Swedisms

A month in Sweden, and things are beginning to make sense to me. I now recognize pieces of squishy flat cloth as sponges. I know which fruits are good – apples, oranges, mangos, and berries, if you eat them fast enough – and which leave something to be desired – grapes and strawberries. I’ve become facile enough with a Swedish keyboard that I don’t type ö every time I want an apostrophe. I’ve even come to grudgingly accept the fact that the second floor means up two flights of stairs, whereas in America it would mean up one. Except at my work, where the second floor is, naturally, the ground floor.

Some things, however, still leave me scratching my head. Here is an abbreviated list of Swedisms that keep me on my toes:

1.) Weather.

Stockholm is slightly colder than Boston, making it – and this is a technical term – FREAKING COLD. Furthermore, Stockholm is significantly snowier than Boston, meaning that your average American (read: yours truly) has to bundle up in several layers, including a ridiculous hat and giant boots, before attempting to brave the elements.

Swedes don’t need to do this. The women especially seem immune to the cold. I cannot count the number of times I have been huddled in the train station or trudging through four inches of wet snow when -- lo and behold – I will see a Swedish woman in an impossibly short skirt, her legs bare except, occasionally, for a pair of tights. And here’s the kicker: more often than not, she’ll be wearing open-toed stilettos. I suffer mild frostbite just looking at these women, but they seem to drift along, seemingly defying the laws of physics, to whatever fashionable club they are headed to (The Ice Bar, perhaps? ) while I am left staring, in the middle of the street, with my mouth unfashionably hanging open in awe. Until my tongue starts to freeze, anyway.

2.) Vacuum Cleaners

I like to think of myself as a relatively rational person. As a general rule, I need to see something before I accept that it exists. I therefore don’t believe in Bigfoot, Nessie, or North Dakota. Therefore, when I tell you that there is a vampire in my closet, I expect you to believe me.

OKOK, so it’s spelled “Vampyr”, but same idea, right? And it’s admittedly a vacuum cleaner, but it’s still pretty scary, right?

3.) Grams

Being the product of both a partially English upbringing and many high school science classes, I have always looked down upon US customary measurements as quaint at best, and decidedly outdated and inferior to the metric system. I certainly didn’t expect the metric system to be a source of any problems. Sweden, however, takes its love of the metric system WAY* too far.

* 27 meters too far, to be precise.

For example, when measuring eggs for a recipe, I rather expected the unit of measurement to be eggs. As a recent baking experience taught me, this is not always the case.

My Swedish cheesecake recipe instructed me to add 200g of eggs. Perhaps Swedes are born with superhuman abilities that allow them to weigh eggs by looking at them, but I wouldn’t know 200g of eggs if it tapped me on the shoulder and asked me the way to the Grand Palace. Although my high school classes drilled the conversion factor from grams to kilograms (1000) and even grams to pounds (450ish), somehow they neglected the conversion factors from grams to eggs.

4.) Strawberries

About 50% of the time, strawberries are called “jordgubb” and 50% of the time they are called “smultron”. I have been unable to find a distinction between the two, but I have formed a working hypothesis: that “jordgubb” are strawberries and “smultron” are robots cleverly disguised as strawberries. This is based purely on anecdotal evidence and maybe just a SMIDGE of speculation, so if you have any thoughts of your own, please leave a comment at the bottom of this post. I’ll reply promptly, assuming the smultrons don’t get me first.

Food och dylikt

Have you ever tried to eat in a foreign country? In Sweden, it's not so difficult. Even in restaurants where there isn't an English version in the menu, I've generally been able to deduce the general idea of most dishes from a combination of my limited Swedish vocabulary and cognates. When I'm really confused, I just ask the waiter, who invariably speaks flawless English.
Living and cooking on your own, however, leads to a whole new set of considerations. I have made several excursions to Swedish grocery stores, however, and each trip has left me severely bewildered in some way or another.

Take, for instance, soap.* Soap should be easy enough to find. It should be in a section full of bottles of cleany-things, and it comes in a handy little bar. A bar of soap has a fairly unique appearance, so I figured that, even though I didn't know the word for soap, I shouldn't have much difficulty finding it.

*Admittedly not a food, but bear with me

Turns out that we Americans are considered rather archaic in the rest of the world for our fondness of solid soap. Apparently Europe switched over to liquid soap years ago. So I was looking around for a friendly little bar, preferably labelled with a word that looked something like "soap". And it didn't exist. Anywhere. I combed up and down the aisles. I found an aisle that I was pretty sure had shampoo and conditioner in it, but I couldn't find soap anywhere.

Eventually I gave up, went home, and took a shower the next morning with dishwashing fluid.

I'm not kidding.

I eventually found soap (which, in Swedish, is tvål, in case it ever comes up). Alas, however, the confusion continued. For example, on my first trip to the grocery store I bought something called "Yoghurt", which I cleverly knew was the Swedish word for "Yogurt". However, the next day I had to go back for something I had forgotten. This time around, in the yogurt section, I saw something called "Mat Yoghurt", meaning "Food Yogurt".

Had I bought non-food yogurt the day before? In the US, all our yogurt is food yogurt, but I'm not familiar with Swedish culture. Do they use their yogurt for cleaning? For laundry? Could the non-food yogurt I'd bought actually be the ever-elusive soap I'd been looking for?

After talking to real live Swedes, I discovered that, believe it or not, all yogurt in Sweden is edible, and that "Mat Yoghurt" is generally used for cooking. I was glad to hear it, because by then I'd already eaten all my yogurt.

Today, I conquered a whole new frontier by making a recipe from a Swedish cookbook. Although there were a few hitches along the way (namely, the confusion that a vanilla bean poses to someone used to vanilla extract, and the step that I'm quite certain instructed me to "turn the sour cream into cheese"), I managed to follow, more or less, the recipe for a cheesecake ("cheesecake", in Swedish). It looks and smells like a cheesecake, and may even be edible.

I wouldn't be too sure, though. After all, the recipe wasn't for Mat Cheesecake.

Hello, Sweden!

A brief introduction, for those of you who have forgotten me in the week I've been gone:

My name is Katie. If I were a book, I would be something in the sub-madeup-genre "Quirky Fiction" (which includes books like "The Eyre Affair", "St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves", and "The Elegance of the Hedgehog"). If I were a tea, I would be something minty and refreshing. If I were a person, I would be an 18-year-old kipper with a fondness for all of the above.

Introductions aside, I have now been in Stockholm for over a week*, which I would say makes me quite an expert on all things Swedish. More or less.

This blog is planned to be a log of my adventures in Sweden. Enjoy!

*A week and 8 hours, to be precise