that english girl

Not content with one terms worth of fumbling Swedish pronunciation and being made to feel like a 5 year old, I returned to school for the spring term.  And I was very glad I did.

Not only was I reunited with a lot of my old classmates but at the front of the class was a totally new creature…and she had a welcoming smile on her face!  My name is Kristina she beamed.  But you can all call me K.  What a breath of fresh air to feel such positivity and friendliness.  Despite this, being in this new class took a little getting used to and I slowly began to realise that I had actually been quite traumatised from my previous experience!  I don’t mean to overdramatise my situation here.  You can’t exactly compare a 35 year old being made to feel like a 5 year old with loosing half your family in a war and becoming a refugee or anything, but it had affected me. By comparison my classmates; Tunisian Tariq, Thai Thongchai, Filipino Fay, Serbian Selma and Iraki Iman, didn’t seem to be very fussed about mean ol’ Eva in the slightest.

They were all pretty much indifferent to whether a teacher was good or bad.  I don’t mean that they didn’t have an opinion, it’s just that good or bad teaching made no odds to them as long as the passed the course.  Without the certificate  ‘Gymnasium Swedish level B’ life in Sweden was a sort of no-mans land.  Coming from countries such as they did, they just HAD to learn Swedish as no-one could speak their languages. Although I too lived in this ‘no-mans land’ of not totally belonging, at least I had the emergency parachute of speaking English if I got into sticky situations.

As I got to know my class pals much better over the year and heard their hardships and for some, tragic past lives I did reflect a little on my cotton wool wrapped western upbringing and my maybe slightly oversensitive western demands (slightly I say!) .

There was no doubt that I had been having a hard time fitting in to the Swedish way of life with its different ways and foreignness on many levels.  For the first year I felt like someone had pressed the mute button, they had directed the remote control at me and turned off my usually more than active mouth.  I couldn’t explain myself fully in Swedish so tended to stand back and observe rather than participate.  This lack of understanding mostly led to my mind wandering away from conversations totally and start wondering about such things like whether I should buy the princess cake with the green icing or the pink icing next time at ICA Maxi.  Hearing Swedes talking Swedish around me resembled nothing like the words I had been learning at school, it was just like white noise and so I just tuned out to it, content in the knowledge that, yes!, I had in fact decided I would get the cake with green icing. (For those residing elsewhere Princess cake is a Swedish cake topped with jam, then thick custard, then lashings of whipped cream, then sturdy green (or pink) coloured marzipan-like icing.  Well if you are going to have cake may as well go the whole hog!)

People told jokes around me and laughed without explaining to me what was so bleeding funny, which led to a paranoid delusion that, it was in fact me that was the joke.  Maybe…  Well OK! No! Probably life’s not ALL about me, but when you are feeling down and insecure your imagination does get carried away with itself.  Before you know it you are locked in a small cupboard somewhere, sobbing about feeling like an alien with a large spoon in one hand and that strange lard laden green cake in the other.

But if my experience of adapting to my new life was difficult, what the hell must it be like for those without English, without Swedish boys (or girls), without standard levels of education, without financial means and without the privileged knowledge of western culture.  Not forgetting that most of them were additionally afflicted by some real type of trauma such as war, death, poverty, persecution….  Looking at my class mates made me realise that life could be much much harder, so I better blow my nose, dry my tears, stiffen that upper lip and pull my socks up!  Like them, I needed to show some fighting spirit.

So with my renewed perspective on life’s hardships  and the strict, but wholly more approachable K coaxing me to utter perfect Swedish sentences I am starting to adjust to this new Swedish lifestyle.  I am even starting to understand some of that white noise around me and reduce my cake dependency.  School as an adult is not so bad after all, you just have to show some good old fashioned British reserve and keep your chin up…and not let one bad experience overtake you…slowly things start making sense.

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In my ever expanding knowledge of Swedish I learned a  new word this week when I made a bit of a gaff at my sister-in-laws birthday party.   My other sister-in-law had a wonderful plait in her hair that started at one ear and went over the top of her head to her other ear, it looked very classy but very difficult to do. Nonsense she said, it was, in fact, very easy to do and she proceeded to demonstrate by fixing my unruly mop in the same style.  I was made up and rather embarrassingly so, thanked her very much indeed for putting a ‘lesbian’ in my hair!!  To which my Swedish boy cracked up with laughter.  (Swedish tip:  its fläta not flata).

They say that we all learn from our mistakes!

It’s all a bit confusing with the 3 types of ‘A’ in Swedish for those coming from a language that only find necessity in the one version. Before anyone starts, I know that  ä, å, and a are three separate letters of the Swedish alphabet but I just can’t seem to see the difference when I read them and automatically the English aaaahhhhh sound comes out of my mouth.

Then before you know it I’ve got lesbians in my hair, still I am sure my Swedish boy could think of worse things….

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About 18 months before I  decided to come to Sweden I went to see a Tarot reader.  I have always been very interested in the notion of fate ruling our lives and if this thing we call ‘life’ is all predestined, could a 45 year old woman wearing far too much blue eye shadow and an amethyst necklace really see into my future….

Curious about this but also very skeptical I went along with my good friend Brenda one Sunday morning to The Mystic Fair, where a whole host of kooky looking folk had assembled, ready and willing to part with their hard earned cash for future insights and messages from beyond the grave. ‘As seen on TV’ and ‘Psychic to the Stars’ claimed some of the readers signs.  They sat behind tables covered in purple velour monogrammed with moons and stars and all it seemed had a penchant for that blue eye shadow. My reader told me that I would take a train from a big city maybe Rome with a guy that spoke English with a strange accent, she thought he maybe came from New Zealand…but couldn’t be sure…maybe there could be romance…and who is it that is pregnant she asked? Whoever it was, would maybe have some minor issue with the pregnancy but I should assure them it would be OK. Finally she could see me studying, I was going to go and learn something, I was surrounded by books she said.

Honestly I thought ‘what a crock of shit!’

The likelihood of someone somewhere in my life being pregnant and having a ‘minor’ problem was not exactly a genius forecast rather more a normal part of life.  The whole ‘romantic stud from New Zealand or somewhere’ was all a bit too vague and could easily be interpreted as taking the train home from London one night with a drunk Kiwi slurring in my ear. And finally there was no way in this world I was going to be going back to school. Been there done that, thank you!  When I updated PSychic Sue on my CV and suggested that maybe I had been to school and University for enough years already, she was adamant that I was indeed going to have my head in the books in the not too distant future.

As I handed over my 25 quid, I felt sorely ripped off and skepticism turned quickly into the realisation that this whole psychic tarot shebang was no more than old ladies predicting that people would have babies and maybe, just maybe, it would require some sort of medical attention in the process.  I don’t really know what it was I was hoping for personally…I did momentarily think that maybe I should try to see what Rita, the lady who reads tea leaves says instead… but… NO!  From then on I took the view that we make our own destiny.

Note there was not even a whiff of predictions about me moving to a new country, albeit a cold country with much the same climate as England, but all the same an exciting new life lay ahead….ooooooohhh. No. Nothing.

Fast forward to life in Sweden…and here I am sat at my kitchen table surrounded by cups, glasses, pots and pans…and…um…ohh…books!! Swedish grammar books, concise guides to common Swedish verbs, text books, exercise books and note books full of scribbles from my days at school.  SCHOOL!!!  Can you believe it? I sure as hell can’t believe it still.  I am actually back at school studying.  After all that protesting to PSychic Sue about enough schooling, she was right after all it seems.

And of course, now that I come to think about it my sister-in-law did have that small problem with the birth of her son, and it was all OK in the end.  And I actually did have the misfortune to meet 2 very drunk Kiwis on the train home from London one night with my good friend Becky (remember that one hon?) But far from being romantic studs, they had mullets straight out of the time when Jason Donavon was still in Neighbours and were deluded into thinking that the train journey was an episode of Jackass, kicking each other, farting and p**sing into used throw away coffee cups.   They said they were longing to head home so they could become butchers. Nice.

I am still not totally back on the side of the psychic, I think that they use such ambiguous language that you can end up reading anything into what they say and matching it to your actual life experiences. Ahem!

But, of course, say if, maybe, my Swedish boy (who speaks English with a strange accent doesn’t he?) was to take me off on a romantic little trip to Rome and we happened to take the train on to Florence thus leaving the big city of Rome by train…..maybe, just maybe, I could be won over again…..and get rushing down to Revealing Rita and her tea leaves to see what lays ahead in the Fuuutttuuurrreeee!  oooohhhhhh!.

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Attempting to converse with Swedes in their own tongue requires a stepping out of ones comfort zone a degree or two.

It is necessary to put oneself in the direct firing line of humiliation and ridicule.  Fun will be poked as attempts are made to pronounce peculiar words that require the mouth to move in a completely new alien way.  The sound ’sj’ is something that does not exist in English and sounds something like the noise you make when blowing out your birthday candles. ffffffuuuuuuu.  It took me quite some time to master this sound and now feel I am qualified well enough to say ’sjuttio sju sjuk sjömän sjunger i det sjukhuset’ (Translation: fffuuuteee fffuuu fffuuuk fffuuumen fffuunnger e de fffuuuk huuset) It is of course not sooo common to find 77 sick sailors singing in the hospital, but it does happen here in Sweden from time to time and so knowing the correct pronunciation is critical!

Apart from silly sounds to contend with, problems also arise with plain simple words too.  Many times I have being trying to articulate a word such as ‘cat’ lets say.  I say the word in the sentence and the listener stops me, mmm cat? whats that? You know cat!  A blank look on their face appears.  At this point I try different attempts to pronounce the word again…cat…kat…caat…caauuttt…ffffuuuucat!! Somewhere in amongst the noises I am making, something rings a bell of recognition in the ears of my listener and they suddenly say ‘Oh! You mean CAT!’ Well YEESSS, that is what I said in first place I think.  Sometimes it does feel that the joke is on me and the listener understood all along and is just having fun seeing me struggle and look foolish. Of course I meant bloody ‘Cat’ what else would be purring while I stroked it!

Moving on….There are many words in Swedish that have a similar spelling for example ‘glas and glass’ and of course they must be pronounced differently.  I have a real problem with this and I am often unable to identify the correct way to utter these words.  So much so that I am often found ordering 6 high ball ‘ice creams’ at the hardware store and asking the ice cream man for a Dime bar flavoured ‘glass’.

When guests come over for dinner I ask people if they are ‘dangerous’ at the end of the meal while warning small children not to touch the hot oven because ‘it’s finished’.  Like some goddess with other worldly powers I offer guests ‘light’ to drink (in addition to tea of course) and I have the ability to turn fruit ‘juice’ on.  I scream ‘FREE’ at people when it is there birthday and question ‘it’s congratulations?’ when I get a free bus ride, causing female bus drivers to touch their stomachs and embarrassingly shake their heads.

But my favourite language faux pas is the fact that for months and I mean MONTHS I have been wandering around Sweden exclaiming ‘IT’S GINGER’ here there and everywhere in my kindly, easy going nature. Why no one has bothered to tell me that ‘No problem’ was not pronounced like that I will never know.  I guess its all just part of the fun of learning a new language.

However, I do fear that it’s possibly some sort of condition that runs in the family though.  My mother told me that my brother had just bought a new car ….and …..it’s a Swedish car she marvelled….you guessed it, he bought a Vulva!!

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