Snuggling With the Enemy

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Because only about 10 million people speak Swedish, the language has considerably fewer words than English, a language that there are easily over a billion people using.

English is a primary language in Great Britain, the United States, Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and has tens of millions of speakers in India, Pakistan, Nigeria, the Philippines, and all over Europe. The British Council estimates about 750 million people speak English as a foreign language. That provides a lot of opportunity for new terms, expressions, and words to be born.

Despite the less widespread prevalence of the Swedish language, it does have quite a few unique and efficient words that have no English equivalents, perhaps a reflection of the creativity of the Swedish people.

We’ve discussed lagom, the prevailing Swedish concept of “just enough” that is seen in everything from work ethics to furniture design. And we’ve touched on fika, the relaxing afternoon coffee and snack break. I have discovered a few more!

For example, when talking about family relationships, there are quite a few useful words. If you’re talking about your grandmother on your father’s side of the family, there’s a special word for that: farmor (literally “father’s mother”). If you’re talking about your niece who is your brother’s kid, that person is your brorsdotter (“brother’s daughter”). These words are quite economical as there is no ambiguity requiring further explanation, like English-speaking people have with the words grandmother, grandfather, nephew, or niece.

Boyfriend-girlfriend couples who live together for an extended period of time, I suppose what we might refer to as “common law marriage” or “living in sin,” are called sambos. Hon är min sambo (“She is my girlfriend who I’m living with”).

There is a nice word, dygn, which means “all-day-all-night” or “24-hours-a-day.” There are lots of ways to say this in English, but dygn pretty much covers it. All the time.

In Swedish, there’s no difference between “there is” and “there are.” Both are det finns.

While those efficient words make things easy, the flipside is also true. Some of the simplicity or lack of words makes understanding a bit more difficult. A few words that I have trouble with are ones that have multiple meanings. I’ve illustrated one of my favorites, tjänst, in a chart below.

Like many languages, in Swedish every noun has a gender. English makes this easy because people and animals are obviously masculine or feminine while all objects are neuter. A few exceptions are countries and vehicles which are referred to as “she.” It’s not so easy in Swedish where everything is masculine, feminine, or “common.” There are no solid rules and genders are applied arbitrarily. When you learn the word for something, you should pretty much learn the gender at the same time.

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More than one of my friends has asked about the availability of unique beers and the world of microbrewing in Sweden. I’m sorry to report that the laws here make it pretty difficult to open a brewery. There are fewer than forty micros operating in the entire country. In fact, the Wikipedia page for Mikrobryggeri (micro breweries) lists only twelve. In a list of great oxymorons, perhaps “Swedish brewery” could join the all-time greats like “jumbo shrimp,” “peacekeeping force,” and “Microsoft Works.”

If we think the prevalence of Miller and Anheuser-Busch are overwhelming in America, they really don’t hold a candle to the market share that a select few mega-brews enjoy in Sweden. There are several ubiquitous and less-than-awesome beers here like Falcon and Pripps Blå that are among a tiny handful of brands – almost exclusively lagers – that most places have on tap. Those two are both part of the Carlsberg Group from Denmark, the number-one producer of beer in Sweden, who enjoys nearly 40% of the market.

In an earlier story, I described how all alcohol and beer over 3.5% ABV is sold by a single retailer, the state-owned Systembolaget. They have limited hours and a hit-or-miss selection. You can special-order considerably more varieties from their hefty catalog if you are dedicated enough to purchase an entire case. Because “Systemet” is buying in such huge volumes – warehousing for an entire country of nine million people – some of their prices are reasonable. However, since the taxes are based on the alcohol content, some of the prices are, ehhh, not so good. It really depends on what you’re buying. That said, I’m searching for good beers as much as I can.

I’m a big fan of super dark porters and stouts. My favorites to enjoy in America were Founders Breakfast Stout and Kentucky Breakfast, Flying Dog Gonzo Imperial Porter, BBC Heine Brothers Stout and Knob Creek Russian Imperial Porter (from Louisville!), Dogfish Palo Santo Marron, and Goose Island Bourbon County Stout. You know, stuff like that. Beers that look like tar, pour like molasses, and should be consumed sitting down when you’re not planning on going anywhere for a while.

I also quite enjoyed McEwan’s Scotch Ale and Harviestoun Old Engine Oil, but after making a list of favorites that includes things like Kentucky Breakfast and Palo Santo, I think of McEwan’s and Old Engine Oil as gateway drugs.

Naturally, I don’t want to poo-poo any of the fantastic Belgian beers, pilseners, Kölsches, or anything else I also enjoy, but the dark and heavy shit is where it’s really at for me.

There is an awesome bar in Stockholm called Akkurat which is world famous for their extensive selection. They have over 600 different beers from around the world. The place ain’t cheap, so I’ve only gone once, but it’s a haven and heaven for beer enthusiasts who find themselves trapped in Sweden. All other things considered, it’s one of the best places in the world to be trapped. It’s nice to know Akkurat is there if I need it or if I have visitors from America. Amazingly, a place like Akkurat would have been impossible just 15 years ago because, believe it or not, beer over 5.6% has only been legal in Sweden since 1995.

Akkurat where I discovered the Smuttynose Robust Porter from New Hampshire. The bottle was 75 kronors (about 9 bucks), but damn it was good! I’m not sure how it escaped me, but it’s always fun to discover something new, even if it means traveling to the other side of the world to find new things from America. I have to mention, though, the packaging on this beer looks so stupid it could have been a deal-breaker if it wasn’t such a mouthful of taste. “Robust” is absolutely right.

Despite the limited variety of local brews, I have actually found a few good Swedish beers I like. I enjoyed the Carnegie Porter before I moved here, so it’s a treat now that I can get it for less than half the price I was paying in Louisville. Carnegie is also now part of Carlsberg. A few weeks ago I discovered OppigÃ¥rds Starkporter, which is now my favorite Swedish beer. I may have to visit my local Systembolaget today for a Friday indulgence. The dollar has been going up the past few days so I can also use that as an excuse.

Although this article from The Local is a few years old, I think it paints a good, general picture of the beer scene in Sweden. I recently learned of the Stockholm Beer Festival that is coming up in September. That’s something to look forward to.

Ah, festivals… something Kentucky does well. I certainly haven’t forgotten that tomorrow is my favorite day of the year in Louisville. I’m missing it. When I lived in Rhode Island and Los Angeles, I was able to make the trip back for Thunder Over Louisville. This time, I’m a little farther away. I hope someone, somewhere – on a rooftop, back yard, or in a crowd of 600,000 people whose cellphones don’t work – will have a little drink for me as they watch a million dollars explode in the sky over the city.

Just in time for Earth Day, Thunder is the largest annual fireworks display in North America and usually lasts more than a half hour. Here’s the last few minutes from a previous year, complete with cheesy soundtrack…

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I noticed while on tours with the band over the years that a lot of Europeans go to the grocery store every day. The same seems to be the case here. It’s a lot different than the several-hour expedition Americans make to stock up for the month. Naturally, most grocery stores here are not super-sized markets that cover several acres and dwarf concert halls. They are mostly somewhere between that and a corner convenience store.

This photo is of one of the carts at the ICA in Hagsätra, which is sized appropriately for the amount of food most of the customers seem to be buying each time I visit. On top are a loaf of bread, veggie burgers, curry sauce. Mmmmmm.

Speaking of volumes of food, my weight seems to have leveled off around 76 kg (167 lbs). That’s nice and I’m happy with that. Early last year when I was on a business trip at the Rentals.com headquarters building in Atlanta, they had a scale next to the vending machines. I weighed myself and when 209 pounds (95 kg) was displayed, I was totally shocked that it had gotten so out of hand. I love food, but I had to draw the line.

I simply stopped eating so much. I started drinking more water, fewer sodas, and tried not to eat late at night. I didn’t keep a lot of food in the house, and I began walking as much as possible to anywhere nearby I needed to go instead of driving. I think the walking and elimination of carbonated beverages probably had the biggest effect. I still like to try different unusual sodas now and then, but it is incredibly rare that I buy or drink an entire soda. My head-start in America combined with the extensive daily walking I’m doing here have paid off.

The weird part about losing weight here is that I feel like I’m eating a lot. Perhaps more walking requires more fuel or maybe I’m lucky enough to have gotten a tapeworm. The bad news is that all of my pants are falling off of me now. When I bought these 36’s I had to suck it in a little. Now if I push my belly out, it doesn’t fill them. The good news is that in central Stockholm there is an H&M on every corner.

When I’m not eating paint, during the past few weeks I’ve been experimenting a bit in the kitchen. This is something new for me. In the past, I have been accused of eating “little kid food.” This is an accusation I flatly deny! Most kids don’t like spicy foods or anything remotely exotic, such as Indian cuisine.

Curry is one of my weaknesses. If I go to a restaurant and see something with curry, my mind basically shuts down and I can’t really read anything else on the menu. I have to get the curry. Needless to say, when cooking for myself, curry is one of my favorite ingredients.

This photo is of a curry dish I threw together recently. We’ve got broccoli, cauliflower, and potatoes in a thick yellow curry sauce. While it was cooking, I mixed some peanut butter in with the curry and let a whole egg sit in the middle of the pan. When it was all almost ready to eat, I broke open the half-cooked egg. There were bits of hard-boiled egg, but the center was still liquid, and I let that run all through the mix. Oh boy was this goooood. The mix of curry and peanut butter are something really unique: two great tastes that go great together, as they say.

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On Tuesday, I made this 360° View of Stockholm from Sofia Kyrka, which is an old timey church on top of a big hill in Södermalm. They have a nice park around the church where people like to hang out. The file is kind of big so it may take a minute to load. After it does, scroll to the right to take a look around. Enjoy the sunshine!

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This morning I attended the first of ten 2.5-hour Swedish language classes at Stockholm’s Medborgarskolan. I’m not a fan of school, but I have dedicated myself to becoming proficient in using and understanding the Swedish language, so taking classes is obviously the most efficient way to speed up that process.

Prior to registering for the class, I took a placement test to evaluate which level I should start in. I know a lot of Swedish words and I can put basic sentences together, but more often than not, I’m using the wrong case, verb form, or gender, or just pronouncing everything so poorly that what I’m saying is indecipherable. If I’m just listening to people talk, I think I’m truly taking in maybe 10% of what’s being said.

I knew I shouldn’t be in a class with people who haven’t started learning Swedish yet, but my test score placed me farther along in the courses than I expect to be. I’m at the point where I can follow conversation topics and answer simple questions, but I know I am a long way from being able to confidently say, “I speak Swedish.”

The first few minutes of the class I felt like I was in way over my head. The group of students – all adults – has apparently been studying together before this particular course began. They all know each other and the teacher. He is a cool, older guy who is typically Swedish: white hair, glasses, sweater, super friendly. After a half hour or so, I was more comfortable with being in this level. I noticed that although the other students knew things I didn’t, I also knew things they didn’t.

The class is small with only six students. Four are from Germany and one is from Malta. It was awesome to hear them speaking German before the class started and when explaining things to each other. Maybe I can say that I speak very basic German. I’m not able to have a discussion about economics in German, but I certainly can have a friendly conversation about everyday things. More than a few times, I have had to use German in situations in other countries when it was the only option and I’ve been impressed with myself.

Since I started learning Swedish, I’ve felt the ease of thinking and composing sentences in German slipping away. I’ve been afraid of that. When I try to start writing something in German, as I did with an email to my friend Cornelia yesterday, it quickly slips into Swedish. Regrettably, I ended up keeping the message short and typing it in English.

This morning when I heard my fellow students speaking German, I realized that I’m probably not really losing my ability in German. I understood a lot of what they were saying. The German language is still in my head somewhere and it can come back when it needs to. Hearing it again was like seeing an old friend. I would say that it’s similar the feeling I get if I hear someone speaking English on the sidewalk or in a restaurant, but that happens so much it’s not particularly unusual.

My German is still much better than my Swedish. It comes to me more naturally once it gets going. Of course, that’s because first real class in German was over twenty years ago and I’ve had lots of informal training and practice during those decades, whereas all of my training in Swedish has been informal and self-administered before this morning.

While I may not be losing my German, something I most definitely have lost is knowing anything about substantive case, objects, adverbs, and all that stuff. Jesus, I don’t even know that stuff in English, which I suppose I have to relearn if I expect to understand it in Swedish. Ouch, my poor head.

The class meets twice a week, on Mondays and Wednesdays, for five weeks. I think it’s going to be incredibly beneficial. There are more advanced classes that follow, if I can afford them when that time comes. If I eventually get a proper job with a Swedish company, language classes are free and provided by the government. That could be nice, though I’ve heard those classes are sometimes not as focused as Medborgarskolan. Those classes are populated with the general immigrant public and I can see where that might not allow for the small class size and direct attention it seems like I’ll be enjoying. My first impression is that Old Timey Tower’s return to school will be a really good investment.

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Apple’s newest version of iPhoto has a facial recognition feature. After you identify a few photos of your friends, it begins guessing on other photos. It picks out the faces in a photo and will ask, “Is this Chris Reinstatler?” This allows you to fine-tune the recognition. After it knows who the people in your photos are, it can assemble on-the-fly photo albums of your friends from multiple locations, sessions, film rolls, et cetera.

You may recognize the photo above from when we ran into a guy who looks like a budget version of my brother. iPhoto was not fooled! It picked out the tiny photo of my brother on the iPhone Iida is holding on the left, but it did not recognize the imposter on the right.

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If I fall gravely ill soon, here’s why:

As we have discussed, my chainsmoking Dutch roommate is selling the apartment and so i have to move at the end of April. In preparation for selling the place, he has essentially torn the apartment into pieces to fix it up. He is sanding everything down and repainting it. This has turned the otherwise clean, quiet, and sparsely-decorated space into a noisy, dusty, smelly construction zone. The smell comes from the oil-based paint and turpentine he’s using.

When he first decided he was selling the place and moving back to Holland, I had really only been living there about two weeks. At that time, the plan was for me to move out at the end of March. I had given him two month’s rent upon moving in, so this would mean I’d get half of that back, having only lived there for one month.

That all changed at the end of March when I mentioned that I would begin moving out that coming weekend. I think it dawned on him that he would have to cough up some kronors, so suddenly “the end of April” was the plan. Okay, whatever. We then agreed that I would stay until the money I gave him ran out: end of April.

Yesterday, I got home from a long weekend in Haninge. I was hungry, so I fixed some potatoes to eat. As you know, potatoes are one of the spiciest foods available in Sweden, so my mouth was watering with anticipation.

It’s always a good idea to wash potatoes before you cook them, but never more so than when they are covered in construction dust. Seriously. I washed them thoroughly before boiling them in a big pot. Unfortunately, there was something else I neglected to wash.

Halfway through my meal of potatoes on the balcony, I noticed that there was paint dust all over the inside of the bowl I was eating from. Jesus Christ. I foolishly presumed that if I took a bowl from the cabinet it would be clean. I hadn’t seen the dust because he keeps the blinds closed in the kitchen and the lights aren’t that bright.

Oddly, the discovery that he had sanded down and painted the cabinets with all the food still inside was not surprising. A few days earlier I was washing a bowl with the dish scrubber in the sink when he shouted, “Oh, no! Not this one! This is the one I am using for the paint!” Great. I’m pretty sure I had used that scrubber before, as it is identical to the one for dishes. He then tried to determine which sponge was for the dishes. He didn’t know. Again, great. I’ve been eating food from dishes washed in turpentine.

The icing on the cake came this morning when I saw him washing dishes in the same tub he uses for all his painting supplies. “Really? I said. “You’re doing the dishes in that thing you use to clean your paintbrushes?” He explained to me that the paint on the tub was dry so it wouldn’t come off on the dishes. “I’m not an idiot.” Okay. Whatever you say.

I should have known something was wrong when I first looked at the apartment. I saw something that could have tipped me off, but I ignored it, thinking it must have been a fluke or accident. I’m speaking, of course, about the fact that he puts the toilet paper roll on the dispenser under instead of over.

Now, I know some other people who do this and they get a pass either because they are bat-shit crazy, left-handed, or women. (I’m kidding, of course, being left-handed has nothing to do with it). A lot of people don’t take the time to think about how the roll goes on there and maybe they put it on in under fashion now and then accidentally. This guy does it like that every single time which is worsened by the fact that the spring-loaded dispenser has teeth which prevent the tube from rolling when it is inserted backwards.

Seeing the roll installed like this during my walk-through in February should have been a red flag. Instead, I gave him the benefit of the doubt. Serves me right. Now I’m eating paint.

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This weekend, Iida, Erik, and I spent some quality time with Erik’s parents. We visited their house on Saturday for a delicious Easter feast which I would compare to Thanksgiving in America. There was more amazing food than you could eat, plenty of candy, drinks, and football (er, soccer) on television.

Also on hand was a plentiful supply of Påskmust, a traditional Easter cola. This stuff has been around for a hundred years or more. There is also a Christmas version, Julmust, which I tasted back in 1999 when Metroschifter played in Stockholm at Kafe 44. These drinks are so popular that there are several brands and they cause Coca-Cola’s sales to drop when they come out each year. Coke has tried to make their own Påskmust in the past, but they received a lukewarm reaction. I’m not sure how to describe the taste of Påskmust. It’s cola-esque, but maybe with a hint of mint or something. They’re tasty, but I can’t say for sure what they’re like.

I had hoped to see some little kids dressed as Påskkärring (Easter witches) over the weekend, but we didn’t happen upon any. Two little girls from the neighborhood did knock on the door, deliver some homemade cards, and sing a song for us. They collected some candy and applause in exchange for their performance.

Erik’s parents are great. His dad drives a Volvo wagon, much nicer than the one I used to have. Sunday he drove us all down to the ocean at Nynäshamn. His mother is a huge fan of Elvis, which almost excuses her preference of Floyd Patterson over Louisville’s hometown hero Muhammad Ali.

His dad was kind enough to print out a 17-page Swedish test for me since I don’t have a printer yet. It was a placement test to evaluate which class I should start in. The Swedish language is coming to me more and more every day, but I really need to intensify my learning and usage. While most Swedes seem to really enjoy speaking English, I feel like it’s rude for me to not speak the language here.

I took the test this morning in the construction zone where I’m living and scored about 37%. That should probably place me in the second level, but I’m waiting to hear back from the school to find out for sure. As expected, the main things I don’t know are verbs, forms of verbs, and forms of adjectives. It was a written test, so it doesn’t take into account how much my pronunciation sucks.

Sunday morning, we also walked to a nearby lake in Haninge. The last of the winter ice can be seen floating in this photo of me traversing the dock. A couple weeks ago people were walking on the frozen water, now they’re fishing in the sunshine. The hours of daylight in the mornings and evenings are getting noticeably longer each day.

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