In the City

Every year a snow animal is made in the central park in Luleå. This year it is a reindeer (ren). Controversially, it was also a ren last year. There is a slide out the back of it for kids to go down. Interesting, if they happen to be wearing brown coats...

Me and my good mate Santa

...who needs to learn a lesson about the gift of giving

Snowy stuff

I know, I know, more shots of snow-covered bikes, snow-covered trees, snow -covered blah blah blah*. What can I say – I haven’t yet got sick yet of looking out the window, or tramping through the snow. It’s great at night, especially when it’s cloudy so the moonlight and city lights are reflected by the snow, making it quite bright. Unfortunately though that means there’s no northern lights to be seen.

* Just an aside, the 2nd biggest laugh I got recently was from the 3rd series of Arrested Development, where in a meeting Michael announces they don't "have time to talk nonsense to blah blah blah - who is actually their attorney Bob Loblaw. Maybe you had to be there. The biggest laugh though came from Tobias' previous career as a doubly qualified Analist - Therapist. There is a very unfortunate way to combine those two titles. "It's not the pronounciation that scares me..."

A new winner in the "frosty early-morning reception" category

A touch of pink sunset

Now this is taking that "frosty early-morning reception" thing too far

Older style Swedish architecture

Snow mounds are all over the town, from the shovelling that occurs overnight every night. The snow is then gradually carted to a big snow dump, that will maintain snow throughout the summer.

The northern port. Pretty much all frozen over now, the tracks are from snowmobiles. They will open a road on the ice that can be used to drive tens of kms throughout the archipelago, either with snomobile or car. It is hard to ice skate because of the snowfall, though there are plans to open a 10k track around the city from the north to south harbour when the ice is thick enough. There are public skating rinks which are scraped every day for playing hockey on. I haven't skated yet, but just borrowed some skates so will get out later this week. I'm also keen to snowscooter - some of the racing models can apparently reach 220kph - awesome!

Just as I was walking around town and wondering why some of the rooves were not covered with meters of snow, I found out why... They get shoveled also.

Christmas Celebrations

The Christmas feast is held at lunchtime on the 24th, on Julafton (Christmas Eve). Santa normally delivers the presents after lunch, then at 3pm is the traditional hour of Disney cartoons on TV. Seeing as almost everyone I know left town to visit relatives in other parts of the country, I spent the day lazily at home, reading, watching some teev (not much of the disney), cooked myself a lamb roast (not an aussie tradition, just something I wanted to do), and watched the snowstorm outside. It's now up to knee height.

Christmas Day is time to recover, and gather up the energy to go out and party. A few of us went out to Cleo nightclub (where else?), where it was absolutely packed. What can I say about Cleo? It is the main meatmarket in town, so the attempts at getting the goods are frequent and very obvious. The girls are very much in control. Unfortunately one of the guys I was with had a technique that involved drunkenly lurching into people, hoping that with enough collisions there would be some success. Music-wise, it is middle of the road Europop. Shlager is the term for the Eurovision Song Contest style of music, which is big here, and there was heaps of it on the dance floor. "Oh Mickey You're so fine hey Mickey" is not any better in Swedish. Fortunately (?) there was no ABBA medley, but they take Europe's The Final Countdown very, very seriously here. There is no irony attached to the song, and when it comes on it is time for even the most tatooted biker types to jump onto the dancefloor and start the air guitar. So be warned: keep tounge firmly out of cheek if discussing this song.

Me, Mangel, and Hasse

After the club, where it took almost 30mins of queuing just to get our jackets back, I spent most of Boxing day asleep, getting up at 2:30, just in time to eat breakfast while the sun went down, and then get ready to go to Marta-Lena's family for a christmas dinner, which was great. l haven't eaten a lot of traditional Swedish food, as most of the restaurants in town serve asian influenced cuisine or pizza and kebabs, but on the occasions friends have cooked for me the homestyle food has been great. We had bits of julbord, and then a roast moose dish that was superb: the frozen slab of meat is put in the oven at about 75oC overnight for slow cooking , then it is marinaded in water with salt and spices. Fantastic. The strangest thing though was 'coffee cheese', a hard cheese that was put in the coffee. Hmm, I think a separation of curds and coffee would have worked just as well.


What is so good about Christmas here in Sweden is that it has a much more traditional feel than back home, I guess partly because we reference the traditions (snow, pine trees, roasts, fireplaces) but don't actually experience them. And the traditions here go back a long way, whereas we have a bit of a modern blend. It also seems to be less commercial, with Christmas ads and goods in the shops not being so noticeable to me until the end of Nov, which was the first week of Advent. But that could be just my lack of exposure to shops, not understanding the TV, and the small town effect.

Our departmental christmas lunch was like a classic tableau, sitting at a table with candles in the window, snow falling in the forest outside covering the green trees and red houses. Fantastic stuff.

Although Sweden gave us the smörgåsbord, it didn’t give us the julbord "christmas table", which is a shame as there's some great stuff on it. It's mostly based on cold meats – pickled herring (inlagd sill) various forms of smoked and marinated salmon (lax), a range of breads (thin, risen, and cracker), and some hot dishes like meatballs, frankfurters, Janssons temptation (scalloped potates baked with herring and cream), and usually a roast ham.

The one thing defeated me was the kalvsylta - the brown stuff above the fork. It's a kind of pressed, jellyfied meatloaf made from scraps. It didn't even look like meat, and definitely didn't feel like it. Admittedly, that wasn't my first time with unknown processed meat product: 'Kebab' meat here is often a pressed meat of some sort, rather than the slabs of fillets we get on a gyros back home. When I asked one time what meat it was all I got was a shrug, an "I dont know", and then "it's not pork" as an answer.


Julmust is a great soft-drink, kinda like chinotto or portello. It is sold only at Christmas time, though it gets rebottled and also flogged as an easter Påskmust a few months later. Apparently Sweden is unique in that Coke sales plummet over Christmas because of julmust. The first ads I've seen for Coke on TV here have been over Christmas, pushing a really tacky "Santa is coming so it's time to drink Coke" angle, in an attempt to prevent the defection. Apparently it doesn't work, so this year they have actually brought out thier own brand of julmust. People I know are a bit sceptical of it though.



Glögg is another christmas tradition, basically mulled wine, cooked with spices, heated and served with almonds and sultanas. The photo here is of a white wine based glögg, in its special heated serving dish. Of course, harder spirits can also be added to glögg, you just have to be quick to drink it before the heat evaporates all the alcohol. There is also julöl, or Christmas beer, which is a dark beer and pretty good too.


One tradition I like, and I don't think it is limited to Christmas, is of singing a toast. Snapps are usually served with a fish course, but even without, when it comes to the toast there is usually a song to be sung. Most recently have been christmas songs. Also, Sweden is probably one of the few countries where they don't sing the usual Happy Birthday song - they have their own. I thought the tune we use has become basically universal.


Paste. Not specifically a Christmas food, but to the Swedes it's a whole separate food group, defined as anything that that can be processed into a tube or tubs. Most are variations of fish, prawns, or ham mixed with cheese or mustard or dill or something. A squeeze from a tube on some crackerbread, maybe with a slice of cheese, can be a typical lunch.

Christmasy Stuff

Christmas decorations in Sweden I think are a little less tacky than in Australia, with a bit more of a religious and traditional theme. There are less santas and reindeer around, and more Advent candles - the pyramidical stacks of 7 candles, one row for each of the 4 weeks before Christmas. Stars also hang in most windows, and strings of lights resembling icicles, stars, snowflakes, and even a couple of snowmen.



Hard to see, but most windows here have something - a triangle of advent candles or stars.


My flat - I went for the tacky. A snowflake and blue lights as icicles was my theme. As I didn't want to start drilling holes to get power to the outside balcony, its all hanging inside. I also have quite a few candles, which are great here in the darkness and give a warm light to the place. The only problem is putting them out - there is almost no airflow in the flat and gets very smoky.






Grey Santa (Tomen). Tomte are mythical Scandinavian elf, which are generally small, bearded, wear grey or green coats and red hats. They looked after the animals and property of farmowners, and would get up to mischief if they didn't get their single gift of pudding on Christmas Eve. The image changed slightly with time, and the jolly red-coated, red-hatted fellow became popularised when a Swede used it for a Coca Cola Christmas ad campaign.

Chrismas goats. Apparently a sign of the devil, what started out as a prank became a tradition, to send someone goats made of straw. Personally I'd rather decorate a tree. Some towns in Sweden also build a big sraw goat, and in Gävle it is now almost a tradition that it gets burnt down every year, often within just one day of it being erected. Check out the link below.

http://www.usatoday.com/news/offbeat/2005-12-04-christmas-goat_x.htm

I'm (gonna be) Dreaming of a White Christmas

All those Christmas decorations now start to make sense.

An even frostier early morning reception

Two-tone is back. Sometimes I would prefer this kind of early morning reception. But it would probably take longer to get ready to go to work than to actually go there by car.

Some of Stockholm 2

I tried but failed to put this 2nd bit of Stockholm, first in terms of the backwards time order that the blog is listed in. Looks like I'll even have to create the draft of the end first. Anyhow, continuing...

The Vasa museum is about the grand ship Vasa that set sail in 1628 and got only a couple of hundred meters before toppling over and sinking. Apparently no-one could say no the King when he said he wanted more cannons, despite making the thing top-heavy. It was salvaged in the late 1960's, having been well preserved in the waters that are free woodworm. It was ornately decorated with carved and garishly painted statues.

A model, in front of the real thing

We were also staying on a boat, the Mälaren Den Röda Båten, which as the name says, is a red boat. Fortunately it didn't sink, or even rock. We were on the edge of Södermalm, which is becoming a trendy part of town
Södermalm has a traiditional hilly, cobblestoned, European feel

This tree fascinated me for some reason. Something about the way it just stood there, alone, all silvery in the snow. Perhaps I'd been reading too much Harry Potter recently, and it reminded me of some fantasy book or chinese sword epic that I've seen, where there are silver trees standing in courtyards.

Tree detail

Swedes won't always confront you about something. But when they do, they can be quite direct. Good to know.

I found an entry in the What's on about a free concert of Scandanavian organ music and soup lunch, so I went. It was quite a modern church, and this was the organ.

The concert was good, and free, but the lunch wasn't (who said there's no such thing as a...)! But for a couple of dollars i got a typical Christmas rice pudding with cinammon, and had a chat to the organist and others, almost entirely in Swedish, which was good for the ego.

The NK shop window - Stockholm's Myer equivalent



The snow fell all day long which was kinda nice, but kinda annoying when I got to the airport for my 10:30pm flight home, and didn't leave till after midnight because the airport can't cope with something that happens occasionally... occasionally several times every single year.


And lastly, my brain still sees processes words in English first, and Swedish maybe second. So when I saw this sign, I wondered why skrotums got so much attention, and why they would need to be douched...

Some of Stockholm 1

I went down to Stockholm for a couple of days, catching up with John who popped over for the weekend while in the UK doing some lab work. It was great to wander around the town and be in a bustling metropolis again. I didn't take many photos, but here are some of them.

Looking through art to Sergelstorg (Sergels square), central Stockholm

The tower improves a bit at night

So many Santas up here, you've gotta be multiskilled to stand out from the crowd

Gamlastan (the old town). Lots of windy, hilly laneways, tourist shops, small art galleries, restaurants, a couple of churches and the old castle.

The Julmarknad (Christmas market). Typical things for sale included various breads, spreads, meats, glögg (mulled wine), santas and so on.

Skansen, the world's first open-air museum. A bit like Sovereign Hill, most of the village is set up to show what life was like over the last few hundred years in Sweden, with glass blowing, blacksmith, a bookbinder, bakery etc. There is also a zoo. It is quite big and was quite busy due to it being the first day of Advent, so the first Christmas market was held. Too much to see in the half a day we spent there, but interesting.

Wild boar lazing around! I've just been reading an Asterix book (in Swedish) so wild boar are more interesting than unsual!
Shy wolverine - so that's what they look like. Pretty small, like a medium sized dog but looks more bear-ish. But hated because of thier hunting method which usually involves killing a whole flock of reindeer first, rather than just taking what they need.

Dad's 2nd favoiurite animal. No, not a giraffe. A wolf.
Lynx, the only large wildcat in Scandanavia
No-one has yet been able to explain what a cheese or sausage lottery is
Skyline from Skansen