Best Dialogue Ever:
Me: Do you know what a fundie is?
Feifei: No, tell me.
Me: Fundamentalist Christian.
Feifei: Ohhh. I thought it meant someone who isn't very intelligent.

Reading Swedish magazines is so much more educational than reading the textbooks, I swear. More interesting, too. I could learn about why Sweden has red houses (it comes from a mine and the color used to be a status symbol) or learn what "godis-bh:n" means (candy bra). Plus with my new vocabulary I can impress, or at least amuse, the locals.

Consensus is very important to the Swedes. If faced with something they don't necessarily agree with they'll simply say "I guess..." I suppose that's to be expected from a country that hasn't been at war since 1814, even when their empire was falling apart they peacefully worked out a solution. That's got to be some kind of record. While it definitely seems to show that the Swedes have a more evolved sensibility than, say, the US, at least when it comes to conflict resolution, they've gotten to the point where they regard any kind of disagreement as something terrible. I had a really minor political disagreement with someone a few weeks ago, just debating semantics really, and the next time I saw her she was kind of closed off. Eventually she asked if we could still be friends after we had an argument. Now, in the US if you stopped being someone's friend because you didn't see exactly eye to eye with their politics you'd lose a lot of friends really quickly. Perhaps Americans are better able to cope with disagreements and live with them rather than just acquiescing.

Surely there's some practical application for a robotic fish.

And if anyone out there uses Firefox, this will make it better. I've noticed that things load anywhere from a few seconds quicker to nigh instantly.