Day 551: Möte

This is the scene: you're at work, there's a meeting and you're sitting with your colleagues. Probably your boss is talking, probably someone is taking notes, probably some decisions are being made or something is being discussed so that a decision can be made. More than likely it's boring but necessary.

If this is a scene you recognize then you don't work in Sweden. I just sat in a staff room for the last hour and a half and for a good hour chunk of it a group of people were having their weekly möte (meeting). This consisted of them discussing the blue/black gold/yellow dress for 45 minutes (nej men! Jag ser blå! Nej men du ser guld! Men titta här det är blå! Men titta där det är guld! Ååååååh neeeeeeeej ooooooh aaaaaaajj vad konstigt! Etc etc 45 minutes later.)

Now I'm about to leave the room and there are two more meetings happening, consisting of two groups of three women drinking coffee and gossiping. "Maybe they're not meetings" you protest. Then why do these peoples' timetables have a big MEETING written on them?

I myself have been in many a möte. They last around 3 hours, although a good 45 mins of this consists of chatting and drinking tea/coffee, or on a really good day cake and tea. The other 2h15 mins is people telling me things they could have emailed me, and people complaining about things that never change, never will change and no amount of complaining can change. Occasionally there will be a show of hands to vote on an issue that we never hear about ever again. More than once the phrase "vi får återkomma till det här senare" (we'll come back to this later) is used to dismiss an issue without resolution, rest assured we never återkomma to it senare.

Sometimes we have meetings about meetings. The topic of the meeting will be "what shall we discuss at the next meeting" or "how do you think the last meeting went". The interesting thing about my meetings is that I work exclusively with foreigners, with the exception of the Swedish management. My group are all English, and when asked to give feedback we always write that we want concrete direction from the management rather than an endless stream of dialogue about what the focus of the next meeting should be, but I suspect we're fighting a losing battle against a long-established and well known phenomenon. Also, being English, we don't really want the status quo to change, we just want to complain. I love 45 minutes of tea and cake and several hours' opportunity to complain about the way things are.

It does make things take longer though, this ample opportunity to sit and chat. Masters degrees take two years instead of one, waiting for a doctors or dentists appointment takes ages not because of overcrowding but because of work/life balance, kids don't learn to read and write until they're 7 because they have to have time to play and chill out and students carry on being students until they're about 80 years old.

Maybe I'm making too big of a leap between having a directionless approach to meetings and having a keen sense of work/life balance and maybe I've never seen how focussed workers in the private sector are during their meetings but I'm still willing to bet they have a decent spread at the Fika table.

The room is set up for hosting a meeting

Day 543: GRAVEL

AAAAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRGGGG  SO MUCH GRAVEL!

IT GETS IN MY BOOT SO I TAKE OFF MY BOOT AND SHAKE OUT MY BOOT THEN PUT ON MY BOOT BUT SOMEHOW THERE'S MORE GRAVEL ALREADY IN MY FUCKING BOOT! How is there gravel already in there?! I haven't even put my foot down! Can it teleport? Can it fly?

YEAH IT CAN FLY, WHICH IS WHY IT SMASHES LITTLE HOLES IN THE CAR WINDSCREEN WHEN YOU'RE DRIVING ON THE MOTORWAY!

And just look at this PILE OF SHIT I have to walk past on every FUCKING street corner! and LOOK HOW MUCH FUCKING GRAVEL IS IN THE BACKGROUND! That's not even the HALF OF IT.

Yeah that's right, I made the picture XL so YOU have to look at this fugly shit, too.

Really I should be thankful for the gravel because it stops me from falling on my arse when the floor is nothing but ice. BUT I'M NOT! LOOK HOW IT FUCKS UP MY NICE WOODEN FLOOR:

LOOK AT IT!

Door mat? Gravelly. Escalators? Gravelly. The bottoms of my shoes? Gravelly. Busses? Gravelly. Trains? Gravelly. Shops? Gravelly. My whole FUCKING LIFE RIGHT NOW? GRAVELLY.

One advantage is that when you vacuum the house it makes that satisfying gravelly noise because the hoover is picking up so much gravel. I guess that means I have to change the bag more often though, fucking gravel.

Eventually the council will come and pick it all up again, so that's nice. Not in my house though. Or in my shoe. And they won't fix the car windscreen or empty my hoover bag. Fuckers.

Day 533: Chess

Chess is really fucking popular here in Sweden!
Who knew!

I saw a man playing chess on his phone during his commute and I thought "Blaaaarrgh chess." This is because I have no patience for chess (or yoga, but that's another story) and I thought playing chess would make my commute feel longer, not shorter! It reminded me that I've seen a lot of people playing chess on their phones, not to mention a lot of little kids and teenagers playing chess at school of their own free will. Every classroom in primary and secondary school usually has a big box of chess boards and pieces for children to play with from the age of 6 onwards. And they know what the pieces fucking do! (Not like some kids I saw in England once who were just eating the pieces.)

The superabundance of chess is due in part to generous state funding. Sweden's Chess federation has a well organised committee and spends their money wisely on many projects, there are chess events and clubs all over Sweden and the sport is linked closely to schools. In comparison to the English Chess federation the Swedish website is sleeker, has a flashy logo and has a much catchier URL suggesting that it is, in fact, the go-to place for chess. The English website looks like some chess nerds had a panic during their 5 minute break from chess and asked their non-chess playing friends to throw something together with some non-state awarded pennies they saved while not playing chess.

So why does Sweden play more chess than England? Er, well, actually it probably doesn't. I haven't done a whole lot of research, but my limited digging did show that there have been significantly more notable chess players in England than in Sweden. (The problem with my research is that it's from English Wikipedia, there wasn't a corresponding Swedish list). All I can say is that I have definitely seen more people playing in Sweden and that chess has a much better public profile here than it does in England, almost undoubtedly thanks to the uptake of chess in schools. The only place I've seen kids enjoying chess in England was working in a private school, suggesting that good old Swedish socialism has spread the game across the masses, rather than keeping it as the preserve of the intellectual (read: rich) elite.

Otherwise we can thank the long history of chess in Scandinavia for its being an established game; Vikings brought the game to Sweden in the first Millennium having received it during trade in the Middle East and Byzantium. The famous Lewis Chessmen found in Scotland were made in Norway and the current world chess champion is a Norwegian. The most common and famous opening chess move is even called the "Scandinavian Defense".

The Lewis Chessmen, British Museum

As I said, chess is really fucking popular here in Sweden and who knew!
Well, now you do.

Day 527: Spongebob Square

Don't get me wrong, Spongebob Squarepants is probably weird in all languages. Here's the English version if you haven''t heard it (where have you BEEN?)

But there's just something ridiculously hilarious about Svampbob Fyrkant, as he's known in Swedish. I think it's just something about how fucking LITERAL the name is, I just don't know. Hey kids, this is a show about a FOUR-CORNERED SQUARE that is also a SPONGE! (Or possibly a mushroom or a scourer depending on how your translate svamp....context is important, kids!) Also, somehow it's more surreal maybe, that it is in fact Bob who is square, and not his pants. Mind. Blown.

Är ni med, barn? / Are ya ready kids?
Aj aj, kapten! / Ay Ay Captain!
Jag hör er inte! / I don't hear you!
Aj aj, kapten! / Ay Ay Captain!
Åååååååååååååh.. / Ooooooooooh
Vem bor i en ananas djupt i det blå? / Who lives in a pineaple deep in the blue?
Svampbob Fyrkant! / Sponge Bob Square
Gul och porös, absorberar som få! / Yellow and porous, absorbs what he gets
Svampbob Fyrkant! / Sponge Bob Square
Jag varnar dig kompis, visst finns det en risk! / I'm warning you friend, of course there's a risk
Svampbob Fyrkant! / Sponge Bob Square
Bob får dig att gapa precis som en fisk! / Bob makes you gape just like a fish!
Svampbob Fyrkant! / Sponge Bob Square
Redo? / Ready
Svampbob Fyrkant! / Sponge Bob Square

Day 524: Swedish Advertising

Advertising. It's the bane of existence...right? The comedian Bill Hicks once asked people who worked in Marketing to kill themselves, such was his hatred of people trying to sell us stuff.

But today during my commute I realised that, actually, billboards here in Sweden aren't always trying to sell me stuff. I've accidentally stumbled upon this subject before, while talking about the Feminist Initiative spreading awareness and Anarchists trying to destroy adverts using counterproductive methods. In these posts, the adverts mentioned were spreading information for public awareness rather than for sales purposes, and this seems to be fairly common. Here are a few pictures I took today in the tunnelbana in Stockholm, all of these are next to, or opposite, each other:

"Recycle if it's beyond saving! Do an Electrical cleanse!"

"We must be better at economising the world's resources"

"Choose the right fish for the future"

So there's the proof, public awareness campaigns are, indeed, common.

"But just how common?" I wondered. "And how likely am I to see some interesting information instead of being encouraged to buy something?"

That's when I did some very low intensity research. A sample you might say. I made a tally of every single advert I saw for the rest of the day and put them into categories; "Selling" if the advert wanted me to buy a product, "Public Info" if the advert wanted me to make more ethical/environmentally friendly choices, "Education and Training" if it was a school or college being advertised, "Gym/Public health" as a separate category (because even though they're businesses I feel it's a bit more public-health orientated than being encouraged to drink coke) and "Event" for concerts and sports events. The results are in!

Predictably "Selling" has the majority. But interestingly it doesn't even make up half of all the adverts I saw. And even more interestingly, there were very few different companies which actually make up that block of 39%. Around a fifth of all adverts I saw in the "Selling" category were from Coca-Cola  while a further sixth of the adverts were from Volvo. There were none, or very few, of the adverts I would describe as common in England, such as for McDonalds.

The "Public Information" category weighs in at around a quarter of all the adverts I saw. For someone desensitised to seeing them, perhaps this does not seem too high a number. But for me, coming from a country with next to no such adverts (and more importantly, a country which doesn't invest enough money in such projects to allow widespread advertising) a quarter is A LOT. I'm impressed that everyone is told to save the environment, consider the chemicals they put down the drain, recycle, eat sustainably and god only knows what else on a daily basis.

All this being said, I can appreciate that some of the adverts I've labelled as "Public Service" are still, implicitly, trying to get people to buy things, albeit more environmentally friendly things. So that just raises the question, are Swedes obsessed with saving the planet because their adverts encourage them, or do the adverts target the enviro-conscious Swede because that's just the way they are?

Day 516: Swedish Girl Starter Pack

There is a lot of this meme going around at the moment. My commute today amidst an army of clones inspired today's post.

Day 511: The White Line

The definitive worst thing about snow is its ability to melt and refreeze into an ice rink making all roads treacherous. This week my boss sent everyone a "welcome back to a new term" email, in which the bulk of the words were spent detailing how she had decked it outside a school and we should all take care not to fall over out there!

There's only one place of refuge at a time like this, the centre of Uppsala. God knows how much money is spent on this but the entire central portion of the city has underfloor heating which melts all the ice. The line where the heating stops is clearly visible.

Day 504: 100th Post Best Bits Recap

Welcome back, it's 2015 somehow already and time for the 100th post of my blog, a feat I never thought I could accomplish since I have the attention span of a small hyperactive child on MDMA. But yes, Sweden really has turned out weird enough to write at least 100 things about. I hope you all had a God Jul (Merry Christmas) and a Gott Nytt År (Happy New Year) two things about which I wrote precisely nothing since I went back to England and ate Christmas Pudding (not eaten here) pulled Christmas crackers (not pulled here) and ignored the Queen's speech (..Okay, that is ignored here too)

I'm going to take this opportunity to run down the author-chosen top 10 weirdest things I have encountered over the last 100 posts. Enjoy!

Nummer tio
Swedish movies are not actually limited to Ingmar Bergman's works, and Swedish Music does not all sound like Abba. Also, there is a fantastic movie which proves both of these things at the same time and can be watched for free online.


Nummer nio
I've been here long enough now to have probably eaten my own body weight in tortilla chips, thanks to the Swedish obsession with eating TexMex on Fridays.

Nummer åtta
Note leaving is an entirely acceptable form of anger. In addition, the more gender-equal and passive aggressive the note, the better. Notes are permitted in places of work, on houses of neighbours and probably even when handed to strangers directly when passing them in the street, or sticking them on people as post-its. In a similar vein, Swedes will not contravene orders given in note or sign form.

Nummer sju
Fika (coffee break) is not Fika without 800 calories of cream crammed into a slice of diabetes. If that sounds great! then take a look at my recipes for semlor, cinnamon buns, waffles and princess cake.

Nummer sex
I was right to believe that Swedes care about the environment. They recycle so much they have to queue for the privilege,  use only environmentally friendly busses and even go so far as to invent a machine to scoop up trees and move them instead of uprooting them during building works!

Nummer fem
Fuck me these people care about candles. So much so that I had to write not one but TWO whole posts on the subject.

Nummer fyra
Ice cream vans. In Arctic weather. at 11pm. What the.fuck Sweden. What. The. Fuck.

Nummer tre
There has to be a National Reason To Celebrate at least once every six weeks. Nothing to do in September, oh! well, there are Crayfish so let's celebrate that. School's out? Oh, well let's ride in trucks and get drunk. The days are getting longer? Oh, well let's get absolutely rat-arsed and sleep in our own vomit. What about "Our Lady's Day" (Vår Fru Dag) which sounds a bit like "Wa-ffle-Dag"? Oh! Well let's have a whole day to eat waffles then!

Nummer två
CIF IS STILL CALLED JIF HERE! HOW IS THIS NOT MAJOR NEWS IN ENGLAND???????!

Nummer ett
Here it is, the weirdest thing about Sweden: people put their shopping in a line on the checkout counter instead of in a pile AND they rotate the items so that the barcode faces the scanner to help the cashier's wrists.  They all do this, collectively, as a society, for the good of the cashier. Cue twilight zone music.

Day 473: Inherent Swedish Ability

This is a piece of knäckebröd. For anyone who doesn't already know, it's basically a cracker made from rye or wheat, tastes approximately like cardboard and is so hard you could probably stack a few together and murder some people. Swedish people eat them so much there is an aisle in the supermarket with different kinds of what is essentially the same thing. Kids at schools eat them at snack time. In the staffrooms of schools there is knäckebröd. On the tables in the dining halls of places of work there is knäckebröd. On the bread table at a buffet there is knäckebröd. Right now while I am typing, my Swedish boyfriend is buttering a piece of knäckebröd. I can hear it from next door because they're that fucking hard.

I would like to draw your attention to the picture above. I buttered that piece of knäckebröd and I have to say I did a lousy job. The surface has a pillowed texture and the butter just goes in the crevices. My attempts to put the knife in the gap and redistribute the butter have just meant the butter is piled in a similar quantity in an adjacent crevice. Now, I've lived here for 473 days so I like to think I've learned a little bit about Swedish life, but I don't think I will ever learn how to butter a piece of knäckebröd. Let's compare with my boyfriend's knäckebröd:

Look at that. It's a fucking piece of art.

While the butter is in the crevices, which is unavoidable, unlike my piece the butter is in pretty much all the crevices, rather than just one measly side. Also, it took me fucking ages to "spread" the butter, so mine is half melted. My boyfriend's piece has unmelted butter, effortlessly spread on with a single sweep.

Now, I'm not much of a scientist but I'm willing to state that this is evidence enough for Swedish people having an innate ability to prepare knäckebröd. Even with lots of practise I'm just not as good as a Swede when it comes to buttering. Hats off to you guys.

Day 468: How Sweet!

I've come to discuss this.

These are sweets. You can buy them in England. They're called mushrooms and when I was a kid I used to pretend I was Alice in Wonderland and that one side would make me tall and the other side would make me small.

But when I was a kid, the pink side was strawberry flavour and the white side had no flavour but sugar. These mushrooms here are BLACK LIKE THE NIGHT and it can only mean one thing in this country. Liquorice.

I'm not Liquorice's greatest fan. I'll admit to buying the occasional packet of Liquorice Allsorts, but not for the liquorice. The best sweets in the bag are the coconut one and the little pink or blue round one which have arguably the greatest sugar to liquorice ratio of all the choices.

That's right Bertie, I'll eat your face and feet.

Nevertheless these weird liquorice salty mushrooms are actually quite nice...I feel a bit wrong for having admitted that in a public forum. A while back Pretzel-Flipz used to be on sale in England, but only for a short time as the public just COULDN'T HANDLE chocolate (a sweet) with pretzels (salty) and I'm still and forever a bit disappointed in the British public for their failure to assimilate Pretzel Flipz into their hearts. Middle class people are coming around to the idea of salty/sweet now thanks to the advent of Salted Caramel (which coincidentally I hate.)

Here in Sweden once a sweet has emerged it's simply not good enough to only have one version. Let's examine this theory. We can start with the mushrooms. In addition to the salty ones above there are also the regular "strawberry" (according to the manufacturer's website, who knew?!) ones, and some "kola" ones (this doesn't mean Cola. It means Caramel)

Alright, thats just 3 types. But then, for those people who only like the white side of the mushroom (god knows why) there are sockerbitar.

Meanwhile those people who like the pink side of the mushroom can go for the Strawberry sockerbit. But I should probably warn you that eating only one of the two colours can cause you to be either excessively large or excessively small, such that doors could become unsurmountable obstacles.

And for those people who like the texture of mushrooms and sockarbitar but would like to branch out and try a different shape, there are foam bananas, or as I shall now refer to them, scum bananas since they are SKUMBANAN in Swedish. For the love of God, write to Ikea now and petition for a wardrobe or whatever called SKUMBANAN.

Don't tell anyone, but this is actually a picture of sugar free foam bananas

But what if you eat your own body weight in skumbanan and then you don't know how you can continue on from that point? Have no fear, chocolate scum banana is here (Or chocolate Mushroom if you haven't had your 5-a-day):

And if all that chocolate is getting a bit too rich on the palate, you can cleanse with a nice, refreshing, sour scum banana.

And when the sugar gets just a bit too sugary, it's back to salt. Salt bananas, that is!

Basically this post could go on forever with variants of the same damn thing, so I'll leave you with this gem I found while searching Google Sweden for all these sweets. And don't tell your excellent, Swedish dentist.