Day 781: Scrumping

Every now and then I come across a list on the internet of words which exist in other languages but which we are lacking in English. Like "backpfeifengesicht" from German, meaning a face that needs a slap, or "hygge" from Danish, meaning a good, pleasant, comfy feeling (I guess the same as the Swedish mysig). But recently I was lacking a Swedish word for an English concept: Scrumping.

Scrumping is stealing apples from someone's garden or orchard to make Scrumpy, a small batch of local cider. Although I guess you can also scrump just to eat the apples. Or, you can do what someone did in our garden and hire a fucking trailer and pick all the apple trees in the private garden totally bare in broad daylight with the residents watching you, and then sell them for a profit. That definitely counts as scrumping.

I myself have been thinking about making some non-scrumped-cider out of all the apples in the garden which nobody is eating. But before I can get my special apple picking tool (yes, every good Swedish residents association has some) I look out of the window to see a guy with a bike trailer full of apples. Since I live with the CHAIRMAN©® of the building, I sent him out to find out why this guy was entitled to pick ALL THE APPLES.

The conversation was as follows:
CHAIRMAN©®: Hello.
GERMAN GUY: Hello
CHAIRMAN©®: I see you have picked quite a lot of apples and I was wondering if you live here or if you're staying with someone here?
GERMAN GUY: Oh yeah, my friend said I can pick as many as I want.
CHAIRMAN©®: Who's your friend?
GERMAN GUY: Oh, er, I, er, forgot his name. He has a beard.
CHAIRMAN©®: I see. Well, you're welcome to pick the apples since we don't want them to go to waste, but next time I would appreciate it if you called someone from the residents association *points to phone numbers* to ask, as there are some people in the building who would like some apples for themselves.
GERMAN GUY: Oh yeah totally I will do that.

Great! Fine! Wonderful! Nobody's being an asshole over the apples, all was solved. Lovely. 5 Days later at the weekend GERMAN GUY texts to ask if he can pick ALL THE APPLES on the remaining trees that the CHAIRMAN©® scared him away from. The CHAIRMAN©® says "sure." because, hey, apples. Who cares. Apart from me, who will never get any cider at this rate, since there are about 2 apples left on the trees.

BUT THEN

The following weekend we're having fika (not a euphemism for sex) with a retired lady in our building, when she says:

RETIRED LADY: Your friend was here on the weekend.
CHAIRMAN©®: My friend?
RETIRED LADY: Yes, the one who picks the apples.
CHAIRMAN©®: He's NOT my friend.
RETIRED LADY: Oh, he said he was your friend. "My friend told me to go ahead and clean the fuck out of every. single. apple tree." that's what he said.
CHAIRMAN©®: He's NOT my friend.
RETIRED LADY: Well, he's gone now and he said he would sell all the apples at the local market
CHAIRMAN©®: He's not my friend.

You know you've lived in Swedish societal harmony too long when you use your Monday nights to write a frikkin' soap opera about a man stealing your apples. Apples which nobody was eating and you were paying money to have cleaned up by a gardening service. The irony is, now I have to go and scrump some apples of my own because I still want to make cider. I go now.

Day 767: Surströmming

Last weekend a friend from England was visiting for a whistle-stop tour of Sweden and so I did what any good friend would do and took her to eat partially rotten fish from a can.

Surströmming (sour herring) is actually a bit of a novelty food item that many Swedes from southern Sweden have never eaten and many Swedes from northern Sweden have. All promulgate the idea that surströmming is semi mythological and can only be eaten outdoors because there is a rule against opening the can where people can smell it and be offended or killed. It's actually partially fermented herring, left to mature in a can, which rots slightly. The rot is washed away in running water and the remaining fish tastes like FISH+++++

source: wikipedia

As we discovered you are allowed to open the can indoors and the smell is more offensive than the average fart but less offensive than a sewage treatment plant. Both of these comparisons are shit (har har) because surströmming doesn't smell anything at all like human waste. It actually smells, well, sour. Think if sour had a scale of sourness and we were looking at the absolute end of the sour scale. I don't even think it smelled fishy, but maybe I'm remembering poorly because my nose was being stabbed with sour forged into metaphorical sour shards. Actually it wasn't so much the nose that registered the sour as the whole olfactory system including the tissue at the back of the throat. As to the idea that you shouldn't open the can indoors, I don't think the smell could actually forge non-metaphorical tools and force its way into adjacent rooms or apartments. I'm not exactly selling the product here with my description, the smell wasn't half as dire as I imagined the smell should be after two years of living here and hearing others hyperbolise about it, but in any case it's not a smell which inspires lip smacking and salivating.

Västerbotten cheese, source:wikipedia

The person hosting the sour fish event was a northern Swede and just got on with the damn eating as soon as possible. She took the fish whole from the can and carved out the entrails and got some big bits of fish in her face before the smell from the can opening had time to waft to my end of the table. My English friend was much more hardcore than me and, despite gasping at the the stench and asking herself thrice why she was doing it, got stuck in straight away without instruction, using her hands to pull out the bones. I ummed and ah-ed about whether I was even going to eat one, before realising I would be annoyed at myself if I didn't. Putting the fish in front of you is basically embracing the smell wholeheartedly into your life and welcoming it onto your hands and into your aura. I'm quite bad at deboning regular fish, so I was not doing too well with the surströmming. I managed to pick a few meagre shards of fish away from the frankly disturbing swim bladder, bones and entrails and I shied away from the roe which the other guests were so keen on. Amateurs usually go for the ready filleted fish, but it was no regular who bought these fuckers.

Sandwich: source here

The redeeming feature of surströmming is that you don't generally eat it by itself unless you're some kind of demented purist living in a shack in the woods with the bears, wolves and elk somewhere up north. Instead you make a sandwich using crisp, cracker-like bread, onions, potato and västerbotten cheese. If you wish to further disguise the fish you can add sour cream (which I did) and drink milk (which I did). My sandwich was about 1% fish in the end, but I still got goosebumps while eating it. Probably from looking at the swim bladder on my plate while I chewed. To best describe the taste I would probably use a combination of two comments made at the dinner; one person said the fish tasted like "the sea", namely the smell you get a low tide when there is some old seaweed struggling on the sand and there's a salty flavour in the air; I myself commented that it was like being punched in the mouth by a bodybuilder fish with hench arms. Put these together and you get a sensation akin to a knuckle sandwich from Neptune himself.

Would I eat surströmming again? Well. Yeah, probably. If there was a decent crowd, plenty o' vodka and good times to be had as a novelty, rare occasion. Would I go northern native and eat sour, rotten fish for my dinner on any old regular day? No.

Day 760: Swedish Cinema

Last Friday I went to see "Inside Out". It was really great, some of the script may go way over children's heads but adults will enjoy it. But enough of that, you want reviews go to Rotten Tomatoes.

Really I'm here to compare Swedish cinema-going with English. It's essentially the same thing; first you go to a dodgy back-ally doctor and sell your kidney on the black market to scrape together enough for the entrance ticket (a kidney and a lung if the film is 3D); enter the cinema 20 minutes late in a vain attempt to avoid the adverts at the beginning; buy your ticket from a teenager who is dead behind the eyes and whose friends identify them from 100 metres by the approaching popcorn smell; be tempted by the popcorn smell for about half a second until you remember a) the popcorn is the same popcorn that's sat in the case for the last two weeks and b) the popcorn costs the same as unicorn tears and leprechaun charms; finally you sit uncomfortably close to a stranger for two hours feeling jealous as they stuff their faces with popcorn that you have the moral fortitude to walk away from.

There are some key differences though. You have to wait a considerable amount of time before the films actually appear in Sweden..."Oh did you see XYZ film yet! It's fucking awesome! The bit with the skdfouserfbhoejfboergf and the other bit with the oaiusdq8uiwegfpieaur are my favourites!" say my friends and my facebook feed and my English news sources and my family and the in-flight magazine on long haul flights months after the film has appeared on fucking in-flight entertainment but STILL not Swedish cinema screens. "They have to take time to dub the film" WRONG. Well, half wrong.  There are dubbed versions for the little kids who can't read the subtitles, but a lot of families see a lot of films in English. This is part of the reason why Swedish kids are scarily good at English.

Once seated in the cinema, film's rolling etc, that's when I notice that Swedish cinema-goers are the noisiest fucking eaters in the WORLD. (I've been to the cinema in England, France and Sweden so let's call that the world for now) They love their fucking rustling packets of popcorn and penny sweets. Yeah alright, there are some rustlers in England too but not like this. This is rustling on a new scale. It goes all the way to 11 on the rustleometer and breaks the needle on the rustle scale. But as compensation for this, Swedish people don't talk during the movie. They talk all over the adverts, laughing and shouting and singing, making me really nervous that they're going to ruin the film. They always stop when the actual movie starts. This doesn't happen in England. If there are rowdy rowdy people in the screen then they're rowdy rowdy throughout.

There is one thing, though, that could put me off going to the cinema entirely here and that's SNUS.

Having never tried snus I can only assume from the smell that it is made in a factory where cats wee on things and then said things are gathered into little pouches so that people can shove them inside their upper lip. Some may argue that snus is made from tobacco and provides a more socially friendly alternative to smoking. I am not one such person to posit this view. If you break out the cat piss teabags in the cinema to have a cheeky snus and think you're doing me a favour by not smoking you can think again. I would rather watch the movie from the inside of the popcorn cabinet in the lobby than sit next to someone who breaks out a cheeky snus.

On Friday I was treated to the double whammy of olfactory excitement that was a lady who had bathed in shitty cheap perfume sitting with her chainsnusing boyfriend. If your perfume smells like Impulse body spray (basically Lynx/Axe for women) then you probably shouldn't pay more than a pound for it, though if you like kissing someone who tastes like cat urine you're probably not the worlds most discerning consumer.