Day 258: What is Valborg?

The Good

Valborg (Vahl-Borey), or Walpurgis in English, is the 30th April on which Swedes celebrate the arrival of spring by lighting bonfires or going to a large, communal bonfire somewhere nearby. This is simply a bonfire, and not a fireworks display like on Bonfire night in England.

The day starts by eating champagne and strawberries, sometimes with porridge, for breakfast.

Swedes in Uppsala have a much larger and richer appreciation of Valborg. There are bonfires, but there is also a boat race down the Fyris river in the centre of town in what can only be described as a total abandonment of the usual Swedish obsession with health and safety. For this, the students at Uppsala University create foam/cardboard/recycled boats in fun designs (their boats are a lot more exciting than those in the Oxford/Cambridge boat race) and see if they can survive the waters...

Most don't.

There is also a mösspåtagning, or hat ceremony, at the university library. Anyone with a student hat, that is to say anyone who graduated high school, is welcome to come and throw their hat in the air.

Finally, when all the other events are over, people move to the park next to the faculty of economics and have a picnic.

The Bad

It all sounds lovely and family fun. 

My first suspicions that Valborg was not going to be all Disney and birds pouring champagne came when I was on the commuter train from Stockholm. My fellow passengers and I were treated to a 55 minute rendition of "drunk asshat frat boys sing and stomp all the classics" including such favourites as Kung för en dag and Hey Baby (ooh-ah) (I strongly recommend that you DO NOT click that link.) They then sprayed beer on the seats, swung from the luggage racks and forced their way off the train first using a selection of garden chairs they had transported in the disabled, bike and buggy spaces. 

Don't get me wrong, I'm a fan of train parties and a bit of drunken singing. But wow. I never want to hear that Hey Baby song again.

I met up with my boyfriend who was in a house just one street back from the economics faculty. "How are you?" I said "Oh you know, fine, I just went and offered toilet paper to a guy who was peeing in the recycling bins." Apparently he didn't get the hint and smiled inanely. There were several inhabitants of the building on their balconies watching in disbelief as a stream of inebriated teenagers came to pee in the bushes, trees, on cars, on recycling. One man was sick and then was too drunk to stand up again after vomiting, so he lay down in his vomit. This was at 2pm. "Don't piss in the garden!" I yelled at two women. One pissed in the garden behind a car and didn't look at me, the other felt bad and went to the other end of the garden to piss, apparently that was better somehow.

Don't get me wrong, I know how it feels to need a drunken, desperate pee. But these people had navigated past a line of portaloos to get to the garden. They also had the sense that "Okay, I'm just going for a cheeky wee in the garden" without realising that a hundred other people were also going for a cheeky wee and creating a cheeky river of wee. Nobody likes a cheeky river of wee.

Meanwhile one man went down to the cellar of the building opposite to pee. He came back up and caught his reflection in the door. He played with his hair in the door reflection for 10 minutes. His friends got bored of waiting so they smashed some glass on the path to pass the time. Anyone leaving the flat was treated to a delightful wee/vomit/broken glass/discarded bottles/drunken teenagers obstacle course. YAY FOR SPRING!

On a more positive note, the weather helped to wash away the piss. "Oh there were some April showers!" you're thinking. No. Here is how the economics park looked just a few hours later:

WTF Swedish weather, SRSLY.

Check the picture of the bonfire above: There is snow. To reiterate: YAY FOR SPRING!

Don't get me wrong, I like snow as much as the next nutjob expat who moved north instead of south. But it's May. Come on now. 

The Ugly

Essentially Valborg in Uppsala is a demonstration of how a tirade of drunk students and young people from all over the land can completely demolish any notion of the socially responsible Swede in just a few hours. There was plenty of fun to be had on Valborg, there was some sun enough for BBQs and if you bought your booze before the massive queues at the government shop formed, all the better for you! But next time, stay the Fuck away from the Ekoparken unless you're off your tits and invest in water guns and balloons if you live anywhere near it.

Day 254: Swedish Swimming

"Why have you taken a picture of a pissy floor?" asked my sister when she looked at my phone. It's not actually a pissy floor (although there might be some piss, I don't want to know.) This is the floor in an English swimming pool changing room, complete with my outdoor shoes which I felt weird wearing in an environment where everyone else was barefoot.

You see, I used to not care about the grime and the indoor shoes. But some transformation has taken place since I moved to Sweden. Here, people are told by signs to take off their shoes before entering the changing area and they all do. The floor is probably so clean you could eat some pickled herring off it. Now I don't want to walk around on grimy floors anymore and I feel like shouting at people to take off their outdoor shoes!

There are also signs telling you to shower, in big letters, WITHOUT SWIM CLOTHES AND WITH SOAP before ye dirty unwashed masses set foot in the pool. And people do (because this is a society where signs are much respected). People don't wash before swimming in England, in fact they roll around in pig shit for a few hours before going to the pool. At least that's what people used to, metaphorically (or literally?), do at a music festival I went to that happened to have a leisure centre nearby offering the only hot showers in a few miles' radius.

The nakedness takes a little getting used to when you come from a society which clings desperately to prudish Victorian values. I'm accustomed to having my own dark cubicle in which to hide my shame, or at least ensconcing myself in some far-flung corner of the changing room where the fewest eyes can see me. Not so over here. Today I realised that, in a total opposite fashion to English people, Swedes notice that I am changing alone and wish to join me in my changing, perhaps so I don't get lonely. Soon enough there are 8 naked people in one area of a changing room with 4 separate areas. And nobody else in any of the other areas.

In Swedish pools, friends chat to each other absolutely stark (bollock, in the mens' room) naked. This has a the effect of increasing the time the conversationalists are naked and have to socialise with an eyeful of boob. But nobody seems to find this awkward. It's not just old ladies though, it's everyone. Even teenage girls (and I have been informed, boys) who are traditionally body-conscious as they go through puberty, will stand in a group of friends and chat while naked, or shower and share products, you've guessed it, totally naked.

Far from complaining about this, I actually am quite impressed by people's liberal approach to the body and to each other. People really don't give a toss if their friend has bigger tits or a massive bush. It's there, its probably quite chlorinated at this point, it's a bush. Done. Can I borrow some shampoo, yes. I am far more shocked and appalled that people wear their frikkin' DOG SHITE covered shoes in the changing room in England than I am that a naked lady with a spare tyre is using the adjacent locker in Sweden.

Day 249: Dara Does Stockholm

I'm a fan of many comedians from British TV and was very surprised and happy to discover that Dara O'Briain was making an appearance at the Kina Teatern in Stockholm. At the end of his show he hinted that several other British (Okay I know he's Irish) comedians have heard on the grapevine that Swedes appreciate and can understand English stand up comedy. Even if, as the boyfriend pointed out, the crowd goes silent in concentration when Dara's Irish accent comes booming to the back. This means further yay for me as I can expect more comedy in the future.

At any rate, many of the highlights of Dara's show stemmed from the fact that he enjoys audience participation and many of the replies from Swedes had him quite baffled. Here is my top list:

1. Dara has a sketch in which he asks the audience "have you ever saved a life". Often people reply "yes I gave the Heimlich manoeuvre". This happened in Sweden, too. But when Dara asked "How did you know how to do this?" to a 15 year old, she replied "we learn it at school" ! Well, that's the first time he'd heard that.

2. The front row were asked what their jobs were. 50% of the front row were Engineers. He asked a young person at the front what they were studying. It was Engineering.

3. Dara needed to know the size of a house to set up a joke. He was expecting a normal English answer like "It's a 2 bed semi" or "It's just a shoebox studio". Instead he got an incredibly precise "It is 27 square metres", a standard Swedish response. Of course he had no idea how big or small that is, because nobody measures their houses in the UK.

4. A lady in the front row was a property developer. "How many student tenants do you manage in your four properties" Dara asked. "400" was the reply. "Bloody hell do they live in slums with 100 in each little house!?" Joked Dara "I bet you deny them all the essentials, plumbing, heat, a sauna". "No, they have a sauna" came the reply. Dara was using a stereotype and certainly wasn't expecting that!

5. One of Dara's parenting jokes centred around him being one of the only men in an antenatal class and feeling ostracised by the women in the group. This didn't get much reaction, since most Swedish men are involved with child rearing most of the time.

6. "What would you shout at a burglar behind a door?" Dara asked the audience. Among other things came "Make a baby noise because nobody wants to hurt a baby!" To which Dara shouted "What kind of a fucking safe country is this, where a baby deters criminals?"

Day 241:Tree Care

What do you do when you have a tree in the way of your roadbuilding project? I think the usual answer is cut it down and throw it away, especially when it's not a very old or important tree.

WRONG.

The answer is a) invest heavily in researching and building a truck that can move trees b) spend tax money on 6 people to operate such a truck c) use truck to move the tree by scooping it out of the ground and scooping a new hole for it.

Day 237: Preparing for Påsk

Some aspects of Swedish Easter (påsk) are not too strange, eggs are eaten, chickens are abundant and everybody is high on chocolate and sweets.

I do miss English chocolate eggs, which are annually available special editions of your favourite chocolate bars, and the advent of the creme egg (chocolate egg filled with sugar goo that looks like a real egg). However I am placated by the Swedish offering of filling a paper egg with whatever happens to be the recipient's favourite.

Paper eggs come in a variety of styles, from classy designs or metal tins to generic, half squashed boxes with a rabbit on or chickens so poorly drawn that they look sinister.

Anyway, as I said, some aspects of Swedish Easter are not weird. But then there's björkris (birch twigs). People stick bouquets of sticks outside their houses, businesses and shops as Easter approaches. They attach feathers of assorted colours to the tops. It doesn't look particularly nice. It doesn't look particularly springlike. It doesn't look like chickens, or eggs or anything to do with Jesus. Its supposed to be a bit like a christmas tree in that you decorate it and can hang eggs from it, but....I don't know. It's not as full and luscious as a tree somehow...

At any rate, we have one in our house and we decorated it with feathers, accompanied with the following conversation:

"Why do Swedish people do this?"
"I don't really know"
"I think it's a weird tradition"
"It is a weird tradition"
"Lets put it in the window where people can see."

Day 234: Drones

This is a snapshot of what my daily travels look like, on bus, train or tube. Some people also hands free while cycling and others do the same while driving, so even bikes and cars are no exception.

Every single person around me in this picture is looking at an iphone and 4/5 visible people have a handsfree in their ears. And that was just the 5 people I could get into the picture without them noticing. So repulsed am I by this trait in society that I didn't even want to take the picture because it meant introducing my own electronic device into the area.

I would make a sweeping generalisation about how the obsession with the phone is more pronounced in Sweden than it is in England but in all honesty, I don't know. I don't feel like I am always surrounded by iphones in London that is for sure, and the obsession with handsfree hasn't quite taken off there in the same way. In Stockholm people are completely oblivious to your personal space and will happily hold a loud and incessant conversation, seemingly with themselves, on their handsfree for the whole duration of a 55 minute commute.

I also feel that in London there is much more fear of openly holding a phone out on transport or in town as it may be stolen from your very hand. There is no such fear in Stockholm and sometimes I wish there was, if only to make people disconnect their hands from their phones for just a minute. They don't put them down, or away, even when they're not using them! Even with a handsfree, they don't have free hands.

I was especially irked when a train of commuters was so immersed in pointless electronic masturbation and repeated refreshing of insipid facebook updates that not a single person offered a doddery old man a seat. In the end I walked down the carriage to offer him my own, at the other side of the train. He took it gratefully. This was not a reflection of the selfishness of people refusing to give up a seat, but an example of how people switch off and become drones with no mind when they are tap-tap-tapping on their stupid little screens.

I am always heartened by the one lonely commuter with his old fashioned book.

Day 231: Shoes off.

This is me at work.

In my years of work in England I don't think I ever took my shoes off, except if they got wet and I dried them on the radiator (weird stares from colleagues), if they broke and I couldn't wear them and be practical (weird stares) or if I hurt my feet on the way and was in pain (weird stares). The moral of the story is, if your feet are uncomfortably sodden with rainwater, flapping about in broken tramp shoes or bleeding out into your socks, in England it is less embarrassing to just keep a stiff upper lip and not take the shoes off.

In Sweden if you wear shoes inside at work you get weird stares. If you wear shoes inside at someone's house you are never invited back. I work in a school and I realise that kids probably, being kids, lick the floor and stuff (well they are liberal here, kids can do what they like) (except lick the floor because Swedes are obsessed with health and safety) (do they lick the floor or not? Requires further study) and therefore there should be no outdoor contaminant on the floor in the school.

Furthermore, Sweden is very gravelly and the gravel gets stuck in the sole and then you drag it all over the place, which is extremely annoying. And while I always enjoy the satisfying sound of the vacuum cleaner picking up lots of crumbs and stones, I do not enjoy treading on gravel when walking barefoot in the house. Sweden is gravelly because there is grit everywhere to stop ice buildup, it took me a few months to figure out that buildings and pavements weren't just eroding at an alarming rate.

Most people have indoor shoes and outdoor shoes and switch seamlessly between. Most people have terrible fashion sense when it comes to indoor shoes, with crocs being the shoe of choice in many places, clogs in others. The option for those without an indoor shoe are some ridiculous blue plastic shoe covers which remind me of a ward in a hospital for highly contagious diseases. They don't work either, if you have gravel in your sole it will rip those fuckers wide open.