Friday, September 18, 2009

Of Chocolate Chips, Fika and MAX, of Sexa, Choirs and Kings...

2pm, Uppsala, Sweden, 16 September 2009

The time has come, the Walrus said...


Actually, the time has long since passed. It has been two weeks since I last wrote something here, and I have to apologise to all you vicarious travellers for not writing anything sooner. I'm still debating in my head the best way to use this blog: should I try to have a “weekly diary” of happenings, or would a series of shorter posts on particular topics like 'The Nations' or 'Swedish Food' be more interesting? Or perhaps a mix of both? One thing I have decided is that I will write shorter posts from now on, in the interests of perhaps getting them up more frequently.

This evening will mark the end of four full weeks in Uppsala, and almost eight weeks since I left Melbourne. Terminal one at Tullamarine seems impossibly far away and long ago...even arriving in Uppsala feels like a distant memory. Each evening as I cross off a day on the little hand-scribbled calendar on my desk, I am reminded of how little time I have here, and feel a renewed commitment to my number one rule for being on exchange: say 'Yes'. So this post will be about a few of the things I've said 'yes' to in the last few weeks, and some of the wonderful moments I've encountered along the way.

One thing I have little difficulty saying 'yes' to is Fika – that wonderful Swedish word for sharing coffee and cake with friends. Older people in Sweden have an almost religious commitment to the daily schedule of meals – Breakfast, Fika, Lunch, Fika, Dinner – while younger people will Fika (yes, it's also a verb) at just about any time: I myself had midnight Fika with some of my corridor-mates just a few days ago, and last Saturday I had a little over three hours of back-to-back Fika before waddling back to my corridor filled with kladdkaka (incredibly dense chocolate cake), snikertårta (a sort of peanut & chocolate slice), blueberry pie and chokladbullar (something like a rum ball sans rum). Getting into the true spirit of Fika, I've also made couple of things myself – namely a huge batch of choc-chip & cornflake biscuits and a large chocolate brownie cake (that's brownie made in a cake tin because our kitchen has no slice tins: very thick and not really cooked in the middle...my corridor-mates approved.)


Mmmm...Fika...

And where in Uppsala can one sit Fika-ing in the sunshine for over three hours without spending a fortune? Why, at a nation of course! When my temporary student ID expired on the 31st of August, I had to make a decision: which of the 13 nations would be my home away from my home away from home this semester?* In the end, the choice was easy: the first nation I ever visited had won my heart from the beginning, and so I have nailed my colours to the pointy spire of the orange 17th century castle that is Västgöta Nation – universally known as “VG”. And I don't think I've made a better decision since arriving in Uppsala...except perhaps making the brownie cake, but it's a close call. I think I might do a whole post on why VG is awesome, because there's quite a lot to cover, but I will mention two things: Reccemottagning and Manskören.

A reccemottagning is the nation's reception (mottagning) for recentiors (freshmen), and VG held its reccemottagning last Saturday afternoon and evening. We began at 3pm, gathering in the nation's top-floor library to hear speeches. First up was the nation's Inspektor, a Professor of Finno-Ugric Languages by the delightful name of Lars-Gunnar Larsson, a charming old gentlemen resplendent in leather-elbowed tweed and overgrown grey Colonel-Sanders-esque facial hair, who addressed us in Swedish, English and German before conceding defeat after just a few words of Polish... Next to speak was the wildly be-dreadlocked Förste Kurator (aka 1Q) Adam, followed by the second and third curators Hanna and Sebastian; the Kuratorer are the nation's semi-permanent student managers. Fun fact: all three have red hair...

After the speeches were done, we were divided into groups and, lead by a 'father' (in my case Cara, one of the International Secretaries), we spent several hours touring the nation taking part in various games in an effort to win points for our team: from song-guessing contests with the Mixed Choir to “guess the beer” taste tests with the Bar Masters, from charades with the Theatre Group to drinking games with the Pub Managers, from Chokladbullar-rolling in the Fika kitchen to being questioned on the nation's history by the Aldermen in the medieval cellar, we were put through our paces...and for the most part found severely wanting. We shone in only two places: Matt, our 5-foot-nothing American, rolled an astonishing 28 Chocolate Balls in two minutes (that's one every 4 seconds!!), and when the newspaper editors asked us to write a story, we shot to glory with the surreal tale of a depressed Roof-Beaver (they live on rooves...what of it?) named Karl Gustav John Linné and his quest for hearty bacon soup.


Drinking games with the sexmästare.


The Aldermen in their cellar.

Exhausted from our trials, we were paired up boy-girl with strangers (by means of magazine pictures that had been cut in half) before piling into the nation's main hall for a sexa, an informal dinner. The Swedes, however, have a slightly different take on “informal”. We sat at three long tables covered by white table cloths, with the three kuratorer (in full tuxedoes, or traditional costume in Hanna's case) sitting at a high table at the end of the room. We were served two courses: salmon in a white sauce on pasta, and then enormous banana splits dripping with merengue and chocolate sauce for desert.

All the while we were plied with alcohol, and I must say the Swedes have elevated mixing one's drinks to an art-form. Before entering, we could have champagne or cocktails, and on sitting down we were immediately given a choice of beer or cider, and a glass of one of several choices of snaps (I had a very strong, very sour white spirit which I was told was called something like “ohr-yah”...no idea how to spell it...it packed a punch though). The main course was also accompanied by red wine, and with dessert we were given coffee-cup-sized glasses of punsch – which is not our 'punch' but rather a strong, sickly-sweet, amber-coloured liqueur made from the South-Asian spirit Arrack and god knows what else...

The drinking was slowed at least a little by the requirements of protocol, which my lovely partner Klara was kind enough to help me through. Speeches were given at regular intervals by a variety of the nations' ämbetsmän, announcing the winners of the day's contests. Before each person rose to speak, our attention would be called one of the ämbetsma banging a short rhythm on the floor with the nations's ceremonial mace. There were performances from the nation's choirs (the mixed choir's rendition of “Fix You” by Coldplay brought a tear to the eye of even Jonas, my diehard metal-head corridor-mate) and speeches by the kuratorer and the Aldermen (who declared the entire cohort of recentiorer unfit to join the nation, until 'persuaded' to relent by 1Q in exchange for a bottle of punsch), but perhaps the most quintessentially Swedish thing was the singing.

Every ten minutes or so throughout the evening, the mace would bang on the floor and the Sånganförare (song foreman) would rise and lead us in a drinking song from the Västgöta Nation Sångbok...and the Swedes knew them all, and sang along cheerfully before raising their glasses in the recognised pattern (partner, neighbour, ahead, Skål!) and sipping their snaps. It was all completely delightful, genuinely Swedish and heaps of fun :-) After clearing the plates, and then the table to make room for a dance floor, we danced until 1am (late when you start drinking at 6!!) before drunkenly wheeling our bicycles back to Flogsta in the crisp September night.

After hearing their wonderful work at the reccemottagning, how could I say anything but 'yes' to the Västgöta Manskör or male voice choir. Rehearsing for three hours every Sunday night, these thirty or so young men make some of the most beautiful sounds I've ever heard – it is simply a joy to be able to sit among them and join in their singing. That said, it is also quite challenging; they are singing at a very high level and I have to work hard to keep up. Of course, they also sing a lot of repertoire in Swedish (which is great pronunciation practice for me) as well as English, German, French, Finnish and Estonian. I take some small comfort from knowing that most of the Swedes find those last two hard also! And on top of the singing, the rehearsals are conducted entirely in Swedish...which is REALLY testing me. So far I know 'page', 'system', 'bar', 'slower', 'faster' and 'longer phrases'...thank goodness at least that 'mezzoforte' is still 'mezzoforte'!! The choir is also a tad bizarre at times, on the verge of some kind of strange secret society. For one thing, they all have secret “choir names” that they reveal only to members...our conductor is “Mjao”, my section leader is “Unsymmetrical Åke” and one of the 2nd Basses introduced himself to me as “Tutten” which translates as “the boob”...

One final thing which I had great difficulty in saying 'yes' to was not murdering the man who promised two weeks ago to sell me a bicycle. After at least four fruitless visits over the space of two weeks, I turned up ready to give old Geppetto (as we have named him) a piece of my mind...but it didn't work. As soon as I started to speak, he grab the bike and literally ran down the stairs into his basement shop, and by the time I had followed him down the bike was up on a hoist and he was sawing away merrily at the rusted-out D-lock with an angle grinder. In the space of less than 10 minutes, while he busily worked away greasing and sanding and oiling and wrenching, he had me laughing along with his jokes, listening to his stories about bikes and odd customers, talking about Swedish Politics (“All is going to shit here...they make us like America!”) and of course answering his questions about Australia.

Bits of bike hurtled about the tiny workroom as he played rubbish-bin basketball with the rusted-through parts that he pulled off my bike-to-be; before rummaging in cupboards and boxes (and a storeroom which was like the Elephant's Graveyard of bicycles) for replacement parts, talking all the while in his endearingly-broken, heavily-accented English (“I read for 9 years in school...but that was 40 years ago.”). By the time he was done, the bike had a new chain, new gears, new rear brakes, new wheels, tires and tubes, new lights and reflectors and, of course, a brand new bell. But before I left, he proudly showed off the cans of Surströmming (that's fermented herring, a Swedish delicacy that is not especially delicate) he had ordered and was storing in the crowded little office: “Tomorrow I have my one day off for this year. I go in my car to up North of here, and I will eat this with my friend. It is very nice, you must try before you go home!”

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*Home = Melbourne; Home away from home = Flogsta; Home away from home away from home = a Nation.

PS: MAX is the Swedish equivalent of MacDonalds, only better. I only put it in the title in order to preserve the rhythm of the line...sorry about that.
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Ben will return in Åttakisse...

Wednesday, September 2, 2009

The Land of the Long White-Blonde Queue

11pm, Uppsala, Sweden, 31 August 2009

Well ladies and gentlemen, it is blog time once more. As I mentioned in my last post, my travelling adventures have come to an end, here in the wonderful little university town of Uppsala, about 70 km north of Stockholm in the province of Uppland. Or seven miles, as the Swedes would say, because for some unfathomable reason a “mile” here is ten kilometers...but if you describe someone as “six foot two” they look at you like you just announced that you can speak Aramaic, and ask “What is that please in centimeters?” :-)

Flower-laden bridge on the Fyris River

I write this tonight from a large, and already extremely messy desk in my room on the second floor of Höghus 2, in Flogsta, one of the main student accommodation areas here in Uppsala. Flogsta lies about 3km away from the centre of the town, and consists of around sixteen Höghusen (literally “High Houses”) of seven or eight stories grouped around a road that from the air resembles the layout of the tape in an audio cassette. Around the towers are woods and fields in two directions, and a mix of residential housing ranging from modern 'terrace houses' to little red and white country cottages that look like they were built off a postcard rather than a plan. Students, many of them internationals like myself, live in the first ten Höghusen, the other six seem to be “normal” people. Scattered around the base of the buildings are a small number of shops catering to students: bicycle store, convenience store, solarium, pizza store; in the basements of at least two buildings there are laundry rooms, and on every roof there is a Sauna. It is a very Swedish piece of prioritizing to give every building a Sauna, but provide only 15-20 washing machines and 10 dryers for upwards of 1,600 students. A Swede would nod sagely at this and say in a serious fashion “Yes, it is a pity there could not have been a sauna for every floor.”

I have my own bedroom/study and my own bathroom, and share a corridor, kitchen, lounge room and balcony with eleven other students, some of these shall be introduced in greater detail later. The room is large and light, but a little bit sterile in it's lack of colour; the kitchen is, like the rest of the building, aging a little, but it's cosy and fairly well-equipped – kitchen gear extends beyond the standard offerings to a Wok, an Electric Mixer, a sandwich toaster and even a coffee machine. No bread knife though...and no sink plugs either!

My room on the night I arrived

Our communal kitchen

I have been here now for twelve days, but it feels like much longer – the principle reason for this being that the middle seven or so days were O-Week for us International Students. There are not many major experiences in life that you get to have multiple goes at: I guess you can get married quite a few times, and you can have multiple children, but most things happen just once: finishing year twelve, your first kiss, your twenty-first birthday and so on. For most people, O-Week falls into the latter category, but for we few, we happy few, we band of brothers, we get to have a second go at it. And I have tried to take full advantage of that by means of a 'Policy of Yes' – I have tried to say “yes” to anything on offer which isn't actually going to get me seriously injured or thrown out of the country. And I have to say, it has rarely failed to keep me entertained...

The last two weeks have revolved around two types of activity: those that involve getting practical things done, and those for having fun and meeting people. The first involves the three great Swedish leisure pursuits: queueing, paperwork and queueing. This is not always as bad as it sounds, as you'll see below...There is also some overlap, which I'll go into in a moment. Leaving practicalities aside for now, let's have a look at fun.

Uppsala is a small town (by Australian standards) of about 140,000 people, of whom perhaps 40,000 are students, and having fun in Uppsala centers on the Student Nations. Nations are an apparently exclusively Swedish phenomena – not quite a fraternity, not quite a student union, not quite a college, not quite a student club, not quite a restaurant, pub, club or cafe – not quite like anything else really, but something of all of these things and more. They have all sorts of facilities, from libraries, study rooms and computers, to pubs, restaurants, cafes and clubs with student priced food and beer. Activities and events range from choirs to ice-hockey, chess to theatre sports, formal dinners in white tie and tails to disco ping-pong evenings (more on that another time). You can work there to earn some pocket money, you can live in their accommodation, you can even get scholarships and loans.

The house of Västgöta Nation - aka "VG"

There are thirteen Nations here in Uppsala, and they are linked to (and take their names from) the counties and cities of Sweden: Norrlands Nation, Uplands Nation, Stockholms Nation and so on. Swedish students tend to join the one linked to their home town, but for international students the choice is a bit trickier. You have to join one; having existed since the early 17th Century, the Nations have become so absorbed into University life that you are not technically a student until you join one. They issue your student card and allow you to access your results. So they're pretty important, and apart from having fun, getting to know Uppsala, and meeting new friends, the chief purpose of O-Week here is to help us decide which one to join.

My last week has been a parade of events at various nations, and every time I visit another it seems I make a table full of new friends without even trying :-) Because only students can enter the Nations' pubs, clubs and so on, everyone you meet is a student just like you, which makes meeting people easy. And because everyone had to be checked on entry, the long queues provide another great opportunity to chat to those around you...usually about how impressively long the queue is, and what other good queues you've been in today. I swear, most of the security guards and door-bitches (is a male door-bitch a door-bastard?) checked my temporary Student ID and Passport more thoroughly than any Customs Officer I encountered in 4 weeks of travelling!

My last week has been filled with lunches, dinners, city walks (a pleasure in this beautiful little town), BBQs, pubbing, clubbing (yes really...I went clubbing. Twice actually. Hip-Hop clubbing no less...), and the wonderful Swedish institution of Fika. A twisting of the word 'Kaffe' (Coffee), Fika is meeting your friends for coffee(s) and cake(s) and whiling away the afternoon chatting. Of course, we do this in Melbourne too...but I think the fact that Swedes have a word for it, and that that word is not only used as both a noun ('We had Fika.') and a verb ('Shall we Fika on Saturday?'), but also spelled with a capital letter, gives you an indication of the importance of the institution here. I will try my hardest to live up to their expectations, even if it means having to eat literally hundreds of servings of the local specialty, cheesecake. I will struggle through, for the sake of inter-cultural understanding.

:-P
Some Fika in process...

I have met far more people than I can possibly mention by name, people from all over the world and from all over Sweden. Special mentions go to Kai and Karen from Germany, who busted their best moves with me on the Hip-Hop dance floor at Stockholms Nation until closing time (I hope whoever stole your hat is suffering now Kai), to the posse who took me under their collective wing on Friday night's pub crawl: Johanna and Jasmina (Swedes), Lucy and Ben (Adelaide), Leo (Italy) Caroline (France), Eva (Germany) and Dennis from Dresden, whose name makes my dad laugh so hard. Also to the hordes of Science-Po Frenchmen (and -women) in my Swedish Politics class, but especially Thomas and Clement. Big props to Adrian, French Jazz Guitarist extraordinaire, who sat with me in the sunshine by the river Fyris one afternoon and jammed (even though I had met him half an hour before), and to my Swedish-Tunisian buddy Jonas for offering to drive me to the cargo terminal at Arlanda for my boxes, and being a generally damn-good bloke. To all the Aussies I've met even though I'm trying not to, especially Aaron & Elle, who make me very jealous that I couldn't have brought MY girlfriend along. Finally to my corridor-mates Jonas (another German), who cooked me tomato pasta and suffered my terminally dreadful indecisiveness in IKEA, and Jonathan (from the very far north of Lapland) who sat on the floor of his furniture-less room and shared his beer with me. You and many others are all awesome, and I am having such a great time already because I met all of you.

The whole gang in the vault at Upland Nation

Of course, it's not ALL partying here...even though classes haven't begun, I have had lots of practical matters to sort out. Furnishings, textbooks, stationery, banking, rent, enrollment, bus pass, nation, luggage, currency exchange and the eternally frustrating Quest For A Bicycle. As this is Sweden, nearly all of these involve paperwork, queueing, bizarre opening hours or all three. I should say first up that Swedes LOVE queueing. They queue for everything, more often than not by taking a ticket (like at the Safeway Deli) but also using the more traditional “stand-in-a-line” method. The formation of neat, orderly lines to acquire goods and services is something the Swedes take great pride in, and god help you if you try to push in, or even cut the line. You would be subjected to a tirade of...well, I don't know. I've never seen anyone try it. Swedes are polite and composed to the point of shyness in public...perhaps they would all cough suggestively at you: “Ahem. Ah-hem. A-HEM.” Or maybe they'd go totally berserker and run screaming at you with an axe covered in runes.

I'd ask you all to just think for a second now, remember the last time you queued for something. I mean seriously queued, not just had to wait behind a couple of people at the ATM, or to get your soy chai latte from Castro's. How long did you wait? Five minutes? Ten maybe? That was a long time, right? Oh no it wasn't...

I queued for two hours in a bank to open an account. I queued for almost an hour in another bank just to pay a bill! I queued for 40 minutes in a Forex office to change some money, at about 3pm on a weekday...why weren't these people at work?? I queued to get into clubs, which is normal, in the supermarket, which is understandable, at IKEA, which is tolerable, in a bookshop, which was a little odd, and in a pub, which is totally bizarre. I don't mean you had to push through a bit of a crowd at the bar...I mean the Swedes formed a neat queue from the bar which stretched out the door.

But as I've said, the queuing isn't so bad. I met many of my new friends here while standing in the queue at Västgöta Nation on the first day, waiting to collect a temporary student card and sign up for activities. That queue took over two hours, but I'd really got to know people quite well by the end of it :-) I think some people further back in line had actually got married and started families, and I swear I heard bagpipes playing a funeral march at one point.

One thing which mercifully did not involve any queueing, was my quest to get a bicycle, the key to student life in Uppsala. With Bus fares costing 30 SEK one way each time (about $5-6) and a pass costing 500 SEK per month, a second-hand bike is worth it's weight in gold to a poor student. For over a week, with my feet and wallet aching from alternately walking everywhere and paying for buses, I visited every bike store in Uppsala (there are about a dozen, maybe more) at least twice, called the numbers on every “For Sale” poster I saw, and even considered texting the extremely dodgy character known only as 'Ole' who looks like a hobo and always seems to be able to get a bike...usually one with a “broken” lock :-| With my feet aching, I arrived at the very last store, far out to the north of the town, and descended into a basement which looked like the Elephant Graveyard of bicycles. Fully expecting another “Nej”, I ask the question again: “Har du några begagnade cyklar?” “Oh ja, ja,” came the reply, and before I knew it I was presented with a trailer full of used-bikes. Jackpot. Blue mountain bike, 26” frame, 18 speed, new gears and chain, new lights and that slightly beaten-up look that will hopefully ward off thieves. 800 SEK, and I can collect it on Wednesday – after which I will be zipping around town with the best of them, and the callouses on my feet can be brought back to a reasonable level, somewhere between buffalo hide and tortoise shell. I must buy a decent lock though; apart from queueing, the major Uppsala pastimes are stealing bicycles and throwing them in the river...

This is what happens if you leave your bike beside the river without chaining it up...

Tune in next week kiddies, for another exciting episode of “Uppsalaphilia”, in which Ben goes to lectures and possibly bakes some chocolate biscuits. Hold on to your seats...