Day 901: Flat Hunting

I'm packing my bag and movin' on down to the big (er, moderately sized by European standards) city of Stockholm!

But before I can do that, there's a lot of flat hunting to be done.

I've never been in a position to buy any kind of property in London and I probably never will (I was going to do a bunch of research and give some interesting statistics about how many people own homes in London and how much it costs but I started reading and got too angry and depressed so I stopped.) Essentially what I'm writing here is not a comparison of English and Swedish life because I don't have a point of comparison having never owned anything in England. Instead it's a look at the quirks of browsing the Swedish home market.

For the past few weekends, and even some weekdays too, I've been looking at flats with my sambo to get a feel for what kinds of flats are on the market, how much stuff costs, which areas we actually want to live in and which areas suck sweaty, dirty balls.

Pretty much any house worth its bricks is listed on a website called Hemnet which, in typical Swedish fashion, also has a well made app on which you can draw the areas you want to search with a virtual pencil.

I get the impression that many Swedish people browse Hemnet and view flats just for the fun of it, after all it's SUCH a fun weekend activity for godawful couples with nothing better to do that ranks up there with "going round Ikea" and "checking out the high street". Hemnet sometimes gets over 2.5 million views a week, which is frankly astounding for a country with only 9.5 million people.

There are essentially 3 places to live in Stockholm, just like any other city; the expensive bit "inside the tolls" which extends just a bit north of the picture above, the slightly-cheaper-but-still-expensive bit just outside which has plenty of houses but not plenty of anything else, and the cheap bit with generous sizes for your money but long commutes with unreliable trains, questionable neighbours in some places and mind numbingly boring orbital towns in which the only source of entertainment is a big Willy.

No matter where you look, though, every flat has the same furniture because the seller has hired rental furniture from the estate agent, who in turn has probably done extensive research into exactly which furniture is best for driving up the price. All the houses are painted white as a backdrop for these items, I did a random search and these were the first 5 of the flats that showed up, all are white:

Apparently Scarlet Johansson's giant face sells well:

I know it's her because I viewed the flat and her face was CREEPY

as do apples:

I would browse for more spot-the-difference (or not) pictures but I just can't bear to look at flats any more than I absolutely have to. There are always candles, similar kinds of soap in the bathroom, fake fur throws on the balcony furniture, a funky coffee machine of some sort, fresh flowers, herbs and a good old HEMNES:

The whole time you're viewing, you're supposed to perform some kind of mental feat (a bit like Orwellian DoubleThink) in which you both appreciate the style of the room with the furniture in it, whilst simultaneously blanking the furniture out and replacing it with your own furniture. You have to see that the furniture and accessories exist and at the same time realise they do not exist in the house as you would have it. This, I will freely admit, is not a skill I have. I truly believe that I will have a HEMNES full of apples and posters of Scarlet Johansson when I finally live in Stockholm.

The oppressive samey-ness of the furniture, the plan layouts, the colours, the sales agents and the accents is only one part of a larger problem: the other people viewing the flats. The blandness of the flats is a symptom of the blandness of the viewers. The sales agents know what people like and give it to them. People queue up nicely, set their many shoes by the door and mill about in the hallway like so many shepherded sheep, looking at a pre-set list of values; is the wooden floor in good condition? Is the light coming from the south? How much debt does the residents association have? Is the floor layout original or have the occupants made changes? Is there a lift?

I viewed a flat last week and I really liked it. I would have bid for it, in fact. But it was not a very orthodox flat; the current owners had renovated, compromising on bedroom space to make room for an amazing kitchen with space for any conceivable size of party. The living room was not a standard square (Shock! Horror! Nightmare!) and the bathroom was not directly attached to the bedroom. Nobody was interested in this flat. There were no queues of shoes outside and no scrum of sheep inside. "Great!" I naively believed. Thinking this would mean a good price.

Actually what it means is that the flat would be very difficult to sell in the future and would not be a good investment. People don't like it because it doesn't meet their parameters of what is interesting. The absence of a lift, even in a building with just 3 floors, can wipe up to half a million Krona off the desired price for the flat on resale (another bizarre fact, given Swedish obsession with health and fitness). When starting out I really enjoyed flat hunting with my sambo and looking for that special place with a quirk just for us. I now realise that there can be no quirk, I have to conform to the ideals of the Swedish market if I want a sensible investment. And this, for me, sucks the fun out of the whole process.

Day 887: Stuff I'd never own in England

Some people pointed out I haven't written anything here for a while, that's mostly because I've been stuffing food in my face for the past month and haven't had my hands free for any other activities. Last weekend I tried to be a bit more active to atone for my recent prone-ness so I went skating on a frozen lake, as you do, in temperatures of -16C, as you do.

Understandably you can't just get off the sofa and go on the lake. It turns out you have to own a bunch of crap that I didn't even know existed prior to this trip in order to have a safe skating experience. It got me thinking about a few other items that I use here that I either didn't use at all in England, or which never even entered into my realms of thinking.

Ice Picks

You need these to pull yourself out of the water if the ice you're skating on breaks under your feet. You also have to have a waterproof bag in your backpack with dry, spare clothes, which acts as a flotation device. I borrowed mine from a Swedish person when my Swedish boyfriend couldn't find any of his 3 pairs. I think I'm justified in believing that all Swedes own these things. In fact, knowing the safety consciousness of Swedes I'm surprised I don't see people just casually wondering around town wearing them.

Reflective Accessories

Sometimes when I'm out walking in the night in winter which lasts, well, a long time, I see people with these shiny things dangling from every crevice or a fucking great high vis jacket  or ALL of these things at the SAME TIME and I think "Ugh come on, is that really necessary? We're in TOWWWWWN. I can SEEEE YOOOOU." Other times I'm a passenger in a car at night and we turn a corner and nearly hit a person in a dark jacket, dark trousers and dark shoes and I think "Ugh come on, where is your necessary reflective thingamajiggy? We're in TOWWWWWWN in a CARRRRR. We need to SEEEEE YOOOOOU" which is why I decided to wear the two free reflective thingamajiggys I got given. Also I like it when people put colourful flashy things on their dog. But not high viz jacket dogs, that's too far.

Air Humidifier

I can't believe I own this. My house in England was so damp you could have swimming championships for small insects. But up here in Sweden I'm dry as a motherfucker and I'll take all the precious water droplets I can get/make artificially.

Ice Skates

If you want to go ice skating in England you have to find your nearest ice rink and they'll have some skates for you to hire. If you want to go ice skating in Sweden you just wait for it to get a bit cold, rummage in your closet for your skates and go outside to the nearest big puddle.

Skiing Gloves

I used to use a single pair of gloves, I would start wearing them from about 5 degrees and downwards and that was that. Gone are those days. Now I have 3 pairs, and when it starts getting below -5 it's time for the big guns, er, mittens. Ski mittens are amazing, they keep my hands toasty even when the rest of my body has turned into a solid block of ice. They're also waterproof for that all-important snowman building, snowball fighting and snow sledding.

Outdoor/Indoor Thermometer

How do you know what to wear in the morning? Maybe you watch the weather or something. Not me. I have in my house, just like many other Swedish houses, a thermometer to tell me exactly what temperature I'm heading into. This is vital because putting on thermal underwear at anything higher than -3 will let you in for an extremely warm and uncomfortable journey to work. It's such an important part of Swedish life that many old houses have a thermometer as part of the window frame. It's also good for knowing if you can use your balcony as a secondary fridge.

Waffle Iron

Okay I only use it on Waffle day but still, I never used it at all before I moved here.

Wtf...

Most Christmas decorations are the same; fairy lights, tree, baubles, advent calenders and so on. But then there are some other bits N bobs that are a bit odd, like the blob of grey felt that's supposed to be Santa, the superabundance of pig bric-a-brac, straw sheep everywhere and whatever the fuck that bollocks is in the picture up there. I'm assured it's "classic" and I can look forward to Easter when the little ladies are replaced with yellow chicks. In the Swedish style, the decorations we have here will probably stay up until Easter anyway.

Vaccum with adjustable suction

Why don't we all have this, everywhere, ever? Amazing.

Day 844: Cider Update!

A few posts back I made cider and squirrelled it away until it had matured. I can now happily report that it tastes great! Hurray!

Well, I think it tastes nice. But some Swedish friends (and others of non-british origin) were not so keen. But they just reaffirm that I succeeded, since you've got to be a true Brit to like that true, bitter, cloudy cider that doesn't taste like cheap soda.

Day 838: Swedish English Learning

What happens if you think you're better at something than you actually are?

I recently attended a conference for English teachers in Stockholm and by far and away the most interesting piece of information I took away from the event was this: Swedish school students' motivation for learning English is low because they think they are already good at English and they don't need to study it at school.

It's a commonly accepted fact that Swedes are good at English. If you come here on a visit and can't even manage a "Hej" or a "Tack" you won't have too many difficulties getting around and about. Sometimes you'll meet someone who'll explain that they're "terribly sorry for my lack of English" and use a whole host of words you would never use yourself in doing so. You also meet Swedes who take the piss out of other Swedes speaking "terrible" English while you smile on, and nod, thinking about your own, utter lack of Swedish.

But while it's all well and good being able to communicate with people on an everyday level, a sad truth about English is that when it comes to certain situations, be they academic, business related or formal events, the language is a total bitch to master. More than this, if you're not a native speaker (and let's face it, sometimes even if you are a native speaker) there are times when you won't use a subjunctive, or a whom, or a pronoun, or some other finicky piece of shit word, and your fabulous idea suddenly won't pack the punch that it's supposed to.

This is in fact true of all languages, of course, but the particular problem with having English as your second language is that you're up against a globalised world full of millions, perhaps billions, of other people using English to reach out to the English speaking world in the best way possible. If you end up in a job which requires you to write formal, or academic, or business, or sales, or any of the other myriad forms of English then you'll either be glad that you had the chance to learn these things or spend a lot of frustrated time trying to do it as an adult. And I'm all for the adaptation of language over time, and the natural changes that come through regular use, but I don't think there's any escaping the need to use the language "correctly" according to the currently accepted model. If you write an academic paper with no apostrophes whatsoever, your reader is going to ask you where they are, instead of thanking you for pioneering a new form of apostrophe-less English.

Where am I going with this? Well, in the study which I was shown at this conference, the presenter (a very interesting academic called Alastair Henry, whose research can be found here) explained that motivation in class comes from a variety of sources. One of these sources is the perceived gap between how good the learner thinks they are at the current moment, and how good they think they will be in the future. If this gap is big, then students accept that they have some work to do and feel motivated to do it. If the gap is small, then the students feel no pressure to work hard, since they think they don't have too far to go. What does this have to do with Sweden? As part of the study, the results from Swedish students were compared with several other countries:

The numbers in the first red circle, under the r, show the mean size of the gap between how good students ranked themselves currently and how good they think they want to be in the future. Sweden's average was .34, which is almost half as small as the next smallest gap in Iran at .62. This basically means, as I already said, that Swedish teenagers think they're nearly the fucking DON at English and that they don't have to do anything because they're only .34 away from being the actual fucking DON at English.

Why do they think this? They think this because:
a) On average they spend >20 hours a week interacting with English on the internet or in games or on TV etc
b) They are actually quite good. I work in a lot of schools and when kids find out I'm English they follow me around and talk to me because they want to show off.
c) Sometimes they can express themselves better in English than in Swedish. Some kids asked a colleague of mine "how do you say 'coincidence' in Swedish?" in English in the middle of a Swedish speaking exam.

Why is it dangerous to think this?
a) Because you're never the fucking DON of a language. There is always more to learn and more to write and more to read. Unless you're J.R.R. Tolkien, then I'm happy to call you the fucking DON of English (although I'm sure he'd agree with what I just said, being an academic)
b) Because the kids I teach might be able to talk fluently and express some complex ideas but they sound like Jessie Pinkman from Breaking Bad all the while
c) Because as much as I like and use them, there are more adjectives, modifiers, verbs and just general vocabulary than just "shit" "bullshit" "motherfucking" "fucking" "poop" "fuck" "dick" and "ass".

The advice of Alastair Henry at this conference was something which all teachers should know and do all the time, but which in any case bears repeating, essentially it is the job of the teacher to show the student a different future self, one which is a bit further away from that which the student has created for him or herself. This future self can achieve more and be even better that the one which the student imagined and can inspire motivation.

No motherfucking pressure then. Poop.

Day 824: You will be assimilated, resistance is futile.

On taking a trip to England to see friends and family I realise I've gone beyond just looking the wrong way on the road and getting in the wrong side of the car. Now I've started to do subtly Swedish things while back in the home land...

1. Forgetting my Oyster card when leaving the tube station and expecting the barrier to open for me like it does in Stockholm. Standing there like a lemon.

2. Wincing when sitting in the passenger seat and watching the car make a turn.

3. Closing the entire lid of the toilet seat when flushing and wondering why it's not closed in public places.

4. Having to use a skanky scourer that's been sat in the sink for a week or two, instead of one of these:

5. Going to get a drink from the bathroom tap but remembering that's not a thing in England and having to go all the way to the kitchen.

6. Apologising to my friends for being late and texting them afterwards to say thanks for having me.

7.  Taking up two seats on the train.

8. Getting knocked down by the STENCH of too much laundry detergent on everybody's clothes

9. Using Swedish words for things around the house when I need them urgently.

10. Wishing there were toilet brushes in public bathrooms.

Day 803: Make Simple Cider

Of all the things I thought I would miss from England, Cider was not high up on my list. But here in Sweden, Cider is a byword for shitty, sugary, fizzy syrup with a vague apple hint somewhere behind the sweetness. If Swedish cider is an annoyingly perky teenage girl who talks in incessant high pitched babble about vacuous nothing, then English cider is a wizend, contemptuous, sardonic old man who knows his way around a pub or ten and won't associate himself at all with the former.

As you may have read, a not-so sneaky apple thief came a-scrumping a month or so ago and I had no apples. Fortunately a friend, actually two friends, came to my rescue and rekindled my cider-making motivation. One friend knew where we could get some apples, and the other had the right kinds of bottles to store the maturing cider. If you know where you can get these two things, then you might benefit from my simple step-by-step instructions for how to make your own cider.

1. Get apples

We did not have the means to weigh our apples, but an educated guess puts these three boxes at around 60kg. They are autumn apples, as summer apples like the Transparence Blanche that my scrumping thief stole from my garden are no good for making pressed apple juice. Apparently they just bruise and taste bad.

2. Press apples

In Sweden you can look up your local musteri or juice press. For a small fee per litre they have the capacity to press the apples quickly and efficiently. We pressed ours at Vårdsätra Musteri and they produced 40 litres or delicious juice, ready to drink or brew into cider. You can press the apples yourself, there are plenty of tutorials online, but you need extra materials and lots of space and these factors put me off. It's supposed to be simple!

3. Freeze the juice

Your juice should not have preservatives in it and can go bad quickly. Therefore if you want to gather together the things you need and not feel rushed into brewing straight away you can freeze the juice and keep it for up to 3 months. Just make sure you thaw it completely and bring it to room temperature before you add any yeast.

4.  Buy yeast, a water lock and a siphon

 

This is a water lock (vattenlås, jäsrör) you can buy this and other useful things (such as larger containers if you want to brew more cider, bigger corks and lids, yeast and siphons) from www.humle.se. I brewed my cider in the plastic bottles provided to me by Vårdsätra Musteri and just bought the cap and water lock in the picture. You put water in the water lock (no shit Sherlock) and it lets the gas out of the cider while stopping air from going in and contaminating the cider. Make sure all the things you use are clean to avoid contaminating the cider.

As for yeast I bought Safcider Yeast for Cider because it was cheap and had a good tempearature range. My bathroom is always 20 degrees and that's right in the middle of this yeast's range.

I also bought 1 metre of plastic tube to use as a siphon, which is really useful for transferring the cider from the big bottle to small bottles without all of the yeasty crap following along.

If you live in England, you can buy all of these things really, ridiculously easily. Even Tescos and Wilkinsons sell home brew kits.

5. Add sugar and yeast to the apple juice

If you want to be precise, you can also buy a Hydrometer to measure the alcohol content of your cider and to work out how much sugar needs adding.

If you are impatient, like me, and just want to see how it turns out, then add some white sugar (I added 100g to my 5L batch, I will let you know how it turns out!) to your apple juice and then add some yeast (a 5g packet like the one above is good enough for 20-30 litres) and then guess how alcoholic it is at the end when you drink a bottle and fall over (or not.) According to some websites, if you add no sugar at all you will end up with 5-6% alcohol in your cider.

Put your airtight waterlock on the bottle.

6. Let it ferment for 1-2weeks

I left mine in the bathroom for 10 days at 18-20 Degrees. I knew it was working because some froth formed (and left the brown smudge on the neck of the bottle) and for a few days in the middle you could hear the "sploop" of the air escaping from the lock. After 10 days I knew it was done because the air sploops had stopped.

7. Sterilise some containers to put the cider in

I was able to get my hands on some Czech and German beer bottles with resealable rubber/metal/ceramic lid contraption dealies. I boiled the lids to sterilise them, for 10 minutes on a rolling boil.

As for the bottles themselves, I soaked them in soapy water for 10 mins to remove the labels and then baked them for 20 minutes at 120 degrees to sterilise them.

I let them cool completely before putting any cider in them!

Some people re-bottle the cider in another large container and let it sit a bit longer before bottling, just to get rid of the dead yeast and make sure the cider is really ready.


 Since my cider had completely stopped making any bubble noises, I decided to put it straight into bottles. This may or may not be a giant mistake, watch this space...

I took the bottling process as an opportunity to try the cider and it tasted ok, like the old man mentioned above but maybe not quite wizened. I hope me comparing the taste of cider to the taste of an old man isn't putting you off completely.

And now I wait, to see if some time sitting in bottles in my basement will make the flavour mature at all, or just turn all my hard efforts into vinegar.

Day 794: Amirite?

Imagine you're at school and you are waiting for the teacher to give you a test back so you can see your score. The teacher hands you your test and most of your answers are marked with THIS:

You think "I done fucked up big time!" (It was probably a grammar test if you think in that voice). To your horror only one or two of these feature on your test:

"The world is so unfair!" you whine "I really, actually, truly studied for and/or cheated on this test! There's no way I could have failed!"

You actually did really well. In Sweden, ticks mean WRONG! and crosses mean RIGHT! as I discovered when handing back tests to my students, and as I explained to my team mate at a pub quiz last week when some Swedes marked his answers. If you don't believe me (because this is the only country in the DAMN WORLD THAT GETS TICKS AND FUCKING CROSSES MIXED UP!) then you can see for yourself on this teacher's blog.

Day 787: Plastic not so fantastic

Today marked the first day of the new rules in England forcing everyone to pay 5p for their plastic bags. Once again, as with the "Poo Bus" last year, I am left wondering how the hell England is so far behind environmentally. Well, I say that feeling all smug over here in Swedenland, but actually it turns out Sweden doesn't use that many fewer bags...

Source: BBC

God knows what the Czech are doing with their bags, making a fort? Brewing them into bag beer? Oh wait, I know, making LE FASHION.

 Katerina Smejkalova, Miss Czech Republic 2005

A hundred bags per year in Sweden? Really? I don't think I collected that many last year. But my boyfriend recently developed an obsession with reusable bags with cute print. He buys them "for me" you understand...

okay...he didn't buy ALL of them,

We do have a plastic bag full of bags in the cupboard though, which I am sure everyone has (unless you live in Finland or Denmark. There you have a plastic bag containing exactly 3 bags). What do Finns and Danes do when a friend visits and needs to carry something home? "Do you have a plastic bag I can use" "Piss off it's my last one". Reminds me of a Rolo advert. Do you love anyone enough to give them your last plastic bag?

What about when you run out of bin bags? Then what do you use? I guess a nation prepared enough to live life on the edge with only 4 plastic bags per year is also prepared enough to never run out of bin bags. This is something Brits will take some time to adapt to, culturally. We're not the most prepared folk, we'd rather just deal with the problems when they show up rather than pre-emptively tackling them.

"You've put asbestos in that wall"
-"Yeah we'll take it out when we find something better".

"Are you going to put insulation in that house?"
-"No we'll wait for people to move in and they can install it themselves".

"Let's make lots of nuclear power plants!"
-"What about the nuclear waste?" 
"Oh I'm sure we'll find something to use it for".

-"Is it a good idea to encourage dependency on Diesel fuel?"
"Sure why not! What's the worst that could happen?"

-"What will happen when you sell all those NHS contracts to private companies?"
"Only good things, I'm sure!"

And so on, and so forth. Perhaps this would be a good time to take some advice from the Danes? On this handy dandy website there are some top tips for how to avoid using excessive plastic bags, with such classics as "carry it yourself" and "make your child carry it". With the BBC already worrying on behalf of the pound shop who, poor them, will have to charge 5p increments instead of nice, round figures, I can only wish good luck with your reduced bags, England. I think you'll need it.

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.