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.

Day 746: Closed for summer!

This blog hasn't been updated in a while because it was SOMMARSTÄNGT.

If the local tax office, police, certain hospital departments, pensions service, service for protection against unfair dismissal from work, job centre, national insurance centre, gynecological clinics, youth intake and sti clinics, government departments, train station offices, childcare facilities, restaurants, theatres, museums, attractions, shops and bars can all take a bunch of time off for summer, then so can I.

Day 658: Birthdays in Sweden

Since it was my birthday recently I thought I'd better let you all know that they don't sing Happy Birthday in Swedish. They actually sing a song which is EVEN OLDER than the one we all know and have lovingly changed to "squashed tomatoes and stew/you look like a monkey/and you smell like one too/belong in the zoo".

The lyrics are as follows:

Ja, må han/hon leva, yes may he/she live
Ja, må han/hon leva, yes may he/she live
Ja må han/hon leva ut i hundrade år yes may he/she live to be a hundred years old
Javisst ska han/hon leva, of course he/she will live
Javisst ska han/hon leva, of course he/she will live
Javisst ska han/hon leva ut i hundrade år. of course he/she will live to be a hundred years old

None of these lyrics will be any news to my Swedish readers, so for a bit of extra entertainment value (and for the benefit of those non-Swedes who have no idea what the song actually sounds like) here's a disastrous children's pop classic version of the bloody thing:

You often get subjected to this song multiple times a day, as you are traditionally woken up by family bringing breakfast while singing this song, then probably your friends or colleagues will sing it at you at work or school, some other friends or relatives will call you up on speakerphone to sing it at you and then when you get your cake you'll have it sung yet again.  

The only thing I really wanna know is, what the fuck are you supposed to sing to someone on their 100th birthday? Awkward!  Some suggestions for changes to the final line are "Javisst ska hon leva många lyckliga år" (of course she will live many wonderful years) and "Javisst ska du leva så länge du får" (of course you will live as long as you can) but in truth it was even hard to find those suggestions. I'm nowhere even close to being 100 and I'm already worrying about it, apparently not a lot of other people are doing the same.

After the song, everybody does the "trefaldig hurra" which means saying hooray 3 times, a bit like the seriously outdated "Hipp-hipp hooray" in England which I haven't heard anyone do for a goodly while, probably for goodly reason.

Day 651: How to Officially Speak Swedish

Today I received an official document in the post stating that I have passed a Swedish language test called TISUS and can therefore apply for lots of jobs and university courses that I couldn't before. Hipp-hipp-hurra, as they say in Swedish (I would never say that in English unless I had just been out fox hunting with the other lords and ladies.)

That's right, my name is officially  .           

I thought I'd better share my gradually-acquired knowledge of how you can become legitimerad (certified) and behörig (authorised) in Swedish, as there is no clear path through the nebulous options open to immigrants as to how Swedish can be learned outside of the government-offered, hit-and-miss SFI (Swedish for Immigrants).

OPTION 1: SFI

You arrive in Sweden. You register your arrival with the migration board and maybe also with the job centre (arbetsförmedlingen). Somebody somewhere starts talking about "S. F. EEEEEEee" and you spend several weeks thinking it's spelled SFE when it's actually SFI but people don't say the English letters and choose instead to drop the Swedish version on you without warning. Somebody with dollar signs for eyes tells you to sign up ASAP because you get, like, a million bajillion krona for completing the course. So you sign up! But, there's no money for you if you're from the EU. Hey, fuck it, you signed up anyway.

You have an interview with a person who says they want to see your level so they can place you in the right track. You get allocated A B or C track depending on how much you already speak. You go to the first class with ALL THE ENTHUSIASM until you find out the class is filled with a continually replenishing stock of people on all levels of the course. Together. At once. With one teacher. Also there are some people in there who have always been there, they never complete. They just come for the warmth maybe.

Eventually you take some tests and get some paper with A B C or even, brace yourself, D on it, and feel, er, well not great but, something, for having completed SF-EEEEEEEE. "But I have a certificate from SFEEEEEEE!" you tell yourself, when you still can't have a conversation with the average cleaning lady from Eritrea.

OPTION 2: SAS

You flounder around after SFI (or maybe you skip SFI entirely because going straight there after work twice a week for 3 hours was not the most useful use of your time and watching the Swedish version of Police-Camera-Action on TV was teaching you more) until someone talks about SAS. "Aha! SAS, I know that acronym! It's the Swedish national airline!" you nod knowingly . WRONG. SAS means "Svenska Som Andra Språk" or Swedish as a Second Language. It's where you go when you realise you can't have a conversation with the nice Eritrean lady and maybe should learn how. But you can't go there unless you have your bit of paper with D on it from SFEEEEEE, so if you skipped, then it's back to Joseph and Layla, your old, reliable friends who should still be enjoying the warmth of the SFI classroom.

After many an evening of crying into a textbook and reading the dryest reading list ever, you'll earn yourself the HOLY GRAIL which is a SAS 3 certificate. And you will be able to converse with whichever cleaning lady you like. About Camus and Dostoevsky. Here's an example of the sort of shit you can do after SAS 3. Also look for employment, be generally awesome at Swedish, yada yada yada.

If you're somehow outside my network of Facebook friends and reading this, then you might like some useful links. Hermods is a company with several colleges teaching SFI and SAS. Komvux is an adult education college with branches all over Sweden, use a google search to find one close to you. Folkuniversitet is like Open University, an Adult Education college offering all kinds of courses including Swedish. Some places are free, some are not. Keep en eye out.

OPTION 3: TISUS

Let's say you hate going to class for hours and hours in the evening when it's dark outside after 2pm, -5 degrees and there is chocolate in your house. Let's also say you have a lot of Swedish speaking friends and quasi-family who babble a lot of Swedish in your presence, so much so that you can crash your way through a conversation with the cleaning lady "Yes weather good. weather sun. You (plural) like sun? Me like rain, from England ha ha! Always cleaning? No, was not you petrochemical engineer back home? Is truth!" Swedish I can talk. Test can I take maybe now.

TISUS is a test run every 6 months by Stockholms University, although you can take the test in a few different places. If you can pass the speaking, reading comprehension and writing tests then you'll get yourself a bit of paper like mine and can apply for University courses in Swedish. You'll probably have to speak a bit better than my Yoda impression, but you won't have to read Dostoevsky. I was very fortunate and already had a job when I arrived so I learned Swedish at work and as I went along, I also have a background in learning languages. This short-cut, take-a-test-and-it-will-all-be-over, option suited me best, but it does cost 1600kr so it's not for the weak of wallet.

OPTION 4: HÖGSKOLEPROVET

Similar to TISUS but for people who can't translate over their grades to the Swedish system, or who have no grades. A test in Swedish of Maths, English and Swedish that can get you in to many further education establishments. Every year the newspapers publish a quiz of the vocab test in Swedish because usually there are several words that even Swedish people don't know. If you want more information about this you can click here.

OPTION 5: KORTA VÄGEN

"Awww man more studying blarhujfioweifbsdfjg" is pretty much what any normal person thinks when confronted with further study when looking for a job. "I worked a lot back home and now I'm right back down the bottom again". Yes. Well, that happens when you can't even write an email to a colleague about the printer being out of paper. Doesn't matter if you have a PHD in putting paper in a printer if you can't communicate your expertise. Korta Vägen means "The Short Way" and is run by Stockholms University and the job centre Arbetsförmedlingen. It aims to give you some experience in using Swedish in the workplace and tries to help you find a work placement relevant to a field in which you have previous experience. Also it gets you out of the house so you stop cleaning shit for the hundreth time and contemplating life as an alcoholic.

The website tries to be all mysterious and "oooh....aah....contact the job centre for more details!" but everyone knows that's irritating as fuck and REAL INFORMATION would be more useful. I believe at the least a piece of paper with a D on it (no, not that kind of D) will be needed from SFEEEEEE before Korta Vägen is a viable option.

OPTION 6: READ THE MILK CARTONS

As previously mentioned, you can try to learn Swedish by reading the milk cartons, which feature interesting new factoids every day. This won't get you a qualification, however.

Day 644: Kina Review

I've decided that what makes a successful blog is regular updates. "Right, that's it, every Monday I'm going to update" I decided. I sat here for an hour and a half and did sweet FA. (That's Fuck All or NOTHING for anyone who's never done FA, you smarmy bastards).

I racked my brains for a goodly while trying to come up with cah-razy Swedish shit that happened this week and decided that while endless chat about jogging, endless people asking me which race I will be jogging in this season, endless others talking about the races they are jogging in and endless adverts for jogging events including the Stockholm Marathon do qualify as Swedish shit, they are exactly that, shit. I'm not further endorsing the jogging obsession already prevalent here, which manifests mainly in people wearing jogging pants at all times to BE PREPARED for unexpected jogging, by talking about jogging.

Instead, I will tell you about the chocolate I shoved in my gullet out of boredom and desperation when failing to come up with a half-decent blog post.

If you've had enough blog and want to leave now, here is a summary of the product called "KINA" (pronounced SHINA and meaning China): I don't know why anyone would a) be inspired to make b) make c) market d) purchase or e) eat this snack.

They're within reaching distance of my blog-writing because they were a thank-you gift to my boyfriend for some help he gave to someone. After eating them I'm starting to wonder if my boyfriend actually fucked some shit up real bad and this is somebody's way of telling him to just not help in the future. The little wheat puffs taste like burnt rice covered in the chocolate found in a year old 99p advent calendar. They're so small it takes your body a few seconds to actually notice you've fed it something, but if you eat a whole bunch at once you get a flavour sensation a bit like being punched in the face by the Sugar Puffs Monster. Some genius, probably in the good old 1930's when it looks like the packaging was designed, thought that there is a clear connection between CHINA and THOSE POINTY HATS THAT EVERYONE IN CHINA WEARS. At some point in the 1990's another designer realised the mistake and added some EXPLODING CHOCOLATE BALLS because the packaging wasn't dynamic enough.

Actually my history is totally wrong. Kina was started in the 1960's and used to have this lovely, absolutely not-racist-at-all face on the packaging until the PC brigade caught up with it in 2011 and had it banned:

The hat's okay though, because everyone wears them so that's a fact, not a stereotype. Right? If you've got any ideas as to why these fuckers are even called KINA, send your thoughts on a postcard.

Day 634: Eurovision Winners

How do I feel now that Sweden has won the Eurovision Song Contest yet again? I feel probably the same as most people, that is to say, not a lot frankly.

How did I feel on Saturday night when I was at a Eurovision Song Contest party, wearing a costume to support my randomly allocated team (yaaaaay Georgia), watching the votes coming in and sitting on the edge of my seat when Russia was two twelve point votes ahead of Sweden? Well, considerably more engaged. And that's probably not because we had money riding on it, since Georgia had no chance when they used words like "oximated" in their song.

Google trend showing that people in England collectively googled "Oximated" because wtf?

A lot of people will tell you that the UK doesn't take the Eurovision Song Contest seriously and that they don't care. But I think these people are lying. All the Brits I've ever met can at least converse on a basic level about how shit the entrants are and they wouldn't be able to do that unless somehow, somewhere they had watched the damn thing. For the longest time we had a presenter called Terry Wogan who drawled ironically, sardonically and sarcastically all over proceedings in his Irish accent and most people tuned in just for him, Brits love a good piss take.

He was replaced by Graham Norton, funnily enough another Irish fella who does just as much micky-taking as his predecessor. I've stuck a little load of golden moments from Graham here in the blog, the video is worth watching most at 2:20 when Albania, er, contribute.

The Swedish commentators tell you a lot of factoids in a dry, disinteresting fashion. I will say this though, they may have tried to emulate Graham a little bit and instead of sounding funny and dry they just sounded like they're bitching and slagging off the contestants. If you type in "Eurovision funny" into youtube you get a lot of Graham. If you type "Eurovision rolig" into Swedish youtube you get....a standard list of Eurovision songs. Nuff said.

Everyone left the party feeling like it was really great that Sweden won, also drunk. We mused a bit about why Sweden won. Was it political? Is it because Sweden is viewed neutrally? Maybe it's simply because the song was poppy, likeable and had the best accompanying graphics. Also the singer was good looking which helps.

In fact yeah, I'm guessing that because the song was poppy and crafted in the most generic fashion possible (Swedes being the masters of this as demonstrated by their consistently writing a large number of the songs in the contest and even choreographing some others) it won the Jury vote. But it DIDN'T win over the public, Italy did, by a long way. So perhaps Europe isn't so into shitty, repetitive pop as you might think, and actually prefer shitty opera warbling instead?

Thx Wikipedia as usual

This table also handily shits on our drunken happiness that Russia was not as popular in Europe as Sweden, psshh yeah right. It helps if you have had a massive union of countries under your control at some point in the last hundred years. But not more than a hundred years otherwise they all hate you, right United Kingdom?

I realise you've now spent more time than you possibly bargained on reading an analysis of a song contest which has no bearing whatsoever on your life. But before you go I must point out this: the UK's number one choice was Lithuania's far-too-long onstage kiss and Poland's scraping-the-barrel-sympathy-vote wheelchair lady wearing a giant sail. Sweden, meanwhile, took their votes very seriously and nominated arguably the three most talented artists into their top ranks. Muse on that if you will, or you know, don't. It's only Eurovision after all!

Day 633: INGEN REKLAM TACK

I was just sitting in the flat minding my own business when I heard an almighty KA-THUNK at the door. It was too early to be post and as anyone who has read my post about post would know, heavy post is not delivered directly anyway. "What the F was that?" I wondered aloud. I opened up the inner door and found THIS MIGHTY PILE OF BULLPLOP:

I discovered, much like my neighbours who had the same experience, that upon having all of our front doors upgraded to security doors last week we had lost all of our "INGEN REKLAM TACK" stickers. In England when you stick a little sticker that says "No Junk Mail" on your letterbox it will result in one of two things, either a) nothing. The junk mail will come anyway or b) The delivery agent will see your sticker as a challenge and post 4 times as much shite as they did before.

Apparently I had not appreciated the power of the INGEN REKLAM sticker. A healthy bundle of deals is slammed onto my doormat twice a week now. The residents of the building are quite worried about the loss of the stickers and one of the points for discussion at our annual residents meeting is the printing out of new stickers for everyone. Meanwhile I imagine the delivery agents are having a corresponding meeting about how they need to MAXIMISE THE TIME NOW! SEIZE THE MOMENT! that our defences are down and they can ply us with as much advertising as they can before the shields go back up.

Does this mean that there is some guy who has come and tried to deliver advertising every week for years and years and each time been disappointed that the stickers were still there? And suddenly there was a day when the doors started to get changed and he found that the stickers were gone and Christmas had come early? Or is there a cartel between the door changing company and the advertisers, so that they get information about the stickers not being up any more and can get straight down to business at the earliest opportunity?

This country is so weird. I just don't understand shit like this.

Day 623: RELEASE THE KRAKE-er I mean- COWS

Kosläpp is a combination of two words; "ko" which means cow and "släpp" which means release, free, let loose. I recently had a Swedish friend argue that "cow release" sounds too violent to accurately convey the meaning of the word, I meanwhile believe that it sounds far too sexual. In any case, the releasing of the cows is in fact not a giant, drawn-out cow wank, but the letting out of cows after a long winter in their sheds.

Why is this even a thing? Well, Swedish cows spend a long time indoors on account of the fact that nobody wants frozen milk with their breakfast. Also, contrary to my childhood wishes, cold cows do not produce mini-milk. When they finally get to go outside again in the spring they go a bit nuts. There are plenty of videos on YouTube to prove this, here's just a short one to get you started:

I organised a last minute event to go and see some cows being released (teehee) and expected to have nobody come (and also to be laughed at for waking up early on a Sunday morning to look at cows like I was attending a bovine church.) Instead, 18 fellow bovine believers followed along, including 5 Swedes who were equally new to the whole thing as the rest of us immigrants. According to my milk, the kosläpp phenomenon is really taking off, with record numbers attending (You can learn a lot of Swedish by reading the milk cartons and then you can start sentences with "according to my milk").

We took a picnic spot on a mound to one side of the paddock and waited for the cows. There was a little farmers market where you could get coffee, tea, milk from the farm and hamburgers - presumably from all the dead man-cows, since all the milking cows are ladies. Aww cute cows, now let's roast their manfolk and let them smell the dead (and drink all the milk they never get to feed their non-existent babies). American cowboy-themed music played over some speakers and some fake cowboys wondered around twirling their lassos impotently.

With just a few minutes to go before the cows came out the farm suddenly became absolutely packed with children shouting "MUUU. MUUUU. MUUUU" (Swedish for Moo) and people pointing iPhones and DSLR cameras at the paddock. There was a half-hearted countdown which went something like:

"20...19............................*long silence*......................................9.................*long silence*........................3..2..1!"

for some reason, and then...yay cows! They ran about, jumped with swinging udders, rubbed their faces on the grass, headbutted each other and congregated right in the entranceway so other cows couldn't get out, a bit like Stockholmers on public transport. After 5 minutes a short-lived hail shower started and all the cows tried to go back inside again, but a man with outstretched arms managed to convince them that he was big enough to stop the whole herd and so they all went out into the field.

Now I know I'm putting a cynical slant on this, but the cows were actually damn cute. If you've ever bothered to look at a field of cows you'll know they don't do much. They eat grass and amble. This kosläpp was the most I've ever seen a cow move. I'll leave you with this pic of some cows moo-ving. YES, IT WAS A MOO PUN.