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.

Day 226: Swedish movie suggestion #1

As a test for my Swedish learning I decided to watch a movie in Swedish without any subtitles. "The Sound of Noise" is a really good movie for such a task as it is very visual and auditory, with a plot about musicians making illegal music from improvised instruments in their city. Oh, and it's a comedy too. The whole thing can be found on youtube complete with English subtitles for anyone not looking to test their Swedish.

The movie was spawned from a short video featuring six drummers making music in an apartment called, funnily enough, "Music for one apartment and six drummers". The film itself basically works on the same premise.

Day 221: Waffle day!

Surprisingly, for a nation which is not ranked too highly in obesity charts, today was another day in a 2 week period in which Sweden indulged heavily in creamy, sugary, fatty things (the earlier day being shrove Tuesday, or fettisdagen). Today is actually Annunciation day but in Swedish this becomes "Our Lady day" or "Vårfrudagen". Apparently "Vårfru" sounds close enough to "waffle" to justify an otherwise religious occasion turning into a scoff-up.

So keen are the Swedes on waffles today that there has been, perhaps predictably, a huge spike in sales of waffle irons. I assume this happens every year, but nevertheless the commuter newspaper printed a story about seldom-used kitchen items such as the waffle iron.

I myself indulged in the purchase of a vårfru iron. It came from a "cheap" shop called Ö&B and cost only 130kr/£12/$20. There was only one left, of course. I sent the boyfriend to get it and he approached the store in the manner of all Swedes: suspiciously. Things in Sweden are not cheap, and in the event that something cheap is found, suspicions are aroused. (This is of course bollocks as all English people know, shops are only there to rip you off and price is not often linked to quality. This is why the waffle iron in the swedish branch of Clas Ohlson is 300kr while in the English branch it costs 150)

My cheap little waffle iron made some kickass waffles even though I've never made a waffle before in my life. Despite his earlier trepidation, my boyfriend enjoyed them too (even though, in his own words, "they're not as good as grandma's.") We had them with jam and ice cream, jam is a necessity in Sweden, and if anyone reading this has their own waffle iron, this is the recipe we used.

Day 217: Spring in Sweden

Spring here is apparently the right time to make a night time snowman!

On the walk to the snowman building site were two kinds of people: Locals who wanted to get home as quickly as possible and newly immigrated pedestrians who were wondering around in amazement, eating snowflakes, touching the snowy bushes and just generally being in awe of the snow

(I dragged the sambo along, he was the former. I was the latter...snow, wieeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!)

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.