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!"