Desperately Seeking Sweden

I’m blessed with the talent of being a fairly good traveller and the ability to sleep well in a upright position. So I generally like to use train, bus or plane journeys as a nice excuse to relax.

I also think I’m pretty adept at talking to most people and happy to exchange a few opening pleasantries with the stranger I’m sat next to. But when it comes to travelling, I become Swedish. If I don’t know you I want you to leave me alone and please don’t try and engage me in uneccessary small-talk. Tack!

Saying that, it also seems I’m blessed with an unintentional talent of sitting close to the person with the world’s most irritating cough, a professionally loud mobile phone addict or a rhythmical seat-kicker.  

This time his name was Börje. From the moment I took my seat on the train to Gävle, Börje wanted to be best friends. I tried playing a few trump cards. Number one: speak English. Börje was keen to practise his foreign language ability. Number two: get a book out. Börje started reading over my shoulder, announced he had read it and even went out of his way to share the ending. Number three: pretend to go to sleep. Börje prodded my arm to show me a view of a nice lake.

Now Gävle sounds similar to a Swedish swear word and non-Swedish speakers will get the gist if I put it as follows: ”For Gävle’s sake Börje, shut the Gävle up.”  In typically Swedish form, I said nothing and instead went and sat on the toilet for ten minutes. 

We parted on friendly terms and I soon hooked up with a few Danes and Germans, who were equally confused as I was as to the whereabouts of the tourist information office. Shut away in the corner of a shopping centre, it resembles a cigarette kiosk, and the employees must have been out the back having a crafty smoke.

It’s rather fitting for a place which is famed for its flaming attempts to set fire to the enormous Christmas goat. The record holding world’s biggest straw goat (where else would you find one) has been erected in the city centre during yuletide season since 1966.

When the tourist information lady appeared she tried to flog me a cut-price copy of a DVD about another Gävle claim to fame. In December 1998, a snowstorm basically buried the town and the film invites you to watch two hours of raw weather footage. This version, a second edition, is dubbed ”now, with even more snow.”

The storm didn’t dampen the arsonists spirits that year and the goat was burned down on December 11. A city centre plaque chronologically charts its rise and fall over time:

In 1976 a vehicle drove into the goat and demolished it.
In 1979 the goat was set alight before it even got to the square.
In 1988 it survived but British betting shops starts offering odds on the goats’ fate.
In 2001 the goat was set alight by a 51 year old American who was caught and fined.
In 2006, the goat was sprayed with flame resistant chemicals to survive its 40th anniversary.

Rather than a snowstorm thriller or a goat burning comedy, there’s a 1971 movie I’d like see about local man Johan Hägglund. Born in Gävle in the late 1800s, he was a fairly normal bloke until he moved to the US and became a prominent labour activist. He changed his name to Joe Hill and is remembered as a working-class hero.

His story comes to a bitter end when he was allegedly framed for murder and executed. The tourist information lady advised me to find out more at the museum in his memory but it was closed.

Joe could have ended up in the county jail, another place I went to visit. Not under arrest for verbal abuse to blokes called Börje but by recommendation again by Ms. Tourist Info and it was even open. Now it’s a museum charting criminal life from the 1500’s onwards, demonstrating how Swedish prisons have gone from gruesome torture houses to holiday camps.

A man could have his nose cut off for being a 16th century gigolo. If you were caught drunk on a Sunday in the 1700s you faced three consecutive Sabbaths in the stocks outside church. And you could be sentenced to death by hanging in 1830 for carrying forged money.

Now, I can empathise with the injustice apparently served upon Joe Hill. Maybe not to the same extent but I, an innocent traveller, was sentenced two hours of being Börje’ed – a 21st-century-style punishment in Sweden today. 

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