The longer you live somewhere the less in-your-face the cultural differences are, and the more you have subtly absorbed those traits which you once considered differences.
Fortunately for the sake of this blog I still encounter a few of them, such as this fine evening when the weather is 23 degrees and the sun will shine on some corners of Stockholm until after 9pm, enabling the good Swedish folk to barbeque farty hamburgers and smoky, fatty fish to their hearts' content underneath the windows which I have opened to get an airflow through the flat.
Perhaps this has little to do with cultural difference (British people like to BBQ too) and more to do with me being a vegetarian. I understand that it is, in fact, possible to grill non-meat products (or as I like to call it, food) but really, fire warmed squeaky cheese does not drastically outshine its frying pan cousin and added-last-minute-then-left-to-go-luke-warm vegetable skewers with soggy peppers and mushrooms aren't ever going to be described as the highlight of anyone's summer.
The joy of the grill is really reserved for the tired, middle-aged Swedish dad, who uses dinner time as an excuse to stand the fuck outside away from, well, everyone else (except, perhaps, other tired, middle aged dads who are prepared to talk about grilling and little else) and flip a bit of meat over the coals. Of course, in contrast to most vegetarian food which requires quite a lot of TLC before grilling it will add any discernable benefit, anyone's pound of flesh is always improved by maillard reaction.
"Vi ska grilla!" (We're going to have a bbq!) is the culturally acceptable but yet also catastrophically and diabolically lazy way of hosting summer parties, since all the host has to do is set fire to something, and the guests have to bring the items to burn. Swedish summer parties always result in 25,000 packs of unused halloumi cheese in the host's fridge and a conga line of freezing guests at sundown all carrying up to the flat any errant ketchup, skewers, empty beer bottles, half eaten hot-dog buns, depleted crisp bowls, cutlery, tablecloths, extra chairs, trays, mayonnaise tubes, and uneaten salad that made their way downstairs in a gradual drip-drip-drip but must all go back up as one.
There's only so much god-damned halloumi I can eat, to be honest, and there's probably a limit to how much carcinogen I can bear to have seeping into my bedroom from the man who likes his cow to taste like charcoal every night of the week. I hasten to add that it isn't just the one dad who's out there grilling on the daily, every flat in the inner garden has a grill setup. So if one person gets their char on at 5, another can start at 6, a third at 7, another at 8 and we can enjoy that smokey, smokey, meaty, meaty goodness all night long! There are also some grills out front, so if I want to close the back windows and let some fresh air through the front, well, I'd better hope those dads are out at one of Sweden's 900 burger restaurants.
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| She's probably set fire to the whole thing 'cuz she's not usually the one doing the grilling... |
