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...