Things are really starting to pick up now, I got good, sensibly priced bed sheets, my luggage finally came in (you don’t know how good a change of clothes really feels until you’ve lived in one set for 4 days in a row) and there are all these fun shindigs they have all the new students do. I bought a bike today, which makes getting around a lot easier, still have to break it in though. Uppsala slopes down one side and I’m living on the up side, which makes going into town a breeze. First gear downhill you can get there in about a minute flat, but you’re going so fast you die if you hit anything. Going back to my dorm/apartment on the other hand is pretty rough. But hey it could be worse, I could be living in Flogsta, which as I say it I realize that means nothing to you, it’s really far away from classes and the main city center.
Oh, and the place where I got my bed sheets is also real far away, like halfway between Stockholm and Uppsala, no joke. It’s like Super K-Mart or one of those big places that squashes the ma and pa stores in the US. The Swedes have figured out how to fix this, they put the thing out in the middle of nowhere so you only go there if you really need to. Good idea in theory, but the prospect of taking a 20-minute bus ride to get bed sheets under $200 really makes you miss Target.
Yesterday I made my first cultural screw up. OK, so in Sweden there’s this round flat bread that is really hard and crunchy, somewhere between balsa wood and cardboard. This one café had the stuff on a metal pipe just hanging from the ceiling; confused I asked why they just had the stuff sitting out. The woman explained that the stuff never really goes bad so you can leave it out. Makes sense, it’s too dry to mold and too hard to know if it went stale. So I thought this was a common Swedish thing, just have this bread sitting out in a kitchen or wherever. I get back to my dorm/apartment and in the kitchen notice these round things just sitting out, so I ask one if the guys in my hall about them. I said I understood the stuff never goes stale but wouldn’t leaving them out all the time get them dusty after awhile? Confused, he explained that it doesn’t matter if those get stale or dusty you just use them to put under your coffee cup.