonus pictures from Italy, Spain and Morocco!

2007-04-25T15:46:00.000+02:00

This is Cathy writing the blog. Usually David and I write together – so romantic – but I’ll be writing about a couple of trips that David didn’t get to go on. I guess he could write about the great meals he cooked while I was gone, but frankly, I think you’d rather read about Italy, Spain and Morocco than ramen noodles. (Hey, Cathy, no fair -- what about the nights I took the kids out for dinner?)

I’ve been traveling a good bit in the past two months. I’ve been trying to limit my airplane flights because I’m making an effort to reduce my carbon footprint. But I think I blew my carbon budget for the year on plane trips to Italy and Spain.

The trip to Italy was purely pleasure – a week with Emma, two other teenaged girls, and an long-time Seattle friend with family roots in Italy. We went to Sicily and Calabria (Calabria is the toe of the Italian boot, Sicily is the soccer ball). David warned us to stay away from soccer games – the past several months have been marred by soccer fan riots in Europe that have resulted in serious injuries and even a death in Catania, Sicily. But Emma and I went for the shoes (definitely not the cleats) and the food. We also went so we could meet our friend’s family who lived up in the olive groves of Calabria. The shoes were great – trendy and elegant. The food was flaky and sweet in the morning and dripping with olive oil and cheese at night and it is a good thing feet don’t expand as quickly as waistlines.

We got on the plane in Copenhagen with proper blonde Swedes and Danes and mysteriously, by the time we got to Rome, everyone was shorter and had dark hair. It was weird, when we landed people were having loud arguments, making out, and pushing, and the overhead compartments were full of cheese – the plane ride had completely changed everyone’s appearance and personality.

We enjoyed our first excellent espresso, canolli, and fresh blood orange juice in the Rome airport, then took a short flight to Sicily. We rented a car at the airport. It was the first time I’d driven in a few months and, while the Italian drivers were far more polite than I expected, the roads were not designed for a car that held five people and their luggage. Our first stop was Taoramina, up the steep flanks of active Mt. Etna. I drove through an increasingly narrow street and finally had to drive down it in reverse with the verbal assistance of half the streets' residents. I almost turned down another street before a woman pushing a baby carriage gestured wildly and told me the street was 1.9 meters and she could see our car was 2 meters wide.

Taoramina is built into a hill and the highlights of our first Italian dinner, down four flights of stairs from our hotel, were good bread, strong olive oil, and a good wine from the ashy soil of Mt. Etna. Since we ate in a seafood restaurant, the owner brought out a huge tray of raw seafood on ice – shrimps, sea bass, clams and so on – sort of like a cheese or dessert tray where he could lovingly describe each fish. He also brought out a half dozen photo albums with pictures of satisfied customers – an Irish singing group, a Russian fashion model, a famous singer I'd never heard of, and big dumpy middle-aged couples. A few more flights of stairs down in the main part of town we could see people wandering around in costumes and throwing confetti to the beat of a pop music light show. It was Mardi Gras!

In the morning we walked through drifts of confetti and investigated the marzipan shop (I settled on the marzipan artichokes, rather than the marzipan chicken legs or marzipan corn on the cob). We found a pasta shop that sold pasta in a variety of forms including pasta shaped like little penises. (See the bonus pictures below!) Tell me, what do they call the pasta dish from that? The girls tried on shoes, ate gelato and were blown away by the price of leather jackets at Dolce & Gabbana.

In the middle of our trip, we took a ferry over to Calabria and drove several hours up into the mountains to spend a night with my friend’s cousins. Perhaps because it was an Italian family, there was a long-running feud between the families of the old brother and sister who both lived in the same tiny village. We visited both branches separately. They spoke no English. Actually, the elderly sister spoke a little English, but she was partially deaf. And she wouldn’t translate for her brother because of the feud. The brother, Francisco, kept a little book in which he had carefully noted all of the family names and branches, including the names of my friend, her six brothers and sisters, and all of their spouses and children. It turned out that for years, as each of these American cousins came up into the hills for a visit to the old country, Francisco had worried that they were coming to stake their claim on their portion of the family olive grove. I think at this point he realizes the American branch just comes for the family experience, so Francisco’s family set out a big lunch spread and we had the pleasure of a table-full of people saying, “Mange! Mange!” to really encourage us to “Eat! Eat!” We left full and ready to head back to Sicily and the town of Siracusa.

We were amazed at the art, architecture and ancient ruins of Siracusa. We stayed a few days just south of Siracusa, on the ancient fortress island of Ortygia. We walked the same streets as Plato, Sappho, Archimedes, and Dionysius. But not in the same shoes.

Catania, where we stayed on our last night, was an armpit of a city, clearly the product of corrupt city governance. Every other place else we visited in Italy was much better managed and taken care of.

When we left Lund for Italy, the farmers in the market had been selling twigs that they assured us would bloom, and the farmers had been covering their vegetables with warm blankets so their lettuces wouldn’t freeze (check out the photos in our previous post). The days were short, dark and cold. When we got back from Italy, crocuses and little purple and white flowers were in bloom on campus lawns but the days, while sunny, were still cold and short. Then Akiva and I left for three weeks in Spain and Morocco and David and Emma looked forward to three weeks of ramen noodles. (David sez: enough is enough! Emma and I actually made fish one night!)

The reason I went to Spain was for a meeting to discuss the Aalborg Commitments by the European Sustainable Cities and Towns group in Sevilla. Rather than just fly quickly in and out of Sevilla, I decided to explore the region a bit more. And I decided to take along a traveling companion.

When Akiva and I looked at a map we saw Africa was less than a fingernail away from Spain (maps can be so deceptive). So we decided to take a train and ferry to Morocco after the Sevilla meeting. And just a few days before the Sevilla meeting, I saw an announcement for a meeting in Barcelona of the Alliance for Global Sustainability. That sounded good too, so Akiva and I headed off first to Barcelona, then took a little side trip to Valencia, Spain’s third largest city. On our trip we ended up in Morocco and in the four largest Spanish cities – Madrid, Barcelona, Valencia, and Sevilla.

A little about Valencia. We all know about Valencia oranges – Sevilla oranges, Valencia dreams – and Valencia has lately been in the news because it is hosting the America’s Cup sailing competitions. Valencia also claims to have originated paella. But the reason we took a four-hour train ride from Barcelona to Valencia was because I’d read about Falles. Falles is fire festival in honor of St. Joseph that has grown to mammoth proportions. We were ready for heat, for loud eruptions, for color searing across the sky. You say fire, I say go. (Burning Man, here I come!)

Each year people in 350 or so neighborhoods in Valencia build elaborate, elegant and giant papier-mache sculptures. The sculptures tend to depict political satires – which we didn’t understand – and to be a bit crude – which even Akiva understood. The sculpture that receives the most community votes is placed in a museum. The other 349 are stuffed with firecrackers and burned up on March 19 at midnight. In my humble city planner opinion, this set of activities is immensely successful for creating strong communities and a healthy city. Valencia is a jewel – the police are really helpful, the sanitation workers are exceptional. Streets were swept moments after fireworks, garbage cans were emptied before becoming full, parks and benches were plentiful and well-cared for.

The serious city problem I saw in Valencia – remember it is just a fingernail away from Africa – were the large encampments of African men under most all bridges in the big city parks. The men were hanging out their washing next to cardboard box houses, setting up chairs in their “front yards” on carefully mowed park lawns, and they glided silently through Falles crowds with barely a ripple. Other immigrants, from Central and South American, seemed a bit more integrated, selling street trinkets and playing Peruvian panpipes, but the African refugees presented true sustainability problems with no easy solutions.

Leading up to the orgy of Falles sculpture burning are three weeks of parades and music, carnivals, bullfights with guest matadors, people getting dressed up in old costumes, and of course fireworks. We saw plenty of fireworks, including a midnight show and another super loud show at 2 in the afternoon in the main city square -- packed with perhaps 500,000 people. Akiva sat on a dumpster with 10 other kids who all kept rolling off whenever an especially loud rocket exploded.

Akiva and I walked around maybe 30 Falles sculptures, and saw the parade of thousands of women (and babies) in jeweled dresses and mantilla, their hair coiled like Princess Leia, bringing armloads of red, white and pink chrysanthemums for an offering to a giant Virgin Mary. Some of the women weep as they walk, but I suspect some may be weeping after being in a nine-hour parade. The men also dressed up – like pirates with short pants, vests, and bandannas. The artisans who created the Falles also had their own special outfit of a smock with a yoke and gathered pleats and a plaid Falles scarf particular to each neighborhood.

We especially liked watching the jeweled women text messaging, smoking, and eating soft ice cream and churros that were being deep fried on nearly every corner. We took a pass on the bullfights. We also took a pass on March 19 when the city explodes since we had to be back in Barcelona for my meeting.

Our first few days in Barcelona were spent on the tourist trail – we stayed on the famous Ramblas pedestrian mall and went to the Picasso Museum (a must see), the aquarium (okay, but it needs more information on the current state of the oceans). A popular street theater in Barcelona was men who dressed up as Greek sculptures and stood on pedestals waiting for people to drop a few Euros in their hats before they came to life. I think they would also have come to life if we’d taken their hats. We spent the majority of our time in Barcelona wandering around looking at the work of Antoni Gaudi.

I’d heard Gaudi’s name before but hadn’t much considered his work before visiting Barcelona. Gaudi was an architect who lived and worked around Barcelona between 1880-1926. Gaudi turned architecture on its head, and blew in its ear. He was remarkable for his creative breadth, his obsessive attention to detail, and his productivity. He designed and supervised the construction of furniture, houses, stores, apartments, schools, churches, a cathedral, and our favorite, the huge (44 acre) Park G¸ell that is managed by the Barcelona parks department. Every path, every tile-encrusted bench, every soaring column was beautiful, efficient and practical – and a delight to move through. Akiva loved climbing the walls.

Gaudi built all of his masterpieces by attending first to nature – the shapes of the windows in his apartment building La Pedrera were like leaves that morphed gradually to maximize interior light while keeping the building interior cool. The columns holding up his massive cathedral La Sagrada FamÌlia resembled in shape, angle, and function, the trunks of trees. In fact it was the cathedral that Gaudi became truly obsessed by. He ended up living at the building site and eventually begging local neighbors for donations to continue his work. When he was killed near the cathedral by a streetcar, he was not recognized at first because of his overgrown hair and his pauper’s clothes, held together by pins.

Although Akiva tends to dress down, I’m still keeping him presentable. In fact he was more than presentable and made many friends at my Barcelona meeting because he spoke three of the main conference languages – English, Swedish and Japanese. The Alliance for Global Sustainability is a group of about 200 academic researchers on energy and water from MIT, University of Tokyo, Chalmers Sweden, ETH Zurich and the Technical University of Catalonia. I spent my time networking in English and was most impressed with student work: a campus organization in Tokyo that had schooled the university in campus-wide energy efficiency measures; joint programs led by MIT students to Asian and Africa to work with local innovators on energy and water reclamation projects using local materials; students studying a bouquet of energy sources – solar, wind, biofuels, geothermal – to grow unique energy solutions for local regions. These bright students realize that one size and style of shoe does not fit all!

Akiva and I also liked the emeritus University of Tokyo professor who frequently reminded all the eggheads at the meeting to keep their own bodies healthy through good diet and exercise. This professor believes sustainability education at every level begins with understanding our personal, physical connection to the planet – and that we can’t work for sustainability if we neglect our own bodies.

I also spent some time with the group of academics who are starting to develop educational curricula for sustainability education – I do wonder how soon sustainable planet questions will show up on the S.A.T.s and other standardized tests.

Akiva struck up a friendship with Dennis Meadows, one of the authors of a classic environmental text, The Limits to Growth. Dennis, who now lives in France, was the keynote speaker in Barcelona and it turned out he was also going to be the keynote speaker at the conference we were headed to in Sevilla. So we shared a cab ride and got together on the overnight train from Barcelona to Sevilla.

The overnight train to Sevilla might have been the highlight of the trip for Akiva. Spanish trains are clean, reliable, and (according to Akiva) fun! We shared a bunk bed, ate in the dining car, and were enchanted with our little toiletry kit that came with our compartment. We got to Sevilla ready to meet and completely refreshed.

The Sevilla meeting brought together close to 2000 city planners, mayors, environmental consultants and other folks trying to make sense of new European Union sustainability rules – and people simply trying to make their cities better. More than half of the participants came from southern Europe – Spain, Italy and Portugal – but there were people from all over the world. I was the only American – except for Dennis Meadows, but then again, he has emigrated.

The meeting presented best practices and trainings, which were okay, but I got the most information by networking and talking to people next to their posters of current projects. The meetings, especially rooms full of mayors, seemed ready to float away on their own hot air. Akiva was ready to leave long before I was, so on the last day of the meeting, we walked around Sevilla a bit and then got on a bus to Tarifa, the most southern port city of mainland Spain (there are a couple of Spanish islands further south off the coast of Africa).

We played cards on the three hour bus ride while the rolling green hills with orange groves changed into dryer grape growing regions, and finally into the wind-scrubbed port of Tarifa. Tarifa is considered a windsurfer’s mecca and it has the pizza joints, board shops, and biker cafes to prove it. We were just there overnight, long enough to have a pesto pizza and pesto pasta made by a chef who went to the groceria next door to buy a bunch of basil. We headed off on the first ferry of the morning to Morocco, an hour away.

The ferry was packed with cars carrying surfboards and a couple hundred people with day-glow Coast of Africa and Costa del Sol stickers affixed to their jackets on their way to Tangier with us.

I’d read on the web and in various guidebooks to watch out for shady moneychangers, thieves, hustlers, taxi scams, and beggers when the ferry landed in Morocco, so my traveling antenna were way up as Akiva and I got off the boat. Well, the guidebooks were wrong. There were some people in long robes greeting relatives and friends, a mess of tour buses waiting for the day-glow sticker crowd, an ATM machine, and a couple of taxis. I changed money – although the taxi driver was happy to take Euros since the money machine only gave me big bills that he couldn’t change after he drove me to the train station. The train station was newly remodeled and clean, the helpful and pleasant ticket sellers spoke English, and there was a clean bathroom, a stand up snack bar, and another ATM machine. We sat around for a few hours waiting for our four-hour train ride to Rabat, the capital of Morocco.

Rabat lacks the romance in our imaginations of Marrakech, Fez, or Casablanca, but a good friend of ours in Seattle is married to a Moroccan man from Rabat and we were lucky to be invited to spend a night with his family at their weekend house near the beach in Skirhat, a suburb of Rabat. Their house was in the middle of a new development – houses were being built all around us by construction crews who lived in tents next to the buildings they were working on. Our hosts included our friend’s mother, his two sisters (one worked for the city of Rabat as an accountant and the other was a doctor – a nephrologist), the accountant’s husband, and their daughter. Language was a bit difficult for us since we don’t speak Arabic or French. While Akiva entertained the two-year-old daughter, I watched our friend’s mom make vegetarian cous-cous. We also experienced our first cup of Moroccan mint tea, poured steaming hot from high above the tea glasses – a Moroccan drink of bonding and relaxation. Our friend’s family called a riad – a B&B in a traditional courtyard house – that an acquaintance had just opened in Marrakech and made arrangements for our next night in Morocco.

After a walk on the beach – great waves, surfers! – we passed by a woman riding in a hired car. It turns out getting a taxi is not just as simple as calling a taxi – our host had to shanghai the driver (and his current passenger) to their beach house and then get a commitment from the driver to come back later to take us to the train station for the next part of our journey.

The five-hour train ride to Marrakech was pretty uneventful. The train rose into the mountainous interior, past sheep scattered on parched red earth and eucalyptus trees aligned along dry stream beds. Men lingered outside our train compartment having intense conversations in Arabic, sucking hard on pungent cigarettes. We talked to people in our six-seat train compartment – a young man from Fez who thought Marrakech was boring, a Moroccan couple visiting from Miami where they worked in a hotel. Most people were friendly but the woman from Casablanca on the seat next to me reading the Koran looked with some disapproval at Akiva’s uncovered hair before answering her phone set to a ring tone of Jingle Bells.

Marrakech also seemed a bit different than guidebooks had indicated. Much tamer, easier to get around, and less filled with exotic people than I had expected. The riad where we stayed the first night was empty – we may have been among its first guests – and the managers were still trying to figure out how to be good hosts. It was convenient to the main sites of the city – we could easily walk to the main square Djema‚ el Fna, where most all of the Berber snake charmers, henna tattoo artists, monkey trainers, musicians, souk vendors, orange juice squeezers and fortune tellers hung out. Same old, same old. What I really enjoyed in the square was the ecstatic Gnawa music played late at night, although it freaked Akiva out.

On our first day in Marrakech I sprained my ankle and so I decided we’d hire a car, drive into the desert, and ride camels. We found a driver to take us over the Atlas Mountains, through a snow squall, past Berber villages with hungry children (really the only noticeable poverty we saw on the whole trip), around hairpin turns that showed yet more villages carved into the mountainside, distinguishable from the rocky landscape only by their bright white satellite dishes. I’d read about the petroglyphs of the Dra’a Valley and hoped to see them, but our driver couldn’t find them.

We did find the dunes and the camels and spent a magical night under the stars, nursing our camel-riding saddle sores. We fell asleep looking at shooting stars and hearing snatches of Berber talking, singing and drumming coming from tents scattered all around us. We awoke at dawn, had a Berber breakfast (flatbread, oranges and strong tea), rode our camels a few hours back to the paved road and spent the next day walking slowly through a couple of other Berber towns – Zagora and Ouarzazate and other mountain villages.

I’d been hesitant to use internet cafes since Casablanca had just had a suicide bomber in an internet cafe, but I figured it would be okay hacking in the desert, surrounded by a bunch of guys in long blue, brown and green hooded Berber robes. These guys were much better dressed for the weather than I was – when I left them in the computer cafe at night to walk the quarter mile back to our hotel I fought through a sand/wind storm and wished I had a long hooded robe too.

Back in Marrakech we moved to a different riad that had much more experienced hosts and a beautifully kept room. We spent the next two days wandering around Marrakech palaces, the Jewish synagogue and cemetery (both had armed guards), and getting henna tattoos that we took on with us to Madrid, the last city of our journey.

We had been away from Lund for 18 nights and slept in 13 beds in 9 cities. We traveled with carry-on luggage but we were getting a bit ragged. Madrid perked us right up. I left Akiva asleep in the morning in Madrid (we’d arrived at our hotel at 2 in the morning) and walked through beautiful city plazas just starting to wake up with shutters rolling open, people having their morning coffee, and sanitation workers picking up from the revelries of the night before.

Our hotel was just a block away from a big art museum called the Prado. Even getting there early, long lines were waiting to get in to see the masterpieces. I wanted to Akiva to see some paintings by Michelangelo, D¸rer and Rembrandt, but I knew what he really would like best would be The Garden of Earthly Delights by Dutch painter Hieronymus Bosch, painted around 1500. Akiva was indeed enchanted and we spent a good chunk of time in front of this painting, discussing what was going on. It’s a truly bizarre and surprisingly modern piece of work. Then we headed off to nearby Park Retiro, rented a rowboat and spent the last afternoon of our trip racing around a little lake.

When we got back from Spain and Morocco the crocuses in Lund had given way to forsythia, magnolias and daffodils and to that surest sign of spring flowering – teens sunbathing in the central plaza. We welcome the longer days to come.

[Note: we'll post some bonus photos from these trips in a separate entry pretty soon!]

2007-03-26T14:17:00.000+02:00

More Biking in Lund … and the Swedish f-word -- Fika!

[Please forgive our long delay from the last blog entry -- life goes on and little is as exciting as the Ice Hotel :-)]

It was a miserable sleety gray Saturday morning. Cathy was out vegetable shopping with her friend in the market square and bumped into a couple she knows. The wife is a physical therapist and her husband is an architect. They are busy people with four teenagers and live about 10 kilometers from the market square. The wife invited Cathy to accompany them to a nearby store. “And we have our car,” the wife said rather sheepishly. “We are being very lazy today.” Think about that for a minute. A busy, financially secure, middle-aged couple doing their weekly marketing and apologizing for driving rather than biking or taking the bus.

Biking, walking, and taking the bus are way of life in Lund because these options are cheap, but they are also convenient, safe and easy. The entire community has agreed to put cars on the bottom of the transportation ladder. Drivers are hyper-aware of pedestrians and bikers. They watch carefully. We have never been “doored” by a driver getting out of a parked car. (The other day David encountered a car in a bike lane, waiting for a passenger -- he was genuinely shocked and a bit pissed off!) Drivers watch while they are driving too. There is a real hierarchy that everyone agrees on. Drivers must and do yield to bicyclists, buses and pedestrians. Drivers, even bus drivers, yield to pedestrians and bicyclists – really they do – even slowing on narrow roads until a bike lane opens up. And bicyclists yield to pedestrians. The system works.

We biked a while back for the first time on ice. The ice can be hard to see – thin, black and impossible to grip, even with good tires. The trick is to make turns and to stop s-l-o-w-l-y. We skidded a little at first but got the hang of it quickly. Akiva was our lookout, finding snow to ride on for extra traction.

Cathy's first spill on ice was nothing major but still a shock. She and Akiva were biking to a concert. The late afternoon was fairly warm and she didn’t see the ice under a puddle. She made a normal turn ended up flat on the ground in the puddle with her bike. Akiva tumbled off his bike to avoid hitting Cathy. Cold, wet, and slightly bruised, it was a good lesson for us to stay aware whenever the weather is a little cold.

Akiva and David biked in the first (and probably only) major snow of the winter-- probably around six inches, with a lot of drifting due to heavy winds. It was tough getting around wherever there was a build-up -- our tires sunk right into the snow and stayed there -- but in many places that had been traveled upon or cleared, there was no problem at all. (And wow, was it fun!)

Indeed, the major bike lanes are cleaned before many car lanes after a snow storm. The priority order for snow clearing transit lanes includes bus routes, major bike arterials and then car lanes.

The bike lanes were mostly carved out of wide sidewalks or existing roads, starting in the 1970s. Several city initiatives in the following two decades added more lanes and improved standards of paving, landscaping and maintenance. An EU-funded initiative, LundaMat started in 1998 and provided about $10 million US over the next six years to fill the gaps in the bike network, including new dedicated bike lanes, bicycle traffic signals, bike parking next to major transit hubs, and the construction of many tunnels under major arterials. We haven’t found any place in or around Lund where we don’t feel comfortable biking.

We expected there would be more mopeds, which are allowed on most bike lanes, since this is the only gas-powered vehicle a teen can drive between ages 15 and 18. But we seldom see a moped. Most of Emma’s classmates walk, bike, or take the train or bus. (Even Akiva takes the train one stop to and from one of his friend's houses for play dates.) Our best guess is that mopeds cost just too much money and require too much work.

One silly thing is that kids are required to wear bike helmets (while biking, that is!) only until they are 15. So, when they turn 15, they immediately stop wearing their helmets because it shows that they are older. Parents often ride bareheaded along with their helmeted kids, which seems to reinforce the equation that "no helmet = older" and suggests that adult brains in Sweden may be less valuable than children's brains.

Cathy says the worst time to bike is in freezing rain, zipping down a hill with what feels like needles of ice blowing hard into her face. She likes biking best for the exercise – working up a grade with muscles firing, heartbeat strong, a clear and open bike lane with traffic lights timed for continuous movement.

After all that biking, it's important to make sure you have proper sustenance. And that leads us to the Swedish f-word, fika. Like the far less pleasant f-word (but not at all like Ann Coulter's f-word), fika is a noun and a verb (and perhaps an adjective or even an adverb) that roughly comprises what we would call a coffee break. Everybody does fika. One of our acquaintances said that she "majored in fika" in school. It is one of our favorite traditions in Sweden.

In David's department (and probably almost everywhere), there are two fika-times each day: 9AM and 3PM. In the faculty/staff/student lunchroom, pots of coffee are put on, and many people gather, usually precisely on the hour, for 20-30 minutes. Conversation might cover something technical, but usually the topics are more general -- folk music, making violins, biking, travel, politics, culture, complaining about the students and the administration (some things remain the same worldwide!), etc.

The coffee is provided by the department, although there is a small espresso machine provided by a member of the department who collects money for its use. Sugar is also free, but you need to bring your own milk if you want it. Quite a few folks are tea drinkers, and some prefer instant coffee. There are mugs to use -- no paper cups! -- with two dishwashers in frequent use. (Confused about which one to use at the beginning of his stay, a colleague gently pointed out to David the "Dirty" magnet, written in English, as the key to this mystery.) Celebrations -- for instance, a recent 50th birthday -- are held at fika (and in that case the celebrant provided dozens of semlor -- yummy cream-filled pastries traditional this time of year). There is also after-lunch coffee, although it's not entirely clear if this is considered as a fika -- even though it surely feels the same!

We were recently invited to a friend's house for a weekend, mid-afternoon waffle fika. A small waffle iron at the table making lovely waffles to be covered with fruit jam, whipped cream, and more. Coffee and good conversation (especially when the three kids went outside to run off their waffle calories) made this a memorable fika, for sure.

There are dozens and dozens of coffee shops in Lund. Makes us feel like we're in Seattle. Kind of. Coffee to-go is usually a few kroner cheaper than if you stay at the coffeehouse. One of Cathy's friends is an American coffee roaster. She was surprised to find that the closest coffee roaster is a far cry north of here -- there isn't one in town. We've been told that the water in Skåne is highly alkaline, which changes the flavor of the coffee. So they have a special SkåneRoast that is especially strong, overcoming this problem.

In any case, we're hosting a fika for the parents of Emma's friends from school on April Fool's Day (on which the Swedes apparently have a similar propensity for practical jokes -- or else maybe we're just the fools for believing this!). The Tentacles (and associates), as her gang is called, will be one of her major support groups next year when she stays in Sweden, so we thought we ought to know more about the families. Emma's likely host family will come, too -- the children are classmates of Akiva's.

The next installment: Cathy and Akiva go to Spain and Morocco and take a camel safari!

2007-01-09T20:26:00.000+01:00

God Nyår! Good New Year!

Note: we have more pictures than usual, including a set at the very end of the entry. A number of the pictures are dark (it is, after all, the middle of winter here in the far north) -- but if you click on them you'll see the larger versions that are generally much brighter than the thumbnails.

Our family pyromaniacs prepared for New Year’s Eve by shooting off fireworks – available at various stands and video stores throughout Lund. It is one of the times when the usually staid Swedes let loose, blowing up everything all over town from sparklers to bottle rockets to whole boxes of fireworks fired off with a single match. While most of Swedes let loose – loosened with a little alcohol – Emma’s friends at their alcohol-free teen party mostly watched Emma, Akiva and Cathy have a blast.

We asked Emma to wake up early so we could leave on New Year’s morning for a family trip to Stockholm. The train took a bit over four hours, and we checked into a funky hotel – an easy walk from the central train station – in the late afternoon. After a little rest we headed out to look for dinner. Many places were closed on the January 1 holiday, but we ended up in a Chinese/Japanese restaurant with a buffet. All of us except Cathy had the buffet, while she ordered from the regular menu. The waitress strictly explained that Cathy’s order did not include the buffet ice cream. Cathy nibbled an egg roll or two from our buffet plates. But when she took a taste of the ice cream, the waitress came running over and said, “The ice cream is not included for you!” What a challenge! We were stared at the rest of the time, making it tricky for Cathy to sample the hazelnut, licorice and Dumie (a local candy bar) ice cream.

The next day we walked through the center of city to a public ice skating rink. Usually many of the local parks have ice-skating rinks but because it is an extraordinarily warm winter, only one rink in the center of town was open. Usually there is also ice-skating on the rivers that surround Stockholm, but they haven’t frozen this winter, at least not yet. We rented skates and joined the crowd that included toddlers, the elderly, hockey skaters, figure skaters, Swedes, Americans, South Americans, wobbly skaters, and more. Guess which we were. After skating, we walked along the water to see the Vasa, a 17^th century ship (commissioned by the King of Sweden) that sank in the Stockholm harbor on its maiden voyage. The Vasa was salvaged in the 1960’s with help from the current King of Sweden. Now there is a huge museum with the Vasa – the largest museum artifact ever recovered – as its centerpiece.

While the kids ate in the hotel room and made sure that Swedish television is as bad as U.S. television – it’s so bad, in fact, that much of it *is* American TV – Cathy and David strolled in the moonlight through the city center and across a bridge to the old city (Gamla Stan). Many of the small alleys of Gamla Stan reminded us of another old city, Jerusalem. We ended up going two stories down into a cavern that held an Irish bar, complete with Irish music played by a guy from the Bay Area. The German and Dutch beer we drank fortified us for the walk back towards our hotel (across a different bridge) and our search for food. The center city was really dead by 9 p.m. Even restaurants with signs that said they were open until 10 p.m. were closed by 9:30 p.m. But thank goodness for Irish bars – we found another one near our hotel and ate the traditional Irish lasagna and chips. On the way home we passed the “Wat Pho Center” – and we are still wondering Wat that Center is Pho.

On our last day in Stockholm, we visited the Centralbadet, or Central Bath, a spa right across from our hotel. In fact its proximity to the baths is one of the reasons we chose our hotel – that and the fact we could get rooms for us and the kids at a good price. We all splashed in the thermal bath and hot tub for a while. Cathy and David sweated through the sauna – the men’s’ changing room had a sign warning that inappropriate actions in the sauna could lead to being banned permanently; the women’s room did not have a similar sign, so Cathy tried to be inappropriate. Hmmm… Cathy had a hot rock massage and got her eyebrows done in the spa. Her eyebrow worker had studied intensively for a year and was now authorized to do almost anything related to taking hair off of any and all body parts – making David extremely leery of going back to the spa anytime in the future. Emma had a facial, but couldn’t schedule the manicure she wanted (even though she tried to schedule it days earlier). While Cathy and Emma were being beautified, David and Akiva ran a few errands. The most important errand was Akiva demonstrating his finely-tuned ability to leap over the many stone lions that defined the pedestrian mall in front of our hotel and the spa.

The next day, after putting the kids on the train back to Lund, Cathy and David headed north. Far north. We took the train to Kiruna, which is about 67.5 degrees north latitude, a couple of hundred kilometers above the Arctic Circle. We took the overnight train, leaving at 5PM and arriving the next morning at 10:30 a.m. – fresh and relaxed largely due to our sleeping car. We were directly behind the locomotive engine, though, and there was some kind of strobe light from it – perhaps it was to scare the moose away, in case they got through the moose fence that protected much of the track. The strobe also let us see the landscape changing from city, to fields, to snow-covered forests many hours north of Stockholm. We were provided with little cartons of water from Lappland in our deluxe private cabin, and we could have had reindeer stew or a jerky mixed from elk, deer and reindeer in the bistro car – but we stuck with the bread, cheese, Murphy’s Stout, and chocolate we brought along, and enjoyed our quiet private cabin for reading, sleeping, and moose scouting.

Many people on the train had skis – indeed, there were special storage rooms for the skis, although these rooms weren’t big enough, and occasionally we had to step over piles of skis that were laid across the walkways between cars. This winter people to travel far from Stockholm to ski and a number of international ski events in February may need to be cancelled at resorts usually now inundated by snow.

Kiruna – the city’s name means ptarmigan (a kind of ground bird) in the local Sami language – is the major municipality of Lappland, with a population of about 20,000. Iron mining is Kiruna’s major industry, and the huge iron mountain looms over the town. It’s a small town, and of course everybody speaks wonderful English. It didn’t feel that Lappish to us – no Lapp dances, for instance. In preparation for the trip, Cathy had painted her boots with a design of the Sami flag, which was only in evidence on tourist schlock. The church is the main tourist site – it was voted the most beautiful public building in Sweden about five years ago. There are actually two church buildings side-by-side – one with a steeple shaped as a Sami tent, and the other more modern. We couldn’t enter the first, since it was locked, and we didn’t enter the second, as there was a funeral service ongoing.

Kiruna was covered with snow, with accumulations of maybe 6-12 inches, and significantly higher drifts. The snow showed the usual signs of the many dogs we saw being walked, but luckily there were containers marked Hund Latrin (dog toilets) along the paths as well – although we never saw a dog avail itself of the facilities. Big rectangular ice blocks – about 1 x 1 x 2 meters – were sprinkled around Kiruna as decorations, some of them plain, some of them carved a bit, some lit with colored lights. There was, to our American eyes at least, a noticeable lack of SUVs and pick-up trucks – most vehicles were regular sedans and station wagons, Volvos and Saabs, but even an occasional Ford. All vehicles however had mega fog lights to deal with the snow and darkness. People got around in other ways too, such as the postman riding a bicycle with snow tires and old ladies using push sleds instead of walkers. Cathy tried to get some videos of these ladies, but they were too fast for her to shoot. Anyway, we weren’t sure they were in season.

But reindeer are in season. Buying reindeer meat is usually harder than buying moose meat in Sweden (which you can even find in the supermarkets in Lund); but the supermarket in Kiruna was well-stocked with reindeer steaks and other delicacies. But there weren’t mooseburgers at the McDonald’s – indeed, we saw no sign of McDonald’s or any other American-based chain in Kiruna.

Most of the stores closed quite early, perhaps at 3 p.m. We aren’t entirely sure if this was because the week after New Year’s is still a holiday, or because it gets completely dark around 2 p.m. at this time of year. (The official times of sunrise and sunset for “Week 1” in Kiruna are: rise at 8:48 a.m., at the peak at 10:54 a.m., set at 12:36 p.m., with twilight (whatever that is) officially at 2:42 p.m.) Even the library and the restaurant at the bus station closed early. But there was a souvenir shop open where we found big reindeer horn key chains for the kids, a moose call for Emma, and a moose cigarette lighter for Akiva (he’s starting a collection).

Ice sculpture sweeper, hot lingonberry juice maker, musher, ice carving teacher, surviving-the-night at -5 degrees Centigrade lecturer, vodka drink mixer, wedding photographer, ice cup carver, ice block mover, inside hallway shoveler, fire door installer, ice suite designer, reindeer skin seller, reindeer-stuffed grouse with angelica butter chef, electrician – if you can fill these jobs, or most any other job at your usual large hotel, wedding and conference center, and you enjoy the cold and dark, and you’re (at least) bilingual, then you can probably get work at the IceHotel (www.icehotel.com). We took the local bus from Kiruna, about a 30 minute ride, opting out of the dogsled transportation option.

The location is flat but spectacular, right on the Torne River, where the ice blocks are harvested from. The river is totally frozen at this time of year, allowing visitors to take dogsled runs to an island for coffee – the Swedes do love their fika, coffee breaks – made in the traditional Sami way. The river is also a major winter corridor for sleds, snowmobiles, and for walking. Cathy heard a man (who she thinks is one the IceHotel owners) talking about how he lived right across the river and walks the several hundred meters to and fro every day – presumably only in winter. The weather was quite mild for this time of year at the Arctic Circle, dropping to perhaps -11 degrees Centigrade. The musher – who knows his huskies and wanted to know details about the breed of the University of Washington Husky dog – said he loved this weather. After living in Finland, Norway and Sweden for many decades, he is tired of the -30 below weather.

The IceHotel has many normal buildings – the reception area, restaurant, some warm cabins for wimps, the ice hanger (where they store and carve much of the ice), a warm area with lockers and bathrooms for people staying in the “cold accommodation”, the saunas, etc. But the Ice Hotel itself is ice – 99.8% ice, according to hotel literature. The other 0.2% must include the electrical system, the fire exit signs (!!!), a few reindeer skin doors with antlers for doorknobs, the wool curtains that are the “doors” to the sleeping rooms, and the wood slats and wool blanket and reindeer skins that form the ice beds. Those reindeer skins didn’t look that warm, but we later learned that we would have a sleeping bag to place on them at night.

After checking in, we were shown to the warm area and given a cardkey to our private walk-in locker. We took a tour of the IceHotel, looking at each suite, the ice carvings (including a tribute to Linnaeus, that was vexing the sculptor who was into her third week of what she had thought was a two week project), and the IceBar. There were quite a few people wandering about, since the ice rooms are open to public perusal (for a fee) until 6 p.m. So while waiting for people to stop wandering into our suite, we went for a drink at the Absolut ® IceBar.

The first drink – almost everything is a fancy mix of Absolut vodka with various kinds of juices, many of them local – costs about $15 and comes along with your very own ice cup. Refills are $3 or so less, since you can reuse your ice cup. We just ate our cups. The bar has music playing, ice chairs with reindeer skins for sitting around, and they are planning on hooking it up via big screens and Web-cams with other IceBar locations that have opened in Stockholm, London, Tokyo, Milan, and Copenhagen, with more to come. (Absolut uses those 1 x 1 x 2 meter blocks of ice that we saw in Kiruna, each weighing perhaps 2500 pounds, for various promotions – including shipping a number of them to an event in Saudi Arabia. Absolut also ships over ten thousand ice cups a month from the IceHotel to the other IceBar locations.)

The IceHotel has ice carvings everywhere – a cat, a bear, Happy New Year signs, wedding announcements, abstract designs, huge ice chairs, an ice chandelier, etc. – but the rooms themselves were the most spectacular, ranging from simple to elaborate, using similar rooms with very different results. The hotel itself is a huge igloo built from rammed snow and those big blocks of ice. Artists from all over the world are chosen to design the suites, which this year include a sunken Persian garden, a Zen center, and a British sitting room complete with sofa, arm chairs, and fireplace carved from ice. There is a relatively uninspired ice chapel, too, but several couples were married there that day, and were wandering around with their wedding party, wedding photographer, bouquets, all in their tuxedo and bridal dress finery.

We stayed in a room designed by a German artist, Michael Jermann, called Flowing Edge. It was an elegant, austere room that worked effectively in the dusky, blue-green light that permeated the whole hotel.

We met people visiting from everywhere – Brits and Scandinavians were the most common, but there were also Eastern Europeans, French, Chinese, Japanese, Kiwis, Americans, Canadians, and surely more. It was hard to distinguish among people because almost everybody dressed in the green-and-black snowsuits, gloves, boots and hats provided by the IceHotel. We survived easily just with an extra layer or two we’d brought along. David’s beard and red sweatshirt caused several kids on the trip to ask if he was a tomte (elf). He needs to learn enough Swedish to make a snappy response rather than wiggling his eyeglasses.

Cathy had been told by someone that dinner at the IceHotel was the best meal she had ever eaten. Maybe that’s true, if you are from Sweden. It was certainly an interesting local menu including reindeer, ptarmigan, arctic char, roe, and lingonberry this and that. Food was all beautifully presented in a nouveau style, with some of the food served on ice dishes. And it was the best reindeer we’ve ever eaten. The mousse was good, too. We washed it all down with a nice vintage with an excellent red nose. On the way to our room, we searched for the Northern Lights, which had been spotted the previous evening. Alas, there was a beautiful full moon, but no aurora.

After dinner we were ready for a (n)ice sleep. David had attended a session in the afternoon on “how to survive the night in the IceHotel” while Cathy took a sauna. David told Cathy that she had to sleep naked and she believed him. Actually, you do keep warmest if you wear at most one layer (to allow body heat to warm the sleeping bag). Other directions included to sleep in a hat, not to wash or shave before bed (to keep the pores closed), to go the 100 meters from the warm area (with the bathrooms and lockers) to the bed in your sleeping clothes (okay, Cathy wore some clothes) and to take almost nothing else. We took books, mobile phone and a water bottle, which surprisingly didn’t freeze overnight. The Ice Hotel provides sleeping sheets and sleeping bags, and we were told to bring our sleeping bag only when ready to sleep, to keep it warm until just before diving in for the night.

We chose a double sleeping bag instead of two single ones, and David gave off enough body heat for two. It must have been what Cathy was wearing. Going to the bathroom at night wasn’t so bad because of the retained heat, and Cathy found the warm area busy at 2 a.m., with staff, other people peeing, all fully clothed. We left a wake-up call for 11 a.m. with coffee, but were instead awoken by a jolly Scandinavian staff member at 7:45 a.m. with a thermos of hot lingonberry juice. Hot lingonberry juice seems to be the drink offered at all times at all events at the IceHotel. It must have some properties we don’t know about. We’ll let you know if we start growing hair on our chest. Cathy slept in for another hour before heading to breakfast – this was much nicer than snowshoeing in the dark, another thought that had briefly passed through our minds.

If you weren’t interested in snowshoeing, dogsledding, or tracking down moose, there wasn’t that much to do (other than the sauna, the IceBar, the restaurant, and the gift shop). Cathy took a class in ice carving, which was taught in the ice hanger by an old man who had lived all his life in Kiruna. David walked to another coffee shop about 1km away – and walked back on the frozen river.

We had booked another overnight train with a sleeper cabin for the 21-hour trip back to Lund (with a change in Stockholm at lunchtime). And returned to our (relatively) warm, sunny city, refreshed by an incomparable winter experience.

En trevlig nyår!

2006-12-31T12:56:00.000+01:00

It was definitely a headline that got our attention: “21 omhändertagna efter sushiblockad” or “21 arrested in a sushi blockade”. What in the name of raw fish is a sushi blockade? A way to protest the depletion of deep sea fisheries? Illegal seaweed imports? A xenophobic gang war? It turns out the blockade was an organized union action – a local sushi restaurant owner had injured a sushi chef in a fistfight in England. Sounds fishy to us. We had made sushi just the week before with our friends as part of a birthday present for their 12 year old son. We found Japanese rice, soy sauce, and of course raw fish, but sushi seaweed, the nori wrappers, are expensive and of poor quality in Sweden. Luckily, we’d brought some unblockaded nori with us from Seattle and had a wonderful sushi party.

December marked a number of other exciting Swedish events. The Nobel prizes were awarded, the first Swedish astronaut went into space, and the winter holiday season started. Oh, and Cathy turned 50 and celebrated by going to an old-fashioned amusement park in Copenhagen called Tivoli. She managed to spend enough kronor to play enough times to beat the house record for the arcade game Wack-a-Gator.

Knock, knock. Who’s there? There’s no bell, so I had to knock.

OK, OK, as Americans we know a little more about the Nobel prizes than this, but we were unaware of the national pride the Swedish people take in the prizes and the ceremonies. Cathy, David and Akiva went to a lecture at Lund University about the history of the Nobel Prize. The main speaker had personal experience serving on the committee that selects the prizewinners in Physics. He shared some details about Alfred Nobel, in particular that he was unusual as he was a scientist, a manufacturer and a businessman – he patented dynamite, based on his development of a way to control the detonation of nitroglycerine. Nobel expected his dynamite would be used exclusively for engineering and was depressed that the product was used so much by the military. Nobel never married, and left his fortune to fund five prizes that he described in a handwritten, one-page will. The Physics and Chemistry prizes are awarded by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, Physiology or Medicine is awarded by the Karolinska Institute, Literature is awarded by the Swedish Academy, and the best-known prize, the Nobel Peace Prize, is awarded by a committee appointed by the Norwegian Parliament. (The Economics Prize is treated similarly to the others, but was created in Nobel’s honor by a Swedish bank years after his death.) The process for selection takes nearly an entire year and is shrouded in secrecy – which Swedes are very good at (don’t play poker with them!). The prize selection process sounds a lot like other intense academic processes (such as granting tenure), with committee members soliciting nominations, making formal and informal inquiries, reading a ton of articles and letters of recommendation, and – most of all – holding lots of meetings. The archives from the selection process are made public 50 years after the awards, for those of you who are interested in gaming the process :-).

Following the presentation by the Royal Swedish Academy member, a woman who seemed to have attended quite a few award ceremonies talked about the social events that are traditional every December 10th – the date of Nobel’s death – when Stockholm hosts the prize ceremonies. (The Peace Prize, following the dictates of Nobel’s will, is decided on and awarded in Oslo a little earlier because Norway used to be a part of Sweden.) It turns out last month Cathy had been in meetings both at the city hall where the Nobel Peace Prize is awarded in Oslo, and the city hall in Stockholm where the other prizes are given out. The awardees are hosted at a number of formal and informal meals, give formal and informal presentations, hobnob with selected students, faculties, King Carl XVI Gustaf and other royalty, and attend formal dances (that become less formal after the royalty leaves). There are special Nobel prize menus (you can buy the book, we didn’t), and special Nobel crystal, china and silverware (that you can also buy if you’re so inclined). Since the weather in December in Stockholm is often unpleasant, there are complicated logistics involved in transporting formally-dressed people between locations. Perhaps if the ceremonies were held on Nobel’s birth date, October 21, better weather would be more common. If you ever want to see the award banquets and events more closely, many are broadcast on December 10 on Swedish TV, and some are archived on the Nobel Foundation’s website. Or you can simply win one and take us along, of course.

Akiva enjoyed the Nobel lectures, since his school focused on the prizes for the better part of a week. On the Friday before the Saturday ceremony, he and his classmates heard student lectures (three in Swedish, one in French), learned proper table manners, had a special lunch, and danced the waltz with one another (after dance lessons from one of the teachers). Akiva looked marvelous in his jacket and tie, as did the other students dressed in their Nobel best.

Swedes spent more of December looking up into the night sky than usual. Why? Because they might see Christer Fuglesang, the first Swedish astronaut, who flew on the most recent Space Shuttle mission. Before his mission, Fuglesang was better known for holding the national record for Maximum Time Aloft for a Frisbee. During the mission, he kept a Frisbee aloft inside the shuttle for a world’s record 20 seconds (that’s 20 seconds, when converted to metric time) – breaking the existing 16.72 second record set by Don Cain. But, as one record keeper noted, “Don’t world records have to be set on the world?” In any case, Mr. Fuglesang, which means “birdsong”, has returned safely to earth and might just try to set a new record before he flies south for the winter.

Cathy and David experienced first-hand the Swedish medical system. Both got flu shots, Cathy visited the dentist and David took a trip to the emergency room. The flu shots, as in the US, were about $20 each at a drop-in clinic. Cathy chipped a tooth and David had some chest pains (that turned out to be nothing) and so went to dentist and ER, respectively. Good thing we didn't get our doctors confused! We entered the medical world, as we do with almost all Swedish encounters, by taking a number (and soon after giving our personnummer). We were both blown away by the speed, hi-tech equipment, competence, cleanliness and cost of our encounters. Cathy paid $25 for a tooth repair and David around $45 for an ER visit that included blood tests, an EKG, and free coffee. We were very impressed – not because all of the medical personnel who dealt with us were fluent in English, since that’s becoming old hat – but by their friendly professionalism. Everyone – doctors, nurses, technicians – shook our hands, and seemed relaxed and highly competent, which put us at ease. The hospital David went to has the reputation of being one of the best in Sweden, perhaps in the world. Both the dentist and the ER are close enough for us to walk to in under 10 minutes and we were both treated (including lab tests) in under 2 hours. Take that to your HMO. But they still can’t help us with Akiva’s lice, now into their 3rd month.

Sweden is about 75% Lutheran although, like in the U.S., only a small percentage of those folks are active in their religion. There are fewer Jews in Sweden – indeed, in Scandinavia – than there are in Seattle, and Seattle has a much smaller population of Jews than, say, the Northeast of the U.S. So we were once again interested to see how the December holidays would be away from home.

The first event in the winter lineup in Sweden is Lucia, a very beautiful Swedish/pagan/Christian holiday. The holiday honors St. Lucia’s name day on December 13, but traces its roots back to ancient times and involves lots of candles, children in white robes, and pure young singing voices welcoming the light that will inevitably follow the long darkness. The main ceremony is a procession of children carrying candles, singing “Santa Lucia” (like the Venetian gondoliers but with lyrics that talk about light – ljus, that sounds a lot like Lucia – and darkness). The girl chosen to be Lucia leads the procession in and out of the ceremony, wearing a red sash and a headdress of a half-dozen lit candles and standing perfectly still as the rest of the children sing their traditional songs. Although younger children have been known to use electric “candles”, the more significant ceremonies in churches have youths with real candles. And yes, there are a few anxious parents standing by with buckets of water, too. We had front row seats at the main ceremony in the main cathedral, and the ceremony was really quite magical with the immense church and the children lit only by candlelight. Cathy actually saw four, count 'em, four, performances of the ceremony: two in churches where children of friends performed, one at Akiva's school (he was a tomte, or little elf) and one at her Swedish language school. While lovely, perhaps one or two would be sufficient next time! (Apparently the Nobel prize winners are woken up with a Lucia procession in their Stockholm hotels, often with no prior warning.)

In contrast to Lucia, Hanukah has eight – or nine if you count the Shamash (the “watchman”) or even 44 if you count all the candles for all the nights! Of course, with such a small Jewish community here, we had to shave down some Swedish holiday candles to fit in our menorah. Hanukah is the festival of lights – light is a consistent theme of winter holidays, for sure. It is also a festival of oil, remembering the miracle when one day’s worth of oil lit the light in the temple for eight days. So it was lots of grating and frying of potatoes (which are easy to get here :-) for latkes (potato pancakes)! Yummy!!!!!! We hosted a Hanukah party for some of our friends, complete with latkes, sufganiot (fried doughnuts), lighting candles, and playing dreydl. Most, perhaps all, of the guests had never seen Hanukah before, which made it great fun – although there were many fewer voices than usual joining in while Cathy fiddled some traditional Hanukah tunes. Cathy and the kids also tried to go to the Lund synagogue for their holiday party but, because they were a few minutes late, got locked out. We keep forgetting how important it is to be on time! And, observing one other important Jewish holiday tradition on Christmas Day, Cathy, Emma, and two of Emma’s friends went to the theater to see a movie – Borat.

The family also went to the main cathedral for a performance of Handel’s Messiah. Lund is well-known for its vocalists and choruses and the performance of Handel’s Messiah is supposed to be the cultural event of the Lund musical season. Indeed the soloists and choirs were marvelous, the huge cathedral was packed, and the candle-lit ambiance appropriately moving. Even the kids and David stayed awake for the whole performance, although, like many winter performances in Sweden, it ended by 7 p.m. The exception to early performances (remember, there are only 7 hours of daylight!) was a midnight mass on Christmas eve that Cathy attended, complete with a Swedish choir attempting gospel songs.

During the holidays we hosted a party for the Cathy’s Swedish for Foreigners class as an end-of-term celebration. This is a wonderfully eclectic group, most of them with Swedish partners (many of whom joined the party). We counted something like 13 different languages spoken by the group including Swedish, English, Spanish, Portuguese, Chinese, Japanese, Croatian, Russian, and more. Emma and a friend at school are building a list of how to say “parsnip” in different languages, so she was very happy flitting around with a parsnip and a pad of paper in hand. Several of the Swedish partners are from Lund, and they wanted to know how we got “the best apartment in Lund,” which is indeed true, as well as the town’s best palsternacka, or parsnip.

Christmas in Lund is a relatively quiet holiday with minimally decorated trees and lights. On each of the four Sundays before Christmas, Swedes light an advent candle. And beginning on Lucia, every house, every store window, even in every library window people place a lamp with seven electric candles. The lights are especially nice – almost every window in town has a holder with these seven simple lights in an upward-pointing “V”. There are literally thousands of these around. Small tea-lights are placed on every horizontal surface – at the gym cafeteria, the library, all the coffee shops. We ourselves are on our 3rd bag of tea-lights already but we passed on getting Lucia-lights or a Christmas tree.

There are a few other decorations in town – the churches are flanked by massive evergreen trees with plain white lights -- but there is none of the flashy, neon-like lighting that you often see in the U.S. It’s simple, beautiful and in many ways more celebratory thi way.
Although a few hardy souls go off and cut their own Christmas trees, most go to the town squares to buy them. We saw many folks walking home with their trees tied to the back of their bicycles, and we even saw one or two trees balanced on a baby stroller (complete with baby) being pushed home for Christmas. The ornaments we saw were mostly handmade, or even home-baked (cookies), and again more simple and more satisfying than we usually see. Swedes do buy gifts for each other for the holidays, but again the operative word is lagom, moderation. Emma’s gang of seven did a small gift exchange with each kid responsible for buying one gift. Presents seem to be small and practical. Stores in the center of Lund remained open until their usual 6 p.m. and didn’t add extra holiday hours with the exception of the big toy store that opened on Sunday from 12 to 4. (Similar to the hours at ToysRUs in the US, right) This is in part because of strong labor laws but also because Swedes have decided not to be a 24/7 society.

The biggest day of the Yule season isn’t Christmas Day, but rather Christmas Eve. The celebrations really begin (after a big meal, of course) at 3 p.m. that day, with a longstanding Swedish tradition: Kalle Anke. The entire country stops, turns on one of the national broadcast TV stations, and watches an hour-long set of Kalle Anke (Donald Duck) and other Disney cartoons. Some are dubbed, some are subtitled, some are both. The same cartoons – most of which are quite old – are shown year-to-year, with at most a small variation, so most Swedes can (and often do) join in with Donald and Pluto and Snow White and Ferdinand the Bull and all the others. There seems to be little known about how this tradition started, but it’s still going very strong after over forty years! As much as we enjoyed the Disney hour, Akiva was also taken with some pretty bizarre shows before and after the program including a sit-com of the Christmas celebration of two families that accidentally mixed up gifts and gave the grandma a dildo that she thought was the hand mixer she wanted. This was not on cable, but on one of the two major Swedish national broadcast channels. Take that Janet Jackson.

There are a few other Swedish Christmas customs we should mention, most having to do with food and drink. People drink. They drink Jul beer, schnapps, a mulled wine with almonds and raisins called glögg, and a Pepsi-like drink called julmust. People bake saffron raisin buns called Lussekatter (Lucia cats), eat saffron buns specially made for Lucia, and bake pepperknakker (ginger snap) cookies for both Christmas tree ornaments and just to eat. Akiva got a pepperknakker cookie in the shape of a pig with his name on it at Kultura, the local history museum. He also made pepperknakker cookies at our friend’s house in the shape of motorcycles and cats, and our young friend Måns made a model of the Eiffel Tower out of pepperknakkers.

There are also lots of julbords, parties with an overabundance of food and drink. Emma seems to be going to or bringing friends over for an endless stream of holiday parties, our Brazilian friend Eduardo, who works at a local hotel, is exhausted with overtime work catering nightly company julbords. We went to a lovely after-Christmas dinner with our friends Boris and Görel -- complete with traditional herring and schnapps -- and their kids, Cathy went to a musical Christmas party with her fiddle group, and Cathy and Akiva even went with our vegetarian friends to the Hare Krishna Govinda’s restaurant for their elaborate vegan Jul feast.

New Year’s is celebrated with yet more parties and fireworks, fyrverkeri, that some of our family is looking forward to. And on a particular day, we think it is January 13, all Swedes take down their trees and Lucia lights and get back to work.

The holidays didn’t feel especially like the winter we’d been expecting. We brought warm gloves, and purchased boots and jackets, but Sweden – indeed all of Europe – is in the middle of the warmest winter in the past thousand years or so. Advertisements in the paper for winter holidays include ski holiday getaways on the Copenhagen to Seattle flight to enjoy the bountiful snow in the Cascades. The Alps are made of slush this year. Akiva and Cathy went ice-skating at the local rink to at least get a sensation of cold. (They thought the large sponsorship billboard at the ice-hockey rink for the local dentist was especially amusing, given that hockey players frequently need oral surgery.)

Cathy decided not to go to Greece this winter since it has been so sunny and warm in Sweden and she has been reading far too many articles on global warming and the carbon cost of air travel. It has been sunny and close to 50 degrees in Lund around Christmas, so we'll all take the train to Stockholm on New Year’s Day and then later in the week David and Cathy will go -- by train -- to an ice hotel (www.icehotel.com) above the Arctic Circle to celebrate Cathy’s recent 50th birthday and David’s January 1 birthday too. We’ll write about our adventures in the north as we travel 17 hours south, back to Lund on the train.

P.S. Akiva is writing a “family newsletter” that we will be providing sometime soon (we hope).

P.P.S. Emma would like to write but needs your questions to respond to – so go ahead and ask her about school, shopping, cheese, Swedish boys, and anything else you think of.

2006-11-15T15:34:00.001+01:00

Some new pictures added to the most recent post!

2006-11-14T00:07:00.000+01:00

Early on we were told that Week 44 was a school vacation week, so we decided to take this opportunity to go on a family vacation. The local travel agencies have many standard packages for vacations from

Sweden

Thailand

Kenya

China

and more – Swedes are serious vacation-package travelers, which is why this otherwise sustainable country has such a big environmental footprint – but we decided to roll our own package to

Portugal

. (Portugal is considered to be too cold to be a Week 44 spot, although there are Swedish vacation packages to the Portuguese Azores.)

After learning to fasten our seatbelts and put our tray tables in the upright and locked position in English, Danish, Dutch and Portuguese, we finally we arrived in Lisbon. (Cathy had just returned from Oslo the night before, so she tried to recite it in Norwegian, too.) The car rental company called our mobile phone while we were awaiting our baggage at the Lisbon airport, and told us to meet a white Opel at the curb in front for keys to our first car in Europe (except for our forays to IKEA). We signed papers on the hood, and off we went, joining the notoriously aggressive Portuguese drivers, north to Nazaré, to a B&B that Cathy tracked down.

We had planned to travel around Portugal a lot, since it’s a small county, but we ended up traveling much less than we expected because we didn’t like how people drove and the kids got really bored in the car. Our B&B hosts had lived in Canada, and we hoped they could help us learn about the country and places to go since we didn’t have the rest of our trip planned. Their place, Quinta das Rosas, was wonderful, with a vista of the Atlantic and of the main beachfront town from our bedrooms’ balcony. The kids were happy because they got their own room. (OK, we were happy, too.) The B&B had a large property with a menagerie of farm animals that Akiva helped to feed including chickens, ducks, a goose (soon to be joined intermittently by a gander), a dog, a donkey, peacocks and probably more critters we didn’t meet.

Breakfasts were lovely, served in a sun-drenched dining room, setting a standard not met later in the trip: fresh bread, local cheese, cocoa, coffee, fresh juice from the B&B’s own trees, eggs from their chickens, persimmons from a friend’s grove, etc. (We are glad we told them we don’t eat meat, especially since we got to be good friends with the donkey.)

The B&B house, an elegant three-story villa, was built by the hostess’ father by hand about 20 years ago. He had a little help with things like pouring the foundation, but he did essentially everything including beautiful cabinetry, wood stairs, and the ceramic tiling himself.

David spent time with Evangelino, the man responsible for the B&B construction, while Cathy and the kids went body surfing. When he was 28, Evangelino left Nazaré for Canada to work as a carpenter. Several years later, his family joined him. In the early 1980's, he returned to Nazaré to "retire." Except that he built the house. And he picked up his saxophone again and rejoined some friends in a band that competed in some European festivals. And he knows everybody in Nazaré (still or maybe again). He took us all back to his apartment and showed us pictures of Nazaré from years ago (his father had designed and built many of the buildings in town). Among the more fascinating pictures were those showing fishing boats crowding the bay and townspeople dragging the boats to the plaza at night – it’s no wonder the local people look so sturdy! Now, there are few boats or fish left in the bay and most people make their living in the tourism industry.

Sitting and drinking coffee in the plaza let us see some reminders of the U.S. A huge Cadillac with Alaska license plates drove by – we kid you not! Evangelino said that the fellow brought in three or four similar road hogs from Alaska, but we couldn't figure out why, especially since our little Opel could hardly fit through many of the streets in town. Also, just like teens "cruise main" in some towns, some folks just circled around Nazaré endlessly. Of course, with the narrow streets and the crowds, they probably averaged about two kilometers an hour. And don't even think of the gas they were burning.

Our first night we ate dinner at a marina, sitting outside on the dock with local wine, fresh orange juice, and sangria until the fish restaurant opened at 7PM. We enjoyed the sunset and ordered “the fresh fish” (the owner’s English was fine, but all he could tell us was “it’s the fresh fish”). The next night we went to a fish restaurant that Evangelino recommended – he must have really liked this restaurant, since he showed up with his friends later in the evening. Again, the restaurant didn’t open until 7PM, so we wandered around the plaza, had some coffee, and watched a group of visiting nuns gather in the setting sun for a picture in front of the cathedral on top of the hill. A few minutes after we sat down for dinner, a couple of fishermen with a cooler walked into the restaurant. We could see into the kitchen and watched the unloading of “the fresh fish”. Soon after, the waiter introduced us to our dinner, which was then taken outside and grilled on a wood fire by a stone-faced woman.

During our first day in Nazaré we went to the beach. The water was a bit chilly but there were nice waves for body surfing, and the warm, rice-grained-size sand was perfect to cover Akiva. We also snuck looks a sunbathing man with the biggest nose we have ever seen; seriously, if George Bush had a schnoz that grew like Pinocchio's, it still wouldn't be noticeable next to this guy. Since it was a Sunday, the beach had a large number of families. In the summer apparently the beach is so crowded you literally need to rent a spot.

Cathy and Emma did a bit of shopping too. It turns out Portugal is the shoe capital of Europe (it is also the cork capital, but we already have enough cork). All of the shoes are designed for small southern European women and big German, Scandinavian and American feet are out of luck. Emma was happy since she her feet fit into the largest Portuguese shoes (European size 39).

The next morning we followed our B&B hosts to Alcobaça where they go to a fresh produce market. We stayed a while at the market admiring the cabbage and the sturdy Portuguese farmers, wondering what they did with the scads of massive cabbages for sale (since we didn't eat cabbage even once during the trip). We then walked over a small river bridge to the church in Alcobaça, the biggest church in Portugal. It was a truly enormous stone edifice with clean elegant soaring arches that probably have very special names that we never learned, but it was a beautiful, airy building. What impressed us most however was the portable street cleaner in front of the church called the “Glutton”. We were looking for the Lust, Greed, and Sloth machines.

That day we also went to Caldas da Rainha which had been a spa town (no more alas) but that was now famous for pottery made to resemble fruits and vegetables – including more cabbages! Cathy and Emma picked out some cabbage plates in the gallery of Bordalo Pinheiro, while David and Akiva had lunch in the park across the street from the pottery studio on a picnic table inlaid with porcelain chess tiles.

We also drove a little further on to the walled city of Óbidos. Portugal is filled with ancient walled cities atop high hills, built to repel waves of Roman, Moorish, and Spanish invaders. Óbidos is particularly well preserved and it is possible to climb the wall, 30 or more feet above the ground, and stare though the parapets as you traverse a three-foot wide stone wall around the old city. Emma and Cathy are sure-footed as mountain goats but Akiva takes after David, and was more comfortable holding Cathy’s hand at the highest, narrowest spots, while David made sure everything was working well on the ground by ordering another cup of coffee. David should have considered a hot chocolate since Óbidos was putting up tents and banners in preparation for the Nestlé European International Chocolate Fair the following week – we could have gone if we had taken our trip in Week 45.

We extended our stay in Nazaré for one night – Emma wanted to stay the whole week, and we were all sympathetic! On our last night, Cathy and David left Emma and Akiva at the B&B to enjoy their favorite meal of junk food and TV. As good as the fresh fish was, we went looking for something different for dinner in Nazaré. We decided we wanted to find pasta, but the first 10 restaurants or so had identical menus: sardines, grilled fish, hamburger, and Southeast Asian shellfish (shrimp, mussels, and crabs are almost entirely imported to Portugal). Not a strand of pasta to be found – “Houston, we’re not in Italy anymore.” Finally, in a dark and narrow street, we found a take-out pizza place with a couple of tables. It was the best we could do. Cathy wanted a pizza with black olives and mushrooms, but could only get black olives and onions (please hold the tuna, which came with the olives and onions). It was a lovely evening, topped off by some pastries and coffee (where we met Evangelino one more time).

The next morning we set off inland and east towards the town of Tomar, and planned stops at caves and at Fatima. Portugal, at least the parts of it we saw, is rocky and mountainous. There are apparently many caves dotted throughout the country. The caves we went to were discovered in the 1940s and developed for tourism, with stairs, handrails, lights, an emergency telephone system, and an elevator. The parking lot looked as if it could hold a lot of tour buses, but we were the only people escorted through the caves by a young man who only spoke Portuguese. We went to the bottom of one enormous cavern – looking up it was larger than the largest church in Portugal, and then we looked down into unseen and still dark depths. As we left the first cavern and continued to descend, the guide turned off the lights behind us and lit the new rock formations, dripping with constant slick water, pooled into plazas and ever more amazing shapes. The guide pointed to the rock formations and told us Portuguese names that were supposed to be “organ pipes”, “squid”, or “dried linguini” but basically they were all amazing. In all, we descended 683 steps, about as much 30-story office building. The week before, the final cavern had been completely flooded, cutting off the elevator and the tours. The elevator took us back up to ground level, leaving us about a quarter mile from our entry point. We blinked in the sunlight, walked back to the car and hustled off to Fatima.

Cathy likes to find places a little off the beaten path – and although both the caves and Fatima had huge parking lots they were empty at this time of year. Fatima is extremely busy on August 13 and October 13. On those dates in 1917, three peasant children saw the Virgin Mary and heard about the future of the earth. Some people decided that a visit to Fatima could heal body, mind, and spirit, particularly on the relevant dates, and a cult dedicated to this sighting and later miracles eventually shaped the town and its football-stadium sized church plaza, built to hold the worshipers. We parked a few blocks from the main church and walked past countless stores selling countless statuettes of saints, the holy family, and the children who saw the miracle. Stores also sold six-foot long candles and plastic body pieces – ears, arms, breasts, etc. – both presumably to be carried as believers went to be healed. In the giant church plaza there was a huge roped-off area for a confessional with wheelchair access and a sign which we made Akiva read that said “Silençio” in large letters.

In Tomar we visited the oldest medieval Jewish synagogue in Portugal. It was closed and turned into a storehouse during the Inquisition, but has been restored as a museum. The once thriving Jewish community in Tomar now has only two Jewish families in town; the guide was from one of those families. It's a Sephardic style synagogue, with an eclectic assortment of Judaica donated from around the world, including a tallit from New York, a torah from California, a challah cover from Florida, and more.

There was a river running through Tomar, and we stayed in a hotel right in the center of the city, indeed in the middle of a park surrounded by a moat (with one small bridge to enter the park). We had a lovely Chinese take-out dinner and yet another excellent bottle of wine sitting on our balcony, looking out over the park. That evening we saw a raucous and long parade of teenagers dressed in odd costumes, chanting and singing "When the Saints Go Marching In." It was Halloween, and we were pretty sure that it was something to do with All Saints' Day on November 1, but it turned out to be a hazing ritual for the freshman from the local university. Stores closed on All Saints' Day, a national holiday, and we saw amazing flowers at a cemetery in Fatima, but less in Tomar. It is not unusual for people to stay overnight in the cemetery on All Saints' Day to honor their ancestors.

Cathy found out that there were some famous spas a bit north of Tomar, so we headed off to Luso. The hotel we called said the spa was closed that day, but would be open the following day, so we reserved a room, used the swimming pool, ate on the balcony, saw a funeral procession, listened to recorded church bells (which made us homesick for the church bells in Lund), and awaited Cathy’s day in the spa. That night, Cathy and David walked through the tiny town of Luso and came up a public water source. There were a dozen or so spigots, and we watched for nearly an hour as families, couples, and individuals brought empty containers to fill from the apparently very special Luso water. Some took gallons and gallons and gallons.

The next morning, Cathy happily went to the spa, but it was closed. In fact it was closed for the winter. Why did the hotel staff say it was open? Well, we hope it wasn’t just to get our business for a night, but at the same time, there wasn’t much of a language barrier in this case. We decided to hit the swimming pool once more, but there was no sign of Emma’s swimsuit, which we had left to dry on the balcony. Hmmm, there was a big wind the night before. We talked to the staff since there were balconies below ours. We don’t know quite how, but Emma’s swimsuit mysteriously ended up back on our balcony at some point.

Upon finding the spa was closed, everybody – the spa staff (there behind closed doors cleaning or the winter), the tourist bureau, the hotel staff – said that we could try Curia, a nearby spa town that didn’t close in winter. They thought. All they could really tell us was the route to Curia, which was apparent in any case. At Curia, Cathy got a computerized-electronic hot water massage (because other activities were booked for days ahead), and the whole place felt more like a hospital than a spa. Oh well, Cathy misses the Korean spa near Seattle, to say nothing of the Japanese onsen we learned to love.

We spent our final two days in and around Lisbon but we’ll just need to tell you about our adventures there in person. Our flight back home to cold, wet Sweden (where we missed the first snow) was uneventful. Akiva and David made sure to make a pit stop again in the Amsterdam airport where all of the urinals have porcelain flies in the bowl for target practice (we have it on video!). May you hit every target you aim for.

2006-10-19T14:26:00.000+02:00

We’ve been traveling a bit recently. David and Cathy just spent a lovely weekend in Milan, Italy, and the weekend before the whole family went to Legoland in Denmark to celebrate Akiva’s birthday. But before telling you about our recent adventures, let us take you back a few weeks ago when we took a trip much closer to home with our friends Boris and Görel and their kids Måns and Björn on a trip to Nimis.

What is Nimis? Is it a country, a book, a sculpture, a state of mind? It is actually all of these things.

About 20 years ago a Swedish artist named Lars Vilks started hammering pieces of driftwood together on a beach covered with ocean-smoothed rock boulders about an hour north of Lund. At first no one noticed, but as the towers and bridges grew larger, and visitors started to come through the adjacent nature preserve and down a steep cliff, neighbors and government officials started to complain. In the struggle to keep the creations of Nimis standing Lars Vilks started using time-honored artist guerilla tactics to save his art. He declared the growing acres of his artwork were an independent country named Ladonia (you can get a Ladonian passport on the internet). He also enlisted the artist Christo to register part of Nimis as a book that was protected by free speech laws, complete with ISBN numbers.

To get to Nimis, just drive, park and hike the Nimis highway – occasional yellow “N’s” painted on trees and rocks. Once there, the bridges and towers make for a great day of climbing for the kids and adventurous adults like Cathy and Boris. Or you can just sit on the big rocks and admire the ocean. As we were leaving Nimis we saw a large group of people headed down the Nimis highway carrying big pieces of driftwood. Leading the group was none other than the artist Vilks, still working hard at nation-building -- the coalition of the driftwood.
After leaving Nimis, Boris and Görel took us to a lighthouse that marks the most western point of Sweden and then we began a long search for an open restaurant for dinner – it was Sunday and believe it or not even pizza restaurants don’t open in western Sweden on Sunday. We ended up eating some flounder (and some pizza) at the only open restaurant in a 40 km radius.
Pizza is a popular fast food in Sweden. It’s pretty much like medium-sized American thin-crust pizza, with a couple of exceptions: the toppings you order may reflect local tastes (bacon and eggs anyone?), you always eat pizza with a knife and fork, pizza is always served with coleslaw (which they call Italian salad), and you are expected to order and eat the whole pizza by yourself.

As we were driving to and from Nimis we learned a little bit more about the regional differences that make life so interesting. As we headed north from Lund, lots more houses were built of wood rather than stone or brick – more trees. The color of the wooden houses used to indicate wealth and status. A local iron oxide produces a red stain that acts as a wood preservative. In former years, bright yellow houses had owners that could afford to paint them every year and poorer people lived in red-stained houses. And to this day it is a fact that all Swedes take excellent care of their houses, from Lund to Ballard.

Another sign of a well-loved house is one of Cathy’s favorite Swedish words – snickareglädje, or carpenter’s happiness. Snickareglädje is what Swedes call the little hearts and curlicue ornamentation on rooflines and balustrades.

It’s quite interesting to hear people in the southern part of Sweden (called Skåne) talk about the Danes, and vice versa: Skåne shifted hands from Denmark to Sweden many hundreds of years ago, and they each still tell quite different stories about the war. It’s also interesting to hear folks from Skäne talk about the snobby Stockholm people with nasal accents (sometimes called the “11’s” because of their area code), and the Stockholm folks talk about the hicks from Skäne with their broad potato farmer accents.

Cathy and Emma went on an historic tour, billed as a “ghost tour”, of the old part of Lund. They learned more about bloody battles between Swedes and Danes for control of the town, and about the crazy people who inhabited Lund over the centuries. They learned that when Lund University was created in 1666, it was essentially a small, walled village within Lund. The original university building still stands, and the top floor included a jail. Why? Because as its own municipality, the University had its own laws and legal system. In fact, the University even executed one student for killing another. While not as extreme, students could also be thrown in jail for the usual crimes and misdemeanors, as well as for cheating!

Emma’s school, Katedralskolan was founded in 1058 and probably has an equally barbaric history. But Katedralskolan recently had a day when all of the girls in Emma’s class dressed as Pippi Longstocking and all of the boys as another Astrid Lindgren character, Karlson on the Roof. Much silliness ensued, including footraces, apple bobbing, sliding in the mud and sliding into vats of flour. Our daughter carried on a proud family tradition and managed to be one of the messiest young people at the school by the end of the day.

The Swedes enjoy these odd but harmless games and ceremonies. Students always seem to be gathering on the lawn in, say, Santa Claus suits. Odd parties are also part of our cultural experience. An old southern Sweden tradition is to have a crayfish party in the fall. People are supposed to wear funny hats and bibs, drink a variety of schnapps and eat huge piles of small local crayfish. We were invited to a party at David’s department. Well, we were spared the funny hats, and the crayfish came mainly from China. David focused on eating the crayfish and Cathy helped sample the schnapps, aided by folks who said, “you just have to try this one that is flavored with juniper and cranberry.” We all sang lots of drinking songs, called snapsvisor with completely strange lyrics (you can dial the drinking song of the week at +46-8744-7075). Cathy really wants to learn a whole set of drinking songs. She promises never again to break the Swedish law of biking or riding a horse while intoxicated.

It is a time of seasons in Sweden. In addition to crayfish season it is mushroom season – mostly chanterelles are available now in the market – and local apples are coming ripe and delicious at the market. Cathy’s favorite apple variety is Rubinola but there are some beautiful new apple varieties every week. Soccer season ended with Akiva’s team having a perfect all-losses record except for the last game, which they tied. But Akiva had a great time and is now deciding between handball and basketball as his winter sport. It was also election season. The liberals lost for the first time in decades and many people in the academic and municipal world that Cathy and David travel in are trying to sense what this change to a more conservative party will mean to their lives and work.

It is the time of Jewish holidays. We celebrated Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur in Lund. Perhaps 20 men and twice as many women crowded into a small meeting room with an ark and four torahs. For some of the services we sat outside on the fire escape and simply listened in. The women had about a quarter of the space of the men – the services were held in Orthodox style with men and women separated. There was a minor revolt of the women to recover some sitting space, but the Orthodox men prevailed. There are some interesting synagogue dynamics here that we haven’t figured out. The torahs are interesting too. At least one has posts or rimonim that are chess pieces – we haven’t found out why yet.

And it is the season of culture and arts. It’s far too dark and wet and cold to stay outside – although this fall has been lovely so far.

Lund starts the fall art season with an event called Kulturnaten – Culture Night. All sorts of theaters, museums, galleries, bookstores and bakeries open their doors all day and all night and the city is filled with lovers of the arts. Some of our favorite Kulturnatten events were:

a group of professors who made themselves available for a few hours to anyone who wanted to try to “stump the experts”
a potter who had won many competitions throwing huge pots
a Kulture-latte with coconut and blueberries
a great museum called Kulturna that lit up its many traditional buildings by torchlight all over its park grounds
Cathy playing in a concert hall with a Swedish fiddle group she joined a few weeks previous
a midnight performance in an old cathedral of Bach and modern music played by the church organist and two saxophonists at midnight

It has also been birthday season here. We went to Måns birthday and ate sushi and homemade raspberry ice cream. For Akiva’s birthday we had a party with lots of friends and played some traditional birthday party games with donkey tails and treasure hunts. One family that we invited to Akiva’s birthday party has an American father. He told the kids (ages about three and five) that they were going to an American birthday party. When they asked what it would be like, one of the key differences he mentioned was that in contrast to Swedish birthday parties where cake or ice cream is served, it was likely (and indeed was true) that cake and ice cream would be served.

The Swedes seem to eat ice cream at a rate inconsistent with their physique. And many stores – supermarkets, video stores, convenience stores, toy stores, even a copy shop, etc – carry godis. Think “goodies” for both pronunciation and content. There are several dozen containers of various candies, etc., which you pick-and-choose and pay for by weight (some unique to Sweden such as gummy fried eggs and salty black licorice).

The day after Akiva’s birthday we went to Legoland for the weekend. We are big fans of Lego so we were excited to visit the place where it all began. We took the train and a bus a few hours south and east to Billund, Denmark, where Legoland is located. Cathy and Emma got a bit bored after a few hours because most of the rides and activities were geared to younger kids. But they enjoyed looking at the built models and spent some time building some of their own creations. Cathy and Emma ended up at the public pool across the street that had a great slide, a light therapy room, and a sauna heated to 240 degrees. Akiva and David spent many more hours at Legoland -- much cooler hours -- and especially liked the PowerBuilder ride. You get a programmable card on entry, and select the intensity of the ride along with seven movements chosen from a menu. A pair of people sit in a seat at the end of a huge robot arm -- then the staff inserts your card, and you get the ride of your choice! One other cool thing at the park is that you can buy Lego by the kilogram -- fill a bag in a room with dozens of bins of every kind of Lego you can imagine.

And we promised to tell you about Milan. It was a perfectly beautiful and vibrant city. We liked the bustle and activity of Italy and liked having a weekend alone. Again and again we were amazed by the great coffee and pastries offered in little places. The only major U.S. chain we saw with any frequency was MacDonalds -- and it is everywhere, including several right in the middle of the area around the Duomo (the major cathedral that is the center of sightseeing, commerce, and religion in Milan). We sampled 13 kinds of gelato (bet you didn't know McDonald's had so many flavors -- yeah, right! -- our favorite place was Three Gazelles): lemon, lime, hazelnut, tiramisu, cappucino, 3 kinds of chocolate (including one with hot pepper), strawberry, mango, soft fruits, and two we can't remember! We think we finished a liter of the house wine one night, too, but we can't remember that either! At least we didn't go bicycling after the wine!

This week, we nitpick the family. Next week Cathy goes to Oslo for a conference, and then the whole family goes to Portugal for the school break week around Halloween ("Week 44"). Until then.

2006-09-17T13:46:00.000+02:00

We went to Cirkus Maximum. Colorful signs sprang up all over the city, shouting that, for one night only, under the big tent, the circus is coming to town! And just like in the old days, the circus pulled onto the city’s big soccer field and unloaded their trucks and trailers. Caravans with elephants, horses, and camels were visible behind the chain link fence, and dozens of circus folks erected a giant red and yellow tent. Odd-looking people sat on the porches of their trailers, ignoring our uninteresting lives. The circus had some amazing Chinese gymnasts, and most exciting for Akiva, offered rides on a camel. A two-hump Bactrian camel to be precise. We asked Akiva what the humps felt like. “What do you think,” he said, “they felt like a big lumps of fat.” The boy is not a romantic.

Akiva also learned his first Swedish swear word on his school playground. “Sheet” is just what you think it means. Swedish is apparently a lousy language to swear in so Swedes use English or Finnish when they have something choice to convey.

We finally have a Swedish bank account. The key thing was to get access to their Internet bill-pay system, so we can pay our mobile phone bills and such without a surcharge. Because David failed in several attempts at installing the software by following the Swedish instructions, he had to return to the bank to get a new PIN code (which required an extra trip because a passport was appropriate ID while a Washington State driver’s license was not). We can now pay our bills online, and we have kroner-denominated debit cards, which are used extensively in Sweden.

The national and local elections are on September 17^th. Voting takes place over a period of weeks, apparently. The line in the library the Thursday before the election was very long. There have been debates on TV, articles in the international press, and quite a lot of discussion at lunch. Everyone we’ve talked to (including the teenagers!) listens to the debates and is knowledgeable about the issues. To learn about candidates, you can actually go and talk to them in the town square. The square is full of political activity with little kiosks holding literature, buttons, and candidates from at least 10 parties. Some parties sponsor concerts and we’ve walked past the square with brass bands and singers singing “When I’m 64” in Swedish. Of course we’ve seen the familiar sight of signs advocating candidates being marked up with curly moustaches and red clown noses. The right-wing bloc is slightly favored to win control of government; but don’t be confused, since the Swedish right-wing bloc is to the left of the blue states in the U.S. You kids at home might want to become commies: part of the communist party platform is “no homework and no tests” Policies like this are set at the national level in Sweden. (We think we learned that the original communist party is now called the “red” party – not to be confused with a red state, and the new communist party has a somewhat different platform.)

Cathy is taking Swedish language classes several mornings a week at an immigration center south of Lund called Komvux. Along with language she is learning about Swedish laws and customs, habits and favorite foods. She has learned that there are at least 10 specific words for various types of coats, which has her worried that we are due for a long cold winter. Swedish society seems very focused on successfully integrating a whole lot of different cultures. Cathy’s Swedish class has, in addition to one other American, people from Brazil, South Africa, Romania, Thailand, Iraq, Vietnam, Uruguay, England, Peru, Russia, Australia, El Salvador, China, Libya, and Iran. Certainly not representatives of the coalition of the willing but all are people with interesting life stories.

Emma and Cathy have been going to flea markets and second hand stores (Akiva wanted to know if there were third hand stores). Everything is extremely expensive – we didn’t pack much because we thought it would be easy to get what we needed here. For the most part that is true, but costs for food and material goods have both a 25% value added tax and reflect the very high cost of transportation (gas is about $8/gallon here). Some of Cathy and Emma’s favorite purchases are not very practical, and include an Allan doll in a box, advertised as “a good friend of Ken” and a massage moose.

Cathy has been interviewing lots of people involved with sustainable cities. One of the people she talked to was an expert in biogas production who works at the Lund University in Helsingborg. He told Cathy that companies who sold polluted land were responsible for cleaning it up if they had added pollution any time after 1969. Even if the land had been sold several times, the original polluter would need to pay for clean-up if they had polluted after 1969. “Why 1969,” Cathy wanted to know. “It is obvious,” the professor said, “Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring was published in 1962 and translated not long after, so of course the companies should have known by 1969 how to take care of their land after that.” Note to Exxon and George Bush, please re-read your copy of Silent Spring.

Cathy, Emma and Akiva went to the Malmö music festival that is a little like Seattle’s Folklife or Bumbershoot festivals except that there are many fewer acts, and fewer activities, but spread over many acres and many more days. They asked at the information booth which group to see and were told not to miss the Electric Banana. The outdoor Electric Banana concert was packed with people of all ages. The musicians were projected on large video screen, and included a full orchestra, a chorus in pink flamingo suits, and the lead musicians dressed in yellow banana costumes. The group sang folksy music with hand and body gestures that everyone in the audience seemed to know and move along with.

We took a brief 3-day vacation to the Bohuslän coast, the bit of Swedish coastline that faces west, just before joining up with Norway. It’s a spectacular coastline, very rocky and picturesque. Cathy wanted most of all to see a famous area of petroglyphs in and around the town of Tanum. The petroglyphs were made between 3000 and 2500 years ago, and were carved into granite outcroppings high up in the beech forests and spread over many square miles. When many of the carvings were made, the sea was much closer and many carvings showed boats and sea life. There was a Unesco World Heritage museum in Tanum, located next to a particularly dense set of carvings. Cathy saw a photo of a carving in a book in the museum and wanted to find out where it was. She asked a man behind a desk, and it turned out he was Lasse Bengtsson, the curator of the museum, and he had written the book she was looking at. He drew a complicated map down some winding roads, through a forest, past an abandoned farm and over a hedge. We all had an adventurous walk through the woods and think we found the carving Cathy had seen in the book. We certainly saw lots of big animal scat, although no big animals.

We had a great time on the coast. We stayed at nice youth hostels in Grebbestad and Hamburgö, and visited the town of Smögen. Grebbestad has a small Chinese restaurant that is owned the Johannson family and serves chickey bits. Hamburgö is a small island across from Hamburgsund, with a 24-hour car/bike/passenger ferry that takes just a minute or two each way and is powered using an underwater cable. The towns were beautiful, and still had some traditional fishing industry, but were definitely well on the road to becoming summer tourist areas. Smögen had one of the most spectacular locations we’ve ever seen for a mini-golf course.

A horse tried to eat Akiva's bike seat. Akiva and Cathy went on a bike trip around Lund with our friends Görel and Måns. Görel collects maps and one of her maps was of many of Lund's city parks. We stopped at some community gardens called kolonitradgard. They are more like little summer homes than your typical p-patch, with beautiful small houses with little kitchens and bedrooms – although people aren’t supposed to live in them. There are about 1000 of these community plots in Lund (again, for a city of less than 100,000). We looked but did not find a bygglekplats, a child-built playground. These were popular in the 1980s but, not surprisingly, are hard to maintain and many have closed. We’ll let you know if we find any child-built playgrounds.

The park map Görel had for our bike trip was an orienteering map that showed little fragments of park objects – the toe of a statue, the window in a building – that you were supposed to find in the park. It was a great incentive to get young boys to bike 20 or more miles around city parks. On trips with Görel, we always learn new and useful facts about Sweden. It turns out that it is OK to gather any fruit in the forest but not nuts which are to be left for the foraging pigs. We didn’t run into any pigs, but one of the parks had horses. When Akiva left his bike to look for the park object, a horse decided Akiva’s bicycle seat was quite tasty – or maybe just salty. Akiva biked home on a nibbled seat that had been mostly cleared of horse slobber. We may go geocaching next time.

We are biking a lot. On a typical day, David or Cathy bike with Akiva about a mile and a half to his school, and then we bike a mile or two to work. We bike to the grocery store, to dinner parties, to soccer practice, and to gym classes. We -- and half of Lund, of all ages -- biked home in the dark after Cirkus Maximum, as is common. It is great having bike lanes and bike traffic lights, and drivers who actually yield to bikes.

It is pretty hard to find Jewish culture and religion in Scandinavia.

There is an Orthodox synagogue in Copenhagen, and a Chabad house in Malmö but there are fewer Jews among the 9 million Scandinavians than there are in Seattle. Cathy has been researching places for the family to go, especially for Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year that starts September 23 and Yom Kippur, the following week. Last Saturday Cathy went to a bat mitzvah in the only "progressive" congregation in the region, Shir Hatzafon in eastern Copenhagen. It was such a big deal to have a bat mitzvah in Copenhagen that the poor girl’s coming of age was reported in the paper and a news camera came to the kiddush lunch after the ceremony. The “progressive” rabbi flies in once a month from England and the service ended by blessing the queen of Denmark.

The Jewish group of Lund has been meeting for just two years. A Chabad rabbi travels to Lund to lead most of the services so the group has to run in orthodox style but the members seem less than orthodox. Cathy talked to the group's treasurer for a long time. He said the most active group meets weekly to sing songs in "Jiddish" and he also said he was negotiating with neighbors to use their walls (and trying to explain) in order to build a sukkah. This outdoor festival house built yearly for the Sukkot holiday may well be the first built in Lund in at least the last 60 years or so. Cathy learned how to say the Jewish Shema prayer in Danish which we will use to wish many of our friends a healthy, happy new year: Hør Israel! Den Almægtige er vor Gud, Den Almægtige er én.

2006-08-31T10:32:00.000+02:00

We now have now a feed -- http://nottle-sabbatical.blogspot.com/rss.xml ( sorry, we couldn't get the atom feed to work).

2006-08-27T18:16:00.000+02:00

Sprinkled throughout are some bonus photographs or our apartment buiding (with the tall spire -- Cathy's art nook is the window you can see on the second floor), the herring aisle at the supermarket, and farmers selling their organic produce at the weekend market.

Cathy and David headed off to meet each other at Gerdahallen, Lund University's student/faculty/staff gym. As David was making his way towards the lobby, he was accosted by a student speaking Swedish. The student quickly realized David spoke no Swedish and explained in English that he and his group were new students who were on a kind of scavenger hunt, and one thing they needed was a picture of a "great beard." So they posed David in front of a fountain (shockingly, based on a statue of a nude woman), while several of them put their arms up to make a kind of tunnel. This picture met three of their scavenger requirements, and they went off happily (while instructing David not to let the next group take his picture!). Alas, they never sent the picture as they had promised, so you'll just have to use your imagination. Apparently there is a long tradition of having new students at Lund University do various pranks. There are a number of large tanks outside some of the engineering buildings, each of which is painted like a different kind of beer can; this was apparently one of the pranks awhile ago. We've seen a number of students walk by in drag or wearing Viking clothing., and we've heard lots of chanting and some fireworks as well. No rolly-chair races so far, though.

Cathy and David took a look at the classes offered at the gym. There are the usual weight-lifting, aerobics, stepping and spinning (indoor biking). And then there are a large assortment of various levels of "Swedish gympa." Cathy took a gympa class to see what it was like – a bit of running and jumping to get the heartbeat going, some resistance training with bendable bars, some yoga stretches, and a relaxation. There is gympa for fit 20-somethings, and gympa for people over 55, even gympa for families and babies. Cathy also tried a "Power Yoga"class. In the class she took, about 60 people worked on mats in an air-conditioned gym lit only with candles. The teacher was hooked up to a wireless microphone and breathlessly announced each yoga pose, and then, in a sultry voice said, "Bra (good)," after each pose was finished. We'll enjoy keeping in shape in Sweden.

It has been raining a lot in Lund. We are talking big thunderstorms with very heavy rain here. We knew we were getting quite soggy but our friends Boris and Görel told us how soggy – they had had to release water from their backyard swimming pool because it had rained about seven inches in seven days. Boris and Görel also have another unique feature in their house (in addition to the swimming pool and sauna, which we haven't seen yet). They have, or will soon have, a house heated by geothermal energy. This is a fairly common energy source in private houses in Lund. It turns out that during the winter, the groundwater under Lund is warmer than the surface temperature so surface water is piped down to the groundwater, heat is exchanged and energy is transformed through a heat pump that will soon be installed in Boris and Görel 's basement. Boris and Görel had a pipe drilled in their front yard last spring to reach this slightly warmer groundwater. It astonished us that the pipe was 201 meters long. Recently, the city of Lund tried to reach an even warmer groundwater source that the city thought might help provide energy for the entire region and ended up drilling down into the earth for 3700 meters before giving up on the project.

There is a Swedish election coming up in mid-September at both the local and national level. We haven't seen a lot of signs or advertising in the paper – or political junk mail, at least as far as we can tell. However, the Lund town squares really are being used like town squares and electioneering by candidates speaking in front of little kiosks is a common sight. Today Cathy noticed that people who stopped to talk to candidates at the Liberal Party booth were given a mylar balloon, the Social Democrats will give you a whistle, the Greens will give you a red rose, and communists appeared to be asking for donations. We also saw the communists out recruiting in Göteborg when we took a brief vacation there.

Akiva and David headed off in the middle of August to Malmö for a baseball practice with the “Baseball by the Bridge” group. 15 minutes by train and another 15 by bus put them at a huge complex of sports fields, including (we think) baseball, soccer, American football, Australian Rules rugby, and more. We had some extra time since we weren’t sure where we were going, so we looked for a snack. Just down the street was a golf complex – golf, a driving range, miniature golf, a café and clubhouse, etc. That fortified us for practice. There were 7-8 kids at the practice, most (but not all) of them either from the U.S. or with an American parent. The coach, Charlie, is a writer from New Hampshire who has been in Sweden for many years. Practice was very good and well organized; they were preparing for a baseball jamboree a few weeks later. Given the distance, Akiva decided not to continue practicing with them, shifting his focus to fotboll.

Akiva registered at the Lunds Bollklubb – LBK – in the "kids born in 1997" group, and he started soccer or fotboll practice the following Monday. We biked to the field (a wonderful achievement for Akiva, who has learned how to bike from getting his balance to good control in city traffic in less than two weeks). There were nearly 20 kids, all boys (although three of them had long hair, like Akiva, and we wondered at first if they were girls). Akiva did drills and scrimmages with the others for the full 90 minutes. The kids spoke little English (although most have taken a year of it at school), but the coach and the assistants were fluent. Once Akiva has a few weeks of school and goes to more practices, he'll likely be chattering away. His first game was supposed to be this past weekend, but it was cancelled because the field (in Hjärup, several kilometers away from Lund) was unplayable due to a flood.

The kids started school today. We biked with Akiva to his school, the Bilingual Montessori School of Lund. There was, as is often the case at the beginning of a school year, both excitement and confusion. Akiva is in the 2nd-3rd grade class. It's largely a shoes-off school (as are homes in Sweden), but this rule was quite relaxed on the first day. In any case, parents and kids were all herded out to the playground, where the headmistress greeted everybody and introduced the staff, all in Swedish. So, English is the second language, right? Well, no. As Dave Barry used to say, we're not making this up: the school is "bilingual" in Swedish, English and French. Parents and kids were then herded to the classrooms, where the teachers laid out the structure, some rules, did some more introductions, took attendance, etc. – this was done in Swedish and almost all was translated into English. Then off to the playground for something to eat and drink, with the kids hitting the jungle gym, the sandbox, the mini-soccer field, the basketball court, and so forth. Akiva is enrolled in "fritid", which is the after-school program that is universal in Swedish schools. After school he spent two hours with his Japanese tutor, Ayumi-san, who is making sure that Akiva doesn't mix up his Japanese with his English, Swedish and French. Just wait until he starts Hebrew in preparation for his bar mitzvah.

Emma had a great start to school. She's got about 30 kids in her class in the first year of the English-based pre-IB (International Bacculareate) class at Katedralskolan. She is the youngest in the class – some of the kids are 17, and most are 15-16-years old. Almost all of the kids in her class are Swedish (except one American who has lived in Sweden for many years), but all have passed an English competency test so that they can take it pre-IB classes. We are a little concerned about how much English the kids know, however. On the first day of school, Emma and a new friend asked a few of their classmates if they were registered for Italian class. It must have been Emma's accent, but all of the kids they asked about the Italian class looked at their watches and told them what time it was. Emma will take Swedish classes and also is taking the Italian class – taught in Swedish. But she is not sure what time the class is.

Sending a letter or a postcard from Sweden to the U.S. costs 10 kroner (about $1.40). But don't move to Denmark in the hope that we'll send you more postal mail – it costs the same to send mail to Denmark as it does to send mail to America! So keep posted here and we will tell you all we would have written in that 10 kroner letter.

Take a peek at the following, which we found on the net, describing how you know you've been in Sweden too long. If you don't find them entertaining, you haven't lived in Sweden! Can you imagine someone winning the Nobel Prize but declining to go the ceremony because it's during the time they scheduled to do laundry?

2006-08-14T15:56:00.000+02:00

The laundry turned out to not be a problem. Cathy has been afraid to go into the laundry dungeon. David says it is easy. Assuming you’re signed up for the time you want. Assuming you don’t hit your head on the door going down into the basement. Assuming you can figure out that you have to throw a switch on a separate electric box for each washer. Assuming you can figure out that you need to turn the separate water valve on to use the washers. Assuming you don’t really care what settings you wash and dry your clothes on (because you don’t read Swedish). Assuming you remember, at the end, to turn off the water valve and the electric switches. And assuming you don’t slip on the ice and snow in the courtyard on the way to the laundry in the middle of winter. No problem.

Our friends very kindly lent us their car over the weekend. We needed a few things for the apartment – some end tables, a mirror for Emma, a bathroom mat, some utensils for the kitchen, and even clothes hangers! So we decided to go to nearby Malmö – the third largest city in Sweden – where we were told we could find a great store to get most of these things. And a wonderful, amazing store it was. It’s huge, with more items that you can imagine. It has good quality merchandise at very good prices. It has great and inexpensive cafés and restaurants. It has a ton of parking (including special “family parking” spaces for folks with babies). It’s exceptionally well-organized. It’s really something that should be exported to the U.S. The name of the store is IKEA. Actually, we have heard that many Swedes are just sick of IKEA stuff and many now go to a Danish chain store named ILVA. ILVA will probably end up opening in Renton as part of the Sonics new arena; oops, that’ll be Oklahoma City, more likely.

The next day we took advantage of the car once again to go to the beach. We drove about seven miles to a small town just south of Bjarred (where we had briefly considered living). It’s amazing how quickly you get from Lund to the countryside, much of which is farmland with acres and acres of wheat. Getting to the beach would have been an easy bike ride on dedicated bike paths. In any case we drove out on a beautiful Sunday and found the beach easily. The beach has camping associated with it –- a bunch of trailers (mostly small hitches and no American giant RVs) were parked with a great view of the water. The kiosk (ice cream, soda, etc.) is separated from the beach by a grassy area, and the beach itself is another 20 feet away from the grass to the water. The water goes out hundreds of meters and stays at about ankle depth with feathery lemony-yellow seaweed. Everyone on the beach slogs out until the water is waist-high, dunks, and slogs back in. (Apparently in Bjarred there is a long pier that allows you to walk out on and jump into deeper water.) There were a few sailboats out, and views of Malmö and the Oresund bridge that we took from the Copenhagen airport to Sweden when we arrived. And yes, some Swedish women go topless at the beach – we’re absolutely certain that this indicates that Sweden is a pagan nation with no moral fiber that will fail miserably. Of course, our country is led by a boob with a shirt but no brain, and look where that has gotten us.

Everyone in Lund speaks English, at least everyone we’ve met, with most of them speaking it better than your average American (and certainly better than the boob at the top). The clerks in the supermarkets, the baristas in the coffee shops, the man in the game store, the people in the bike stores, and even the drunks in the park who told us (based on watching Akiva play catch) that he would be excellent at handball, and we should take him to Lugie’s in Lund. OK, we’ve found a few people who don’t speak much English – another drunk (in the park, where drunks are found the world over), one cashier in a mall, and a fellow in the library who tried to speak to us in several languages (including Swedish and German) before giving up. But for sure everyone speaks more English than we speak Swedish!

One item we tried to get at IKEA that we thought would be universally used throughout Sweden during the long nights is full spectrum lights. These lights are for SAD folks, afflicted, like Cathy, with Seasonal Affective Disorder. After coming up empty at IKEA, Cathy went to the art supply store across the street to look for the lights. The owner didn’t have the lights but recommended Cathy go to the local electrical supply store. The electrical supply folks hadn’t even heard of full spectrum lights and recommended Cathy go to the pet supply store and get a light for a snake. Cathy might do this as long as the snake doesn’t come with the light. Speaking of reptiles, our neighbor Chris has a tortoise wandering around his house. When we go to Chris’s house we are always carefully on the lookout for the free-range beast. We used Chris’s internet hookup late at night while he was on vacation with his family last week – he and his wife Katja don’t own a car , so they took their two toddlers by bus and bike to the east coast of Sweden.

One impulse item we got at IKEA was a ping pong set with a net, two paddles and three balls. The net fits across our dining room table, and with our huge room with high ceilings, we can play killer games, as long as we compensate for the oval table. It's great except when someone is eating at the table! Our current family champion is Akiva, and the game is a hit with visitors too.

When we returned our friend’s car – after driving to IKEA and the beach – we of course wanted to return it with a full tank of gas. The tank was about half empty and cost about $75 to fill. There is a good reason people bike in Sweden. Another reason people bike is that the tax on purchasing cars is huge – 25% in Sweden and, believe it or not, 108% in Denmark. And of course, people bike because it is easy – the traffic laws favor bikers, there is bike parking everywhere, and there are lots of bike lanes. But we do wish adults would wear helmets.

Hey, we finally got our cell (mobile) phones! It turns out that the problem wasn’t registration of our personnummers, but rather with our lack of a credit history in Sweden. They let us get two phones, after all, but it took documenting of our income to allow us to get a third phone for Emma. We still need a credit rating before we can use our phones outside of Sweden. And, finally, “we’ve got Internet” (in our apartment). Although we miss visiting Linnaeus, it’s nice to have full access to all applications without a time limit: web browsing to look up schools, maps, activities, work information, etc. only for an hour at a time, followed by a required 10 minute break, was getting kind of tiring. The recent rainy weather would have made Linnaeus a less pleasant venue, too.

Next week Lund, a city of about 50,000, will add another 40,000 university students. Since our apartment is basically located on campus, we are interested in how this will affect the traffic and the noise from passers-by late at night. We’ve heard one of the biggest problems is speeding hordes of bicycle riders since all of the students ride and ride quickly. We’ve all been practicing our bike riding skills this week to prepare for the onslaught. Another potential problem is from hazing the freshman class – the older students like to play practical jokes that may get rather wild, especially when the jokes are played by various “nation” houses – fraternity-style houses associated with each region of Sweden.

We haven’t seen very many atypical people around. Most folks we’ve seen are relatively conservative in dress and movement. We haven’t spotted any weird piercings or hair colors. We did see one slightly eccentric young man on a bicycle with an orange top hat and tux and one transvestite -- but school hasn’t started back yet. We shall see what 40,000 people under age 25 bring to Lund.

How do you tell a Norwegian pirate? He’s the one with two eye patches. Thanks to Björn, that was our introduction to the jokes that Swedes tell about Norwegians! Now who tells jokes about Swedes? We’ll let you know.

2006-08-08T13:42:00.000+02:00

Errata: Ylva says: "although plikt actually means duty...punktlig means punctual." All errors are the responsibility of the Nottles, not of their teachers!

2006-08-04T09:48:00.000+02:00

Hej Hej: The Nottles go to Sweden

As many of you know, the Nottles (a mythical creature that is part-Notkin and part-Tuttle) have written about their previous extended travels outside of the

United Sta

tes

. Here begins our newest saga – Sverige, Sweden.

In the months preceding our sabbatical, we took a handful of Swedish lessons from our friend Ylva. We focused more on culture than language – Ylva is an anthropologist. Ylva told us the three specific virtues in Sweden are being punctual (plikt), doing nothing in excess (lagom), and being thrifty (spara). These each have associated vices, such as being wasteful (slösa). The cultural trait that Ylva said is most important in Sweden is punctuality. Swedes should arrive about 10 minutes ahead of the start of events, she said. If they arrive exactly on time, people are a bit put out.

Since Cathy is often late, she asked how to call ahead and say, “I will be late,” and how to say, when arriving, “I am sorry I am late.” Ylva was horrified and said, “You just can’t say that,” and her hand shook as she wrote down “I will be late” in Swedish. It turns out since Lund is a university town, everything starts a precise and very academic 15 minutes late, according to our friend Görel. We will let you know if we are late.

Ylva also taught us that the Swedish word for “gullible” translates as “blue-eyed.” We still wonder if Ylva was telling the truth, or taking advantage of the gullible Nottle clan.

While we were waiting to move from Seattle, we started dealing with our Swedish life. (We were also hard at work getting our house cleaned and ready for our renters, a British couple with two young children, who will visit UW from Brussels). We first had to find a school for Emma – to make a very long story short, she will attend Katedralskolan (Cathedral school), the oldest school in Scandinavia. It’s over 900 years old and was founded in Denmark when southern Sweden was part of Denmark. Emma will be in a pre-IB (International Baccalaureate) program, taught in English. She’ll be taking beginning Italian, and she chose drama over music and art. We’ve visited the school grounds, and Cathy and David think the buildings and courtyard look just like Hogwarts. We haven’t chosen Akiva’s school yet. From what we understand, he can go to an English-speaking school, Swedish schools that specialize in nature or in arts, a Swedish as a second language school, or a Montessori school that has classes in Swedish, English, and French. We’ll talk to principals next week when they get back from vacation.

A huge challenge turned out to be getting our visas, which we needed because we’ll be here for a year with kids in school. The forms weren’t especially complicated, and David sent them off in early June. The forms and our passports went to the Swedish Consulate in NYC. At the consulate they checked the forms to make sure that they were filled in properly, and they were. Then the forms were transferred, electronically, to the Swedish Migration Board, in Sweden. Repeated calls to the Consulate were kindly answered with a consistent message: “They are very busy at the Migration Board, and we don’t know how long they will take.” This caused Cathy to cancel a long-planned trip to a conference in Spain, and then stopped Cathy and Akiva from heading to Sweden early. The visas did arrive, however, about a week before we finally departed on July 30. It turns out that the real reason the visas took so long was that Sweden essentially closes for vacation from the last week in June through the first week in August. We definitely found communicating with our friends, colleagues, and landlord was much slower in July than in June. So the consulate was telling the truth – the Migration Board was indeed very busy in July, since most all of the staff was on vacation!

The trip itself was very easy. Emma was amused when it took Cathy and David a long time to make a call from the Copenhagen airport to Sweden – we had to find out that one dials “00” to make an international call between Denmark and nearby Sweden. Emma wondered, “How many parents does it take to make a phone call?” “Only two,” she decided, “but it takes them a loooooong time.”

When we left the airport for the taxi ranks outside the airport, we had to choose between one queue for a Danish taxi to Sweden and another queue for a Swedish taxi to Sweden. We could have taken a one-hour train that leaves three times an hour directly from the airport to the Lund train station, a five minute walk from our house. But we decided on a taxi instead, due to our luggage. Let’s just say that despite the best of intentions, we didn’t travel with just carry-on luggage.

Our friend Boris met us at our apartment. He had picked up the keys from our landlord (they are acquaintances). We’re in a building nicknamed the “iron building” because of its distinctive shape. We’re on the second floor of the building, right at the point of the iron. The apartment is lovely and indeed bigger than expected. The ceilings are more than 3 meters high, and there is a ladder for changing light bulbs, getting into high storage areas, etc. But we still could use a bedroom for Akiva. We only have two bedrooms, so we’re trying to figure out how to carve a space for him from the giant living and dining room areas. Maybe he can sleep under the Steinway baby grand piano.

We’re 200 meters from the country’s best hospital (called a “sick house” in Swedish), and we’re directly across the street from a vegetarian restaurant run by (primarily Polish) Hare Krishnas. We’re on the main street in Lund, called Bredgatan (Broadway), with many buses, a few cars and taxis, and lots of bicycles. There are some limits on personal cars in this area that we don’t understand yet. There is a law that people under 15 have to wear bike helmets. It seems that not many adults choose to continue wearing them; it might be wise to do so, especially since many people smoke and talk on their mobile phones while biking. At night it gets quiet enough to hear insects chirping. Perhaps this will change in three weeks when the university students flood back into the city once again.

Emma thought that Lund would be old, but it’s even older and more ancient looking than she expected. Even newer buildings have an old feel. We’re near a famous cathedral that was built in the 12^th century. It chimes the hour on the hour, and a single chime on the half-hour. This is great for jetlag. We can figure out exactly what time we are awake without looking at a clock.

Our University hosts and long-time friends, Boris and Görel invited us for dinner at their house the night of our arrival. They have two boys, Måns and Björn – Måns is about two years younger than Emma, and Björn is about two years younger than Akiva. All three boys have birthdays in early October, when they’ll be 12, 9, and 7. Måns has taken English in school for three years, and he is quite good although not yet comfortable with it. But, as always happens, the kids figured out how to communicate. The four kids played a lot of soccer in the yard while we parents sat around reminiscing. The kids all took a swim in their pool before dessert, too. The boys showed us their rooms, Cathy started a stuffed animal fight, and then we headed back to the apartment to stay awake listening to the cathedral chimes early into the morning. (The next day Cathy was playing hide-and-seek in our apartment with Akiva. A few minutes after Cathy hid, Akiva and Emma came to David laughing hysterically, because Cathy said she needed help getting out of her hiding place -- on top of our refrigerator!)

Cathy spends a great deal of time in front of the nearby public library next to a statue of Carl Linnaeus. (The picture on the left is captioned, "Linnaeus has a hotspot for Cathy.") The statue of this most famous son of Lund is in a lovely setting, but even more important is that sitting on the bench next to Linnaeus is an internet hot spot. Our apartment was supposed to have internet service, but it is late being installed. Perhaps the installers are on vacation. David and the children choose usually to sit in the library café for their internet time. We feel pretty cut off from everything without internet. In addition, we don’t have any telephone service yet. Basically, we can’t get our phones until we get a very important Swedish identification called a personnummer.

So how does one acquire a personnummer? First, find the tax authority office. Then, fill out a simple form and provide passports and visas. Then walk home and get the childrens’ birth certificates and bring them back to the tax authority. Then wait three days and the personnummer comes in the mail. Of course the personnummer needs to be registered with the central authority before the mobile phone company will issue a phone number. So we are still waiting for a phone. Don’t call us and we won’t call you (or send you email).

We’ve walked everywhere so far. We plan to buy bicycles soon. Even though Lund is a small town, we aren’t used to hours a day on foot. We’ve decided not to buy a car – in part because gas prices are nearly $8/gallon and also because we like the opportunity of being car-free.

Our next adventure is tomorrow morning. We do our laundry. It turns out, according to Ylva and to Boris, doing the laundry is a topic of great interest in Sweden. We share a laundry room with the other eight apartments in our building. There is a sign-up sheet that is taken very seriously, with people signing up weeks in advance, often more than once each week. We wonder how clean the clothes will get in this basement laundry room with very little light. We’ll keep sharing our dirty laundry with you.