It's been six months since I came to Uppsala, amazing how it goes by so quickly. I had one hell of a weekend. Friday was a friend's moving in party, plenty of alcohol and good food. The music selection was also pretty odd too, again all the stuff Americans make fun of Europeans for. When Swedes get drunk they just turn absolutely crazy, acting like little kids or, in one case, flamboyantly gay. After that we ended up at one of the nations, a meat market one. We observed how around a half hour before closing it gradually turns from a dance floor to a pre-orgy. Fun times. Also, Värmlands is my nation of choice for trying out mixed drinks, that's where I tried absinthe (no hallucinations at all, what a rip-off). I also tried a Margarita, which I didn't expect they'd get exactly right so I wasn't going to hold that against the student bartender, but they line the glass with SUGAR! For Christ's sake can't they get anything Mexican right? Well, if you want something done right, you got to do it yourself, I guess.
Saturday was dumpling night at Feifei's parent's house in Stockholm. Six of her friends were there as well so it wasn't a horrible one on one dinner with them prying me for details. Not that they would have done that anyway since I made such a good impression the last time I was over with my expert handling of garlic and chopsticks. I now know how to make Chinese dumplings, now I just need to know what's in them. Speaking of ingredients in Chinese food, evidently the stereotype of Chinese eating cats, chicken feet and other unusual things only applies to Southern China, not Manchuria. As Feifei's dad commented, "Yes, the Southern Chinese will eat *anything*."Which I thought was rather amusing.
Later that night I went back to Uppsala just in time for my corridor's first corridor party. It was good fun, especially seeing all my hallmates drunk. They're quite reserved; you have to be in the kitchen together for several minutes before an obligatory conversation awkwardly starts up. I showed up and was greeted with, "HEEEEJJJJ KEVEEEN!!" A refreshing change to be sure, though I'm glad they're not always like that. The hall smelled of smoke from my Persian hallmate's hookah, which I, being the good anthropologist I am, tried. Flavored smoke tastes like what you'd imagine: smoke. No insight gained as to why people like them so much.
Sunday was the ski trip to Romme in Dalarna (the land of the Swedish Chef, though I didn't hear a single Bork) it was my first time skiing, so I ended up falling and crashing a lot. I didn't even know one could fall face forward while wearing skis. My efforts were cut short when Feifei got hurt snowboarding (she's fine); I spent the rest of the day with her. Shame, it really spoiled my plans to fall in snow for six hours. It did give me more points with her parents, to be sure. And as the Chinese proverb goes, "Making your girlfriend's parent happy is worth more than a day skiing."

Charlie and the Chocolate Factory with Johnny Depp and Freddie Highmore. I went into the theater expecting the movie to be less than the sum of its parts and to be disappointing. At the moment all I can say is that it was entertaining but the jury is still out as to whether or not it was disappointing. Naturally, it was dark but I didn't think it was a very poetic dark, just creepy. If anyone denies that Wonka in this version is based on Michael Jackson they're fooling themselves. Come to think of it I think everyone was portrayed better than the 1971 film except Wonka and Charlie. Thankfully they offer a completely plausible explanation for this Wonka's freaky, messed up behavior: Count Dooku is his father. I dunno, dark is refreshing and good but only for certain stories, and I don't think this is one of those stories. I probably would have liked it so much more if it weren't for the way Wonka was portrayed. I wouldn't ever let five children near him, actually I wouldn't let five adults near him either. Aside from him, everyone in the cast was awesome, the fat German kid, especially.

It's so strange to me that so few people in Sweden know what anthropology is. I had been told that it's not a very common major outside the US and Britain, but I had assumed people would at least know what it is. It's a particular contrast to back home where largely people not only knew what it was but were all in awe like I told them I was studying to become a superhero. Then again, they might be thinking archaeology and automatically think Indiana Jones. But hey I haven't decided where I'll go with anthropology yet, so who knows? And going off on a tangent, at what point can one no longer say, "When I grow up, I want to be..."? When you graduate college? When you get that job? At a certain age? When are you too old to talk about when you grow up?

Oh, and here's something uniquely American and part of a generation's collective heritage: The Oregon Trail. Imagine your childhood without it. How else would you learn about dysentery or shooting buffalo? Or how funny your epitaph could be? The Swedes of course would have no games teaching American history, that's to be expected. But you'd think they'd at least have the Amazon Trail or maybe some Swedified version, the Leif Eriksson Trail or something. What a sad, sad childhood they must have had.

BTW, I got some message from someone on Flickr that wants to use my photo "The Source" as a cover for his album. So that's cool.

Culture Builders by Jonas Frykman and Orvar Löfgren. What a great book, so full of fun little anecdotes about Swedish cultural history and society. They compare and contrast the peasant and bourgeois classes and show how each has influenced modern Swedish culture. I'm not sure which one of the two I'd rather want to be if I had a choice, since they were both so horribly extreme. The peasants were vulgar and filthy to the point where it seems like they did it just to be gross. For example peasant women used to wipe their children's noses with their own mouths. At the other end of the spectrum, the upper class was so prudish and reserved that they rarely could call any part of the body that was covered by clothing (everything but the hands and head) by its actual name. They were allowed to say foot but weren't allowed to refer to them in the plural. I have no idea why that might be, maybe they weren't allowed to think that things came in pairs, they could say breast, but not breasts. Of course, this gets to the point where one can hardly say anything at all; one account said someone's risqué and outspoken mother referred to the rear segment of a fish as the "tail end". One possible bright side is that I imagine if a language continued to develop that way, it would be incredibly poetic since they would need to call everything by pleasant euphemisms.

I started my fieldwork at a Swedish high school, or gymnasium, this week. It's weird, some things are only slightly different and others are so crazy it makes me wonder how they even function. First off, let me just say that as much as we bitched about school food in the US, you have no idea how bad it is here. We at least had to pay for ours which ensured a modicum of quality, theirs is free and worth every penny. Blech! To offset this, there are plenty of vending machines with candy and coffee and a little vendor by the entrance too. Not up to par with the giant muffins and fresh baked cookies we got at Sabino but they make up for it in other areas. Namely, high school is voluntary in Sweden so they don't have monitors, hall passes or any of that crap. When they don't have classes, instead of study hall, they are free to sit in the halls, the lobby or in the library (which is pathetically small, even for a school of 1000 students).
As for the students themselves, they're not so different from Americans. The school was about as ethnically diverse as Sabino, so no real change there. Swedish guys have one of two hairstyles: long or bald. Only the obviously non-Swedes have something different. The girls are almost identical to American girls: bottle blonde hair, ugg boots and base tans and yet for some reason that doesn't piss me off as much as it would in the US. They just seem to pull it off better. Maybe it's because the Swedes are supposed to be blonde, uggs are practical in cold weather and Swedes will turn translucent if they don't get any sun in the winter.
A common greeting among girls is to go up and smack each other in the ass. I find this to be an unfair double standard; I believe guys should be able to greet girls in the same way. I guarantee it would eliminate the shyness the Swedes are so known for. Besides, Swedes are all about equality.

And a final thought: why is the letter R so hard to consistently pronounce throughout the world? Asians mix L's and R's, it's often dropped if it's at the end of a word, and sometimes added for no apparent reason (Warshington). The Australians are the worst offenders of this letter, I find. Adding and dropping R's whenever they want: Har ah yer during? And the infamous Aussie negation "Nar!"

I am enrolled in two courses that give me an ungodly amount of reading. One, Swedish Society and Everyday Life, I don't mind because it's interesting and the class involves fieldwork. The other is People, Power and Food, it is about as interesting as it sounds; sustainability, free market, global harmony, pretty unicorns etc. It's supposed to be an anthropology class but it's really economics. Honestly, I don't care about the population of blue fin tuna, I want to know about people and cultures. The class wants us to answer questions that are better suited to be rhetorical questions; asking us to contextualize need, define what sustainable development is and who has the right to decide what the future will be like. The discussion groups all end up agreeing that the terms are impossible to define and we end up just talking amongst ourselves for a half hour, which I suppose isn't all bad. The reading is by far the worst part of it all. I've never read so much and not learned a thing, the information repeats over and over without any solution. I guess that's an allegory for the real world bureaucracy. One thing that's kind of cool is that every week we have video conferences with universities around the world, so there's an opportunity to get global perspectives on these ever so fascinating issues. We get the best time though, one university has to get up at 4AM to talk to us, which makes me feel better about having a 1PM class. And of course I must mention one of the universities is called EARTH University, which naturally leads to: "Earth? Earth? Are you recieving our transmission? Lars I'm not picking up anything from Earth!"
The other class had me do a fieldwork at a bank, which was boring but since I had to actively observe my surroundings it was boring in an interesting way. My later fieldwork will be at a Swedish high school and I will study how Swedish culture is created in the school systems. Should be enlightening, I'm particularly excited because I was very curious about how Swedish high school functioned since I'm told the US high school movies are very different from what the Swedes are used to. Now not only will I be able to satisfy my curiousity, but I'll get credit for it too.
In one of the books I'm reading for that class, they explain origins of Swedish archetypical traits like loving nature, avoiding conflict and a solid work ethic. Some of the best gems from the book are fun little etymology lessons, for example the Swedish word for autumn, höst, means 'harvest.' The word for Saturday, lördag, means 'bath day' because the peasants only bathed once a week and only the day before church. My favorite is the word for knacker (the person who slaughters worn-out livestock): 'rackare'. The knackers were the lowest rung of society, like gypsies or prostitutes. Since the largely rural Swedes had such a connection to their cows and horses anyone whose job it was to kill them was treated as diseased. And where do I live? Rackarberget: "the knacker's hill." That might explain why the rest is so cheap and why most people I know don't live here. Lovely.

Word of the Day: etic- Of or relating to features or items analyzed without considering their role as a structural unit in a system, as in behavioral science or linguistics.

My recent project was to make Mexican food for dinner for the Swedes. This was considerably harder than I had thought (and I suspected that it would be pretty tough to begin with). I think I went to half the grocery stores in Uppsala trying to find all the stuff. Things like cheddar cheese, refried beans and enchilada sauce were minor miracles to find. No corn tortillas though, whether they were out or I just didn't look hard enough, I can't be sure. I felt rather foolish when I finally found the cheese, though, since in Europe cheddar is white. Which probably means it was in all the stores I couldn't find it in.
I went quite out of my way to ICA Maxi, the giant hub of the near monopolistic grocery chain ICA (note: you don't spell the letters out, it's pronounced "eeka"). I now love that store and I've only been there once. It's like a real supermarket, but instead of just having food they have department store items too. It's like a Target. I felt the euphoria one must have felt when big stores like that first opened: I can actually buy it all in one store! Screw Netto, (a smaller chain that sells foreign foods) they only had stuff you could get anywhere else so there isn't much point in having it as a place for foreigners to get their culture's food. Anyway, after five months without a big store like that it was so wonderful to find nearly anything I wanted. As long as they don't turn into Wal-Mart I'll be fine, but then again, the Swedes seem to have a thing for monopolies so they might not mind.
But I digress, the dinner turned out nicely, though I was a little behind schedule thanks to recipes in Swedish even the Swedes couldn't understand. It was also the first time any of them had seen, heard of or tasted refried beans, I have now corrected this culture gap. I have to say the best part of the evening was watching the Swedes try to eat a taco; once they realized that their vaunted silverware would be ineffective they began to figure out at what angle one eats tacos. But the food was good and everyone liked it, though I thought it was rather odd that a supposed vegetarian ate tacos when I had vegetarian enchiladas. I guess they're a bit more flexible than they are back home.

On an unrelated note: I don't care if it's snowing or not, I would *kill* for an eegee's right now.

The Librarian You scored 73 erudition!

Congratulations! You're well above average when it comes to your knowledge of English grammar, history, and literature. You may have missed a few questions, but if you keep your studies up and stay away from genre fiction, we'll have you ready for Stanford in no time! Who knows, we just might be reading your columns in Talk of the Town a few years from now.

My test tracked 1 variable How you compared to other people your age and gender: You scored higher than 45% on erudition

Link: The Are You Truly Erudite? Test written by okellelala on Ok Cupid, home of the 32-Type Dating Test

I have a feeling my regular readers will do better at this that I did, but then again most of you are older and are English majors.