Curious Adventures: Karnival

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Karnival

It is hard to believe I have been in Sweden for a month but calendars don’t lie so it must true. I had thought to write weekly but since much like everyday life, I don’t do much of anything interesting most of the time, I didn’t really see the point. Actually, I haven’t really done anything interesting this week either, but I have more pictures now. Also, I’ve had another week to see Swedish students in their natural habitat (much like American students but with more group singing) and explore the bike paths and trail systems of Lund and to learn more about how the Swedish live and what they eat.

I still have some...

Since it has been pretty cold for the last two weeks and kind of rainy, extensive exploration was less desirable and sitting inside reading far more desirable. I’ve been reading a lot, which doesn’t make for a interesting narrative at all.

As you have seen, I was given a really nice office in the Pufendorf Institute and so when I get tired of sitting in my house I walk across the gravel driveway and go sit in the office and work there for awhile. Most of my days have been spent in one of these two locations. Or at the climbing gym.

However, my colleague who invited me here, Stefan, also works with the folks at the Lund Internet Institute, which just so happens to have its offices in a castle in a nearby city. So, last week he invited me to go work there. This involved a longer commute than across the driveway, but Stefan was super nice and drove me, meaning I avoided taking the train, even though I like trains.

The castle was really cool and the Internet Institute offices were on the second floor beyond the gift shop so it required going up another spiral staircase.

Spiral Staircase in the Castle

I am finally getting the hang of walking on spiral staircases … it takes some practice. The climbing gym has one too and I live in fear that I will fall down that one which will not inspire confidence in my fellow climbers about my climbing abilities.

The castle is close to the water and you can see Denmark in the distance. It has two moats, one of my favorite castle defenses, with the possible exception of trap doors in the floor, which I think I only see as a castle defense because of the Playmobile castle, possibly the coolest kids toy ever.

From the window of the Lund Internet Institute (in Landskrona)

The moat

The lack of a drawbridge defeats the original purpose of the moat

I have urged Joe to build a moat around our cabin. However, instead of water, our cabin moat would have snakes in it – so really more of a snake pit than a moat. Joe has ignored my request, probably because he hates snakes. However, maybe we will get a spiral staircase….

Back to my work week – nothing exciting happened. I did not solve any pressing intellectual puzzles that will make the world a better place. I did spend considerable hours looking at 700 pages of comments from people who fileshare on The Pirate Bay about their privacy issues – that was interesting. I also read more about brains and creativity. This was also interesting. Then, the U.S. indicted some Chinese hackers and that made me start to revise my paper on securitizing IP – so that was interesting too, at least to me.

I had planned this past weekend to take the train to Malmo and check out the city. It is bigger than Lund and lots of people who work here live there. However, this past weekend turned out to be the weekend for Lund’s Carnival – which in Swedish is one word -- Lundakarnevalen. This event happens once every four years and is put on by the students at Lund University. It has taken over the town. I live close enough to the carnival grounds that sleep isn’t really an option until they shut down at night.

On Saturday there was a parade. It was the best parade ever. Pretty much everyone in Lund who wasn’t in the parade was lining the streets to watch it. Now, given that everything was in Swedish, I am not entirely sure what most of the floats were about, but I think I can describe the basic algorithm for themes.

First, the theme of the Karnival is the future, so there had to be some sort of futuristic component to the float – this involved a lot of aluminum foil and paper mache.

Tractor covered in aluminum foil

Second, I believe that you had to have some educational component that was aligned with something from the school. There were lots and lots of placards and banners and stuff, which may or may not have been educational. However, there were floats that seemed to have lots of medical themes and this seemed to mean that these were med students. Either that or everyone just took the theme of the carnival literally and decided that in the future they would be old. More than one group with wheel chairs and IV bags and dental equipment were there. I have no idea why these would be in a parade unless they were meant to indicate some sort of educational affiliation.

Dental themed float

Third, you have to dress funny.

As a child I remember going to the 4^th of July parade in Black Diamond Washington, not a particularly well-known parade destination, but the only parade I ever remember attending. What I most remember about this is that pretty much everyone in the parade threw candy at us and all the children were engaged in a Darwinian struggle to acquire the most candy possible as if we were starving or deprived, which may have been true for the children of Black Diamond, I don’t know. So, I was expecting lots of candy to be thrown because in my mind that is what parades are for.

This parade didn’t have any candy but one group catapulted a bagel at us. I have no idea why – their wheelbarrow/catapult did not give an indication of why bagels or why they would launch them at us, or what it had to do with the future. As you can imagine, there was not as large a scramble for the bagel as there would have been had it been candy. I didn't get a picture of them because I was startled by the bagel.

I took lots of pictures…. and a parade is best narrated by pictures.

There was the Swedish House Mafia float, but strangely no ABBA float....

Swedish House Mafia

This was the narcissist float -- I think.

The song was about selfies

Then there was the NSA/Santa float which seemed like a weird combination until they held up their informational sign in English.

Then in the distance I saw what looked like a giant penis coming our way.

Looked like a giant penis float

But I just figured it was my imagination because what possible theme could there be attached to a giant penis?

In the mean time, this float went past -- and of course is much funnier if you don't know the English translation.

Possibly the oldest car I have seen in this country

Then the giant penis float was closer and it still looked like a giant penis...

Then, it was there and yep, it was a giant penis float. I am sure there is an educational theme involved somewhere.

The people in white are sperm

Then there were the people on bike/toilets.

And some other political floats like the Gay Russia float.

And the one I didn't understand that had Obama and Putin as fruit... possibly a commentary on vegetarianism? And lots of people dressed up as fruit and possibly cows.

And then last came some police officers on horses. This was notable because I had not yet seen a police officer either during the parade or in the town -- it is without police for the most part. AND people can legally drink in public here -- how have they not spiraled into chaos? In the US a parade like this would have required hundreds of police, most likely in black combat gear.

The fire department was there too -- watching the parade from on top of their truck.

And then the parade was over.

After the weekend celebration I was again transported to Landskrona where the castle is for a two-day workshop with the DigiTrust group, which is my working group. Since they were holding the meeting in Swedish I was mostly just there so I would feel included. When we arrived, Stefan provided me with about a dozen books on Trust to read, which was the academic equivalent of putting a kid in a sandbox and telling them to play quietly by themselves for awhile. I had my many papers to work and since I can't understand Swedish, I found the background conversation to be sort of soothing.

During our breaks I tried to learn more about Sweden by asking all sorts of questions that were not necessarily in anyone’s field of expertise.

I learned, for example, that University is free here so nobody pays to go to school. You can then take out a loan to cover your living expenses which means most students don’t work while they attend University.

I learned that there are not that many vicious predators in Sweden – there are some bears and possibly a wolf, and wild boars, but mostly nothing too scary. As a result, the Swedes have initiated a war on what they call “murder snails,” which turn out to be brown slugs. They sound much more vicious when you call them murder snails. It is an ongoing but very slow war where the slugs win by sheer numbers. Learning about murder snails helps to explain why one of my German climber friends picked up a slug off the sidewalk and hid it in the bushes when we were walking back from the climbing gym, a behavior I found incredibly strange. He said he was trying to save it from being killed by the Swedish who hate slugs, but until I learned about the murder snails I didn’t really get it.

When I told the Digitrust group about the foot long leopard slugs and the banana slugs and the brown slugs in the Pacific Northwest, there was silence and then one of them merely commented that you can tell a lot about a culture by how many words they have for something.

I am not sure this was praise given how they feel about slugs.

Given that I am a nerd and thus attracted to all things nerdy, we also discussed superheros and comic books and Dungeons and Dragons. It turns out that batman translates more like “leatherman” in Sweden, which kind of gives him a different superpower. Also, I asked if there were any Swedish superheros. They said no, that Marvel comics had taken the Norse god Thor, which was the closest thing they had to a superhero. Otherwise they didn’t really feel the need to create superheros so they just read about ours. Then we bemoaned the loss of paper-based role playing games because they are different from the computer ones.

From one of my new climbing friends I also learned about an old Nordic game called ‘fingercrook’ which is when you hook your fingers together and then try to throw each other off balance. It turns out I can be taken down with a single finger really quickly. However, obviously since this game has not made it big in the U.S., but is evidently played a lot here, I will have to practice. Though part of me things he just made up the fact that it is a popular game here so he could push me down.

I also learned that the Swedish don't understand American gun culture which they find sort of psychotic but I cannot help them in explaining it. Of course, very few people own pick up trucks here too -- so that isn't explainable either.

I also learned that the Swedish have to be in touch with alien life. Outside the castle is what Stephan said was a “water tower,” but shaped like no water tower I have ever seen. Perhaps it really is a water tower, but nobody could explain why it is built to look like a UFO or why it has an antenna on top.