Day 411: Proactive Feminism

A commendable advertising campaign is out and about at the moment. The Swedish Women's Lobby Group invites everyone to report sexualised imagery of women by taking a picture, uploading it to facebook or suchlike, and tagging it #reklamera. The reported images will be shown to the government and action will be taken to block them. This is a much more proactive form of protest than smashing up a bus stop.

WHAT WOULD THE TUBE BE WITHOUT A FEW HALFNAKED FEMALE BODIES? 

You would normally see a picture of a sexualised woman here. Sexualised advertising makes women feel bad and makes them want to change their bodies. This is a hindrance to equality . Together we can take this space back. Are you with us?

Day 390: Valfläsk

Valfläsk [vahl-flesk] is a Swedish word which means "whale meat".

It also, by some linguistic jiggery-pokery, means election rhetoric.

Today Sweden had its election orgasm after a ridiculously long and drawn out build up consisting of being hit in the face by valfläsk repeatedly. Valfäsk here looks like a bald man, a tired pockfaced porky man and a young bespectacled man, none of whom should ever be used, ever, in an analogy describing sex. 

There are, in fact, a lot more than 3 parties in Sweden. Here everybody loves the little parties. But the people who get the most airtime are, organised helpfully by which side they represent,

The leader of the biggest leftist party (Stefan Löfven)

I'm awesome because I have a red tie

The leader of the rightist party, and current PM (Fredrik Reinfeldt)

I'm awesome despite my red tie

The leader of the racist Sweden Democrats party (Jimmy Åkesson)

I'm Åwesome becåse I håve ån Å in my nåme

I don't want to scare away my readers with all the millions and billions (ok, slight exaggeration) of other small parties, but needless to say there are many, of whom some of the biggest are the Feminists, the Greens, the People's party (not socialist) the Pirates (not actual pirates) the centreparty (actually farmers) and the Left party. For the last few years, Sweden has had a coalition of right wing parties in power who, unlike the coalition in England that was a divisive failure, actually agreed on several things. Much to the chagrin of lefties överallt.

Aaaaanyway. I don't want to sound like I know anything about politics here because I actually know fuck ALL. The only thing I can say is that I've seen a lot of crap posted around town on billboards (My personal favourite VOTE FOR SCHOOLS! because hey, those people who think "I'm going to vote against schools" need some persuading). There has been a lot of debate about whether the racist party should have the right to advertise their racist ideas, and this has lead to Jimmy ÅÅÅÅÅÅkesson's face being plastered all over the news every day, and in my blog, while people ask that question repeatedly. He therefore made it into my top 3 people who you hear about during elections. Damn, somebody get me JÅÅÅÅÅ's PA guy!

The other big issues have been schools ("Let's throw more money at them and not really think about raising training standards!!") Nuclear power (Close them! Make them better! What about turbines! Uranium! Solar cells! Incomprehensible oneupmanship!) Old people (Give them better food in their old people's homes, that'll quiet 'em down!!) building Stockholm for the oncoming hoards (what colour should the new tube line be!!!! Lets put some parks in the ghettos, make 'em better!) and immigration (They're great, they do all our shitty jobs for us!)

VOTING

Voting here is in some ways very efficient. In other ways, not so much.

For instance, I got a voting card in the post so that I could make my choice in the local elections, not the general, despite only living here a year. I didn't have to register in any way, like I do in England even though I was born there, I just got the vote card through the letterbox with instructions of where to go.

But.

When you toddle on down to the school where they've set up a poll station, there are lots of cards laid out for you to choose by the door (see pic above.) These cards each have the name of the party you want to vote for at the top. This for me is an incredibly open system where anyone can see which party's card you're taking and leaves you open to the possibility that someone can remark upon your choice. In England you take a poll card with every single name and party and set a cross by the one you want while in the privacy of the booth, so nobody can see who you chose. I much prefer this system.

Don't worry if you're a n00b with no idea what you're doing, a handy poster tells you what to do. Unless you're me and you take the card to the poll booth and, after seeing the poster, still stand there like an idiot not knowing what to do. In my case, there were around 30 names on the party card, and I didn't know how to vote for none of them. Fortunately I did the right thing and simply placed the card with no pen marks into an envelope. This felt weird, as you always have to mark your ballot in England otherwise it's meaningless. I also forgot to seal the envelopes before handing them to the people at the desk, who looked at me like I had no idea what I was doing. Which I didn't.

Voila. First election in Sweden (not so deftly) handled. Now can they please clean up all the valfläsk that's lying in the streets, I'm sick of their stupid faces and empty slogans. (Some things are the same the whole world over.)

Day 397: Smashy smashy happy happy

Someone in Uppsala likes going around and smashing all the adverts. They think they are making an anti-advertising statement but instead they're making life hard for underpaid workers like this one, who are predominantly immigrants might I add.

Ironically in this particular picture the man is cleaning up the glass around an election campaign advert which reads "create more jobs!!".

They've been smashing adverts since they had the bright idea 8 months ago to steal the little red thingies on the bus which break the emergency exit glass. This now means that there is often broken glass everywhere which the advertisers in their limitless funding just replace time and time again, while the buses now have no means to escape through the emergency exits in times of emergency. FUCK ME ANARCHISTS, YOU'RE SO CLEVER!

Sometimes they just write slogans over the adverts with a sharpie pen instead. Or draw moustaches.

Don't get me wrong, advertising is the devil's handiwork. But I don't think leaving a trail of smashed glass around town is going to a) stop advertisers from advertising or fixing broken adverts or b) encourage citizens over to the cause or c) help in an emergency bus situation. or d) give Mohamed here a good day.

Day 387: Stop, oh yes wait a minute mr. postman

I have given some thought as to whether it would be better to be a postman in Sweden or in England, here are my musings on the topic.

Advantages:

1. Get a company bike and Sweden is quite bike friendly
2. Don't have to walk far with a heavy post sack
3. Get to be outdoors in the sunshine
4. Stringent (sometimes bordering on ridiculous) health and safety laws meaning you don't have to carry much e.g.:
5. Parcels are delivered to depots and people pick them up themselves so you don't have to carry them

Disadvantages:

1. Portuppgång [port-upp-gong] the stairwell leading to individual apartments in a block of flats.How many of these bastard stairwells does a poor postman have to climb in a day? Okay, you can trundle round on a bike 5 meters between doors to blocks of flats but then you have to climb up 4 stories (or more) to 12 different houses (or more) in each one. And they're all the frikkin'same street after street! Do postmen even ride their bikes? Is there any point?
2. Ericsson. Johnsson. Nyqvist. Karlsson. Everyone here has the same name. I would bet good money that many portuppgång have at least 2 of the same name. And letters don't have door numbers, just names. In fact, I really wouldn't be surprised if there was a portuppgång where every single person was called Anna Andersson.
3. Yeah you read that NO DOOR NUMBERS. Wtf Sweden. Everyone who lives in someone else's house, I.e. Rents it or lives with a friend, will not receive their mail because their name isn't on the door. Or, if you receive a letter without your name to your portuppgång it's undeliverable. If you try to pick up a parcel without a name, but with the rest of your address on, the staff will act as if this is the most INCREDIBLY BIZZARE package that has ever existed, and you are a thief trying to steal it. I reiterate at this point: no door numbers, everyone with the same name. (Side note: going to people's houses is also difficult. You usually have to know the door code and surname in advance otherwise you can't get into the portuppgång and there is no doorbell you can ring either. So you just have to stand outside like a knob.)
4. Did I seriously write "get to be outdoors" as an advantage? What a knob. This is Sweden. Deliver post on a bike at 7am in the pitch dark while a blizzard rages? No ta.
5. "INGEN REKLAM TACK" is there a single person in Sweden who doesn't have a no junk mail sticker on their door? A single one? What do the postmen do with all the junk mail then? How much of their energy is spent carrying unwanted advertising up and down the portuppgång? This is a very miljö conscious country, think of the wasted energy there! The man (oh sorry this is a very gender equal country too, OR WOMAN) who harnesses this lost energy will be very rich indeed. I'm pretty sure companies don't stop sending junk mail just because people have that sticker.
6. The ikea catalogue (aka Swedish bible) that gets delivered to every house once a year. Carry that? Nope, not me.

In conclusion: Don't be a postman. Unless you're a sadist. A poor sadist who needs the money.

Day 383: Holy Duvet

For anyone whose bedclothes come from Ikea this will be old news but: bed sheets in Sweden have holes in the top for you to stick your hands through and pull the duvet in. I didn't really earmark this as a bloggable topic until my mum was visiting and she turned her duvet cover inside out so she could do the old "flip cover and duvet together the right way round" trick. Then I showed her the holes in the top and she was AMAZED. The earth moved and she had a holy revelation. Kinda.

Note for American readers: a duvet is pronounced Doooovay. It's a quilt filled with feathers. You sleep under it. The covers can be changed every couple of weeks (if you like laundry), every couple of months (if you like dreaming in a pile of your own sweat and skin cells), or never (if you're a student living in what can only be described as a skanky pit and it's a duvet that used to belong to a sexually promiscuous male housemate who moved out and now you lend to friends who sleep over.)

Day 376: The mystery of Jif

I'm marking a comeback after my 2 months away from Sweden with an extensively researched article about Jif. That'll regain any lost readers!

I was cleaning the other day (been away, shit gets dirty) and had the revelation that I was using Jif. It was a revelation because I use Cif in England all the time and had instinctively shopped for this particular product without taking any notice of the name.

In England, Jif changed to Cif in 2000 with a massive advertising campaign to make sure nobody stopped buying Cif just because they couldn't find Jif any more. I wanted to link to the incredibly patronising advert, which features several idiotic people "from the continent" failing to pronounce the letter J in Jif and then states that everyone in England now has to have Cif instead, but I can't find it. Instead, here's a description of the advert written by the company contracted to make the advert. It must have been all over the place and on the TV every five minutes, because it's been 14 years and I still remember every detail of the advert, right down to the stupid blonde woman saying "Khhhiiiif?? Khhiiiif??" while making a face like she had shit in her mouth.

Business news reports that the name change to Cif was overwhelmingly successful while popular opinion laments the change and wants Jif back. All that is irrelevant here, though, as the main thing I need explaining to me is this:

Why did Unilever change Jif to Cif in England, where J is a commonly occuring hard sound in the English language, and keep the name Jif in Scandinavia where the letter J is a much less common sound which has a sort of Y noise?

It's basically called Yif here. It is therefore pronounced in exactly the way the patronising advert told us NOT to. What the hell, Unilever. What. The. Hell.

Unilever are still, in 2014, making people shake their heads with their shitty advertising campaigns for Jif/ Cif/ Gif/ Fliff/ Pliff/ Handy Andy/ whatever it's called. Check it out! I never would have kept up with that particular current affair if I wasn't so vigilant in the shower, and that's a free life lesson for you all.

I'll leave you with this gem I found while looking for the advert. Vi ses!

Day 301: Studenten

Around the age of 18, Swedish students graduate from Gymnasium and celebrate the end of a long, tough period of exams and study. So far, nothing strange about that. Many students drink copiously and make a lot of noise, some buy air horns and some scream and sing at the tops of their voices. Again, nothing out of the ordinary. Families are very proud and many buy gifts for their children to congratulate them for their hard work. Still not saying anything odd.

What I neglected to mention is that the students are mostly pissed out of their heads while driving around on the back of a truck, they slowly trundle through regular traffic blasting their airhorns and screaming or throwing things at passers by. They decorate their trucks with the gifts their families give them, bouquets specially designed to hang off the side or little cuddly toys which I can only assume represent the end of childhood as they bash and bump the side of the truck and get slowly soaked in the alcohol of adulthood. Some trucks also have a theme, my only photographic evidence of this madness shows a Turkish truck which drove around Fridhemsplan and could be heard in a 2km radius.

Stockholm seemed extra busy, full of parents and families carrying gifts, flowers and large signs to announce their children's successes. Traditionally the signs feature a childhood picture of the student for extra embarrassment factor.

Later, families celebrate together in a money hemorrhaging exercise involving barbeque, food, cakes, booze and togetherness. The entire enterprise can cost thousands after truck hire, hats, party clothes, signs, air horns, booze, party hosting and more, at least according to the metro newspaper.

Fortunately for me I was invited to celebrate a student and I took a nice picture to embarras- to commemorate the day! Note the student hat, which all students are entitled to, the flair hanging round the neck and the big childhood photo on the sign!

My own student graduation consisted of the school hosting a club night for all the graduating students. While it was memorable seeing all the teachers drunk off their tits, the druggy crowd daringly on coke in front of the whole staff and the turkish contingent deliberately smashing all the glasses on the floor, I think the Swedes add some interesting extra touches to the affair. After all, my consecutive Uni life basically consisted of the same club nights, but I'm sure Swedish students only get one opportunity to wear the hat, carry the sign and terrorise town on a truck!

Day 298: Wrong use of biscuits

Today my Swedish boyfriend was eating this.

WHAT THE FUCK!

They're Digestive biscuits with salami and cheese.

Let's read that again.

That is a plate of fucking SALAMI and CHEESE with DIGESTIVE fucking BISCUITS.

Now, somewhere my English mother and sister are thinking "Oh well, a bit of cheese on a Digestive might be quite nice" so maybe I can forgive the cheese (these two also advocate cheese on hot cross buns for some diabolical reason) but the salami is an unforgivable crime.

As a child growing up in England we used to get a Jacobs cracker selection box at Christmas. It contained cream crackers, mini cheddars, pepper crackers, water biscuits, wholemeal crackers and a few sneaky bastard Digestives who should not have been in a cracker box.

Crackers are crispy and tasteless or crispy and salty. They are SAVOURY and can be eaten with SAVOURY foods. Biscuits are crumbly and sweet. You dunk them in tea and they are great, or you can melt chocolate and marshmallows on them for smores if your diabetes isn't progressing fast enough. As a child I was always outraged that Digestives made the cut into the cracker selection box and people thought that meant you could eat them with cheese.

Now I'm extra incensed that Swedish people (by Swedish people I am assuming that because my boyfriend does it, all swedes cop the blame) think it's okay to eat Digestives as a cracker with salami, pickles, ham, or any of the other WRONG items I have seen the bf eating.

And worst of all, he eats these Digestives without a CUPPA TEA!

I might have to move back to England!

Day 294: Rain Clouds

Taken by Andrew Matthews/PA for the guardian

In England when you see a cloud like this, you run.

A clear summer sky which is suddenly dominated by an ominous cloud means at any moment you are going to get drenched. The rain materialises in one massive downpour lasting only a few minutes and leaving you looking like a drowned rat. I've seen people try to outrun such rain, they failed. I've seen people huddle under trees to avoid such rain, they failed. I've even seen people stand in the relative cover of a building with an umbrella to get away from such rain and, you've guessed it, they failed. The best option is to make a dash for the nearest shop when you see a black cloud. This often results in you running to a sex shop you wouldn't normally go into and huddling awkwardly in the doorway like a water-averse pervert.

Today when this cloud appeared over Stockholm a mad a dash for the nearest shop, where I spent 5 minutes looking, with mild to nonexistent interest, at second hand cooking utensils.  When I dared to leave the shop I found it was indeed raining but it was a kind of rain which English people would call piddle. It was piddling down. It was the kind of shitty, noncommittal rain which drops so intermittently you can walk around it. I'd made all that effort to respect the power of the rain and avoid it, only to find out the rain here demands no respect. If the rain in Spain falls mainly on the plain then the rain in Stockholm doesn't fall, mainly.  It lulls you into a false sense of insecurity and then drops a few token drops.

UPDATE: Later there was, in fact, a thunderstorm! But not a lot of rain...

Day 291: Shitty, shitty trains!

There are daily complaints about trains in England. Our railways are a joke, our trains never run on time, there are leaves on the line stopping anyone getting home and please, please, nobody mention a millimetre of snow! But...boy can we complain about it. It's in the news, its on the TV, we're mobbing the railway stations and we're vocal about how terrible things are. And even though fares still increase in price and we can't get things running on time, at least train companies know we're pissed off and give us as much information as they can in a clear way.

Not here.

No.

My mum visited and was on a train to Uppsala. It was not leaving the station because of signal failure. I took her off the train and we went to the pub instead. 3 hours later we returned to catch the train, and realised the people on it were the same ones who we'd left 3 hours ago. Those people had sat on that train, with no information given, for 3 hours. With no food, no drink and no knowledge of how long they would be there. And nobody complained!

This week has been an absolute disaster for the train companies. All over Sweden there have been strikes, broken signal systems, fires and burnt out circuits. If you don't believe how bad it's been, take a look at this article from the metro. One spokesperson has helpfully pointed out that Sweden has a "non-robust railway system" NO REALLY? But hey, whatever, stuff breaks and I can deal.

What I hate though is the piss poor information the companies give to travellers. There are 2 companies, SJ and SL. At different points in the week these companies have given different information. When they say there will be replacement busses, they don't say where from (they've started to now, but it's taken them a week.) They also do unbelievably poorly conceived quick fixes, like making a rush hour train terminate at Arlanda airport and having 300 people walk through 4 revolving door systems designed for individual people, a terminal building, a packed arrivals hall and a bus station so narrow they could never have expected such a crowd. Then, just to put the tin lid on it, they send 2 busses to carry all these people.

And that was a nice version of my commute story, I skipped the part where I waited 40 minutes for the train - a train that ran, like all the others, according to no schedule so I just had to turn up at the railway station and hope for the best.

A week on and the companies still haven't got a working replacement system. Perhaps if people were more outraged, demanded their money back, called the complaints line, got angry or did more than just bend over and take it up the arse, perhaps, PERHAPS the companies might have realised they should get their shit together.

Or maybe I'm finding the wrong scapegoat for this. Whatever it is, WOW the train companies here suck balls.