Day 216: Guess where this is?

 

He's watching you...but where from?

Day 212: Fredagsmys

Fredagsmys is a difficult term to literally translate. It refers to the feeling of comfort that can only arise from it being the end of the working week. If I were to translate it, I would say "comfy fridays".

I just looked in 3 different dictionaries to see if I could get a less shit translation. All three did not have the word fredagsmys. Google translate helpfully offered "fredagsmys" as a translation of fredagsmys.

Fortunately most immigrants are quickly acclimatised to fredagsmys by grace of it being ubiquitous. There are some key elements to fredagsmys:

1. lösgodis (pick N mix sweets) the idea that Friday is fucking awesome is instilled from an early age in Swedish children by social conditioning. Most children are not allowed sweets throughout the week but they can gorge themselves stupid on sweets on Fridays. Children are obsessed with sweets on Fridays to the extent that today a girl in one of my schools followed me across the playground to ask:
"vem är du?" who are you? "Vad har du i ryggsäcken?" What do you have in your rucksack? 

It was a half eaten kexchoklad and she knew damn well what it was.

2. Mexican food yeah, I don't know why. A while ago I posted a picture showing a whole aisle of tacos in a supermarket. This is the reason why. The picture above is from today, I made nachos and wraps and my boyfriend was happy because I had unwittingly made them on a Friday, which is of course the correct day for such things.

3. att mysa to take it easy and put your feet up, be comfy, hug a cat maybe. Light some candles. Run a bath. eat Mexican food and gorge on sweets. Definitely not go out and party on a Friday night because it's -2 outside and a glass of rum and coke costs £10/$17/€12/100SEK if you're lucky.

Day 202: Fettisdagen

Today is Fettisdagen, Fat Tuesday or Shrove Tuesday. In England I would be looking forward to the pancakes but now I'm in a country with something even better!

SEMLOR

In fact I just finished eating one right now, with a cup of tea. Semlor are Swedish cream buns, traditionally eaten around Lent, flavoured with cardamom and marzipan and rainbows and unicorns.

Here is a recipe for making your own, unless you have the good fortune to be reading this in Sweden around Lent, in which case buy some NOW.

Ingredients
For the Buns
100g butter
300ml milk
50g fresh or 2 tbsp dry active yeast
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 Egg
1½ teaspoons baking powder
100ml sugar (Swedish people are strange and measure dry ingredients in liquid units. Use a measuring jug, otherwise its a third of a cup (American people are strange and measure everything in a cup))
1000ml or 1L plain flour /all purpose flour /vetemjöl /farine de blé (there, now everyone's happy)
10 crushed cardamom pods (take the pod bit out, just crush the inside seeds)

For the filling
125g ground almonds - I ground mine in a coffee grinder and kept the skins on
Crumbs from inside the buns
100ml milk
100ml sugar
whipped cream
icing sugar

Instructions

1. Melt the butter and add the milk. If you are using active yeast, heat this mixture to 37ºC. If you are using dry yeast, heat this mixture to 45ºC. Add the milk/butter to a bowl containing yeast, salt, sugar and egg. Mix the flour and baking powder and add this to the mix. Cover the dough and let it rise for 30mins
2. Knead the dough until it's elastic, then separate it into 12 round balls. Put these on greased baking trays and leave them for another 30 mins until they double in size. Brush them with egg (or rub them like me if you don't have a poncy brush) and put them in the oven for 8 mins at fucking gas mark 9 / 250ºC. I say "fucking" because that's fucking hot.
3. Let them cool then slice off a little cap from the bun and keep it to one side. Scoop out a bit of the middle of each one and put the middles in a bowl. Add ground almonds, sugar and milk then mix it all up and shove a bit in the centre of each bun. Top this with whipped cream (pipe it on like me if you have a poncy piping bag). Put the top of the bun on the cream and dust with sugar
4. mmmm...

Day 201: Being an adult

Being an adult means being sick when your mum isn't there to make you feel better. This I learned by contracting vinterkräksjukan from a buffet.

As I mentioned earlier, Swedes take illness very seriously and so I am not allowed to go anywhere, especially to work, for 2 days. What a shame eh?

On the other hand, there is no Lucozade in this country to help recover after being sick. Lucozade is an orange flavoured, fizzy glucose drink which a friend at school described to me as "liquid fat" because people like to drink it even when they're not exerting themselves. My mum, and many other English mums, prescribe lucozade after sickness because it recovers lost energy and also because they are from the 1950s when lucozade was still known as a medicinal product instead of a sports drink.

Day 196: Cruising the Baltic

A common trip for Swedes is a cruise across the Baltic to the nearby cities of Tallinn and Helsinki. Some people also travel to Åland, an island between Sweden and Finland.

The reason for these cruises are 1) holiday but more predominantly 2) to get shitfaced.

The cruise itself is very cheap and since you sleep on the boat you save money on hotel costs at the city you visit. This means everyone has more money for the 10+ drinking establishments on board.

I didn't take this, I stole it from here

I would say that the British equivalent is the booze cruise to Calais on the French coast. However, the Swedish booze cruise isn't just for the purpose of stocking up on beer to take home (don't get me wrong, they do that too. Your multitude of beer crates come with a wheely trolly included.)

Indeed the cruise itself is designed around cheap drinking in international waters. When I got on the cruise in Stockholm even the cruise staff smelled like yesterday's bar and there was an avalanche of old beer cans that came tumbling out of the wardrobe.

I suspect also that the former residents of my cabin got into a drunken brawl, as they kindly left blood splatters on the carpet, mirror, bedclothes, window and walls. I'm not really selling this trip am I? It was fun! Plus we were compensated for the blood and the beer cans with... drink coupons handed to us by a hungover information desk man.

Incidentally, Finnish for drink coupon is "Drinkkikuponki" which is fucking brilliant, well done Finland.

Having been on a Tallinn trip previously I can honestly say that none of the journeys are particularly different, although the Tallinn boat was red and the Finnish boat blue. I have heard it said that evading taxes is a national sport in Sweden. Well, if that's the case then evading the government booze monopoly is an international sport in Sweden, too.

Day 185: Rear window

Did you know that over 60% of Swedes don't have curtains? This is a statistic I made up while looking at this photo I took from my back window, an activity which may have made my neighbours think I am a weirdo.

I have seen Swedes have parties, fight, kiss, cook and run around the apartment looking for keys just before leaving the house. Although not all of these things happened in the same window at the same time. I have also seen a man inexplicably doing penguin impressions, I can only guess that there was a baby or toddler out of sight under the window frame acting as an audience.

I myself do not close the curtains in the back of the house. Consequently there is a small observable portion of the house which I have to traverse with my bum out when leaving the bathroom. This has led to some interesting hallway crossing techniques such as the dash, the sprint, the stoop and the strategic towel hide. I can only imagine that other Swedes engage in similar techniques. Or buy a bathrobe.

Sales of curtains remain high however, as Swedes like to have curtains for display purposes which hang impotently on either side of the window. I also have some of these. They are 50cm wide on either side. The window is almost 3 metres across. The curtains, they do nothing!

Day 183: A Hotel Tribute

After recently having a unique hotel experience I would just like to take a moment to point out a small selection of Sweden's cool hotels!

You can stay on a boat in the centre of the capital:

You can stay in a prison:

You can stay in a silver mine

 You can stay on a Jumbo Jet

 

 

 

 

 

You can sleep in a room made of ice

 

 

Day 180: Line 'em up

In what may be perceived as a continuation of my earlier post about health fanaticism in Sweden, I draw attention to the practice of correct checkout etiquette.

I won't say "Swedes" as I don't know if they all do it, but many Swedes arrange their food in a line. Before I understood why, this practice annoyed me, as in England it's custom to arrange your food tetris-style and take up as little space as possible so the person behind you can also use the checkout. (In fact, many of the things I find very alien here have under-crowding as a root cause - coming from an overcrowded place, I find people here just don't have the same level of consideration for others' time as I am accustomed to.)

Anyway, I digress.

The food is arranged in a line because a study reported that carpal tunnel and repetitive wrist strain injury in checkout workers can be greatly reduced if they don't have to rotate the items to scan them. Therefore kindly Swedes like to turn the food with the barcode already facing the scanner to reduce the workload of the person scanning.

So, while they may be temporarily screwing with the person(s) behind them, most Swedes are considering the long term health of the cashier. I think I can get used to the linear checkout custom knowing this, but I'll have a hard time importing it to London. "Oi mate, get a bloody move on! Why are you putting all them peas in a line?"

Day 177: Swedish Hypochondria

Often I raise my opinions on the subject of Swedish culture with my Swedish boyfriend and often he offers a sympathetic ear, generally agreeing with my observations or offering a slightly different viewpoint which is not too far from my own.

Not so when it comes to illness!

I can't tell if I am unusually stiff-upper lip about being sick and soldiering on because I'm British or if Swedish people are unusually over-reactive about their problems. Either way, there is a large gap between how I think people should behave around sickness and how Swedish people actually behave.

First of all is the story of the middle aged woman who held up a tram for 20 minutes because she ran into the closing doors and fell over. She collided side-on and was pushed backwards. Then, as if in slow motion, she decided to sit down. After sitting she apparently decided to lie down on the gravelly platform and hurt her head. Ok, you're probably thinking that I'm mean and she needed help and it probably hurt to hit the doors, the floor or the gravel. But why does it take 4 passers-by and the conductor of the tram to stand around her pointlessly and soothe her anxiety and embarrassment? For 20 minutes? While a tram full of people is waiting and another tram is waiting behind? In England you hit the doors, you laugh because you're embarrassed and then you get on the tram and have the conductor fuss over you while you're traveling home. And Sweden is meant to be the efficient place?

Secondly I refer you to the treatment of sick children in Swedish schools. They don't come in. Sometimes for weeks. Because they have a sniffle. Sometimes they get sent home because they have a sniffle. If a child claims to be ill, feel sick or have a headache they go home, no questions asked. Some of the children I teach miss weeks worth of school because of illness - in England parents are punished if their children have low attendance. Furthermore if English children cotton on to the idea that they can go home if they claim to have a headache, there would be no children in school. On a side note, children in schools can take themselves to the toilet whenever they want. In the middle of a lesson. What nonsense! Swedish kids never bloody sit down, they're always "peeing". Yeah right.

Weirder still, in schools there are boxes of plasters on every floor that children can help themselves to in times of need! If we had that in England there would never be any bloody plasters because kids love plasters and would stick them on themselves for no reason, or trade them in the playground.

Thirdly, small injuries are regarded as worthy of a hospital visit. I went with my boyfriend to the A&E because he fell while running and had gravel in his hand. I didn't say this to him as I was being supportive, but in England you take the gravel out yourself and put some TCP on that shit. There's a crisis in the A&E departments and you'll be sitting there for 6 hours behind a queue of car accidents and stabbings before anyone will look at your damn hand.

Fourthly you don't need to have a helmet, knee, shin, elbow and god-knows-what-else pads to go ice skating. Or a high visibility jacket and trousers when you go for a walk. Although I see why everyone has high desks at work and no chairs, since sitting is bad for you. But people deserve a sit down sometimes!

Fifthly, not a day goes by without a newspaper article about poison in foods (this week DN's angle was this). We have to avoid tin cans, lettuce, plastic containers, bottles, foods with some additives... Parents have to avoid toys, because they can poison the kiddies. Salad can also make you sick. So can meat. The supermarkets are out to get you, too.

Beware though, you don't get a high quality of life without fussing over the small details collectively as a nation!

Day 173: This sums Sweden up nicely

A friend pointed out this list on Buzzfeed of some things Americans find cah-razay! about Sweden. Enjoy!