Tourism Fail

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Tourist Fail

So for the most part I’ve been staying local and enjoying Lund, with the exception of a few trips to Malmo and of course Bergen.  However, my friend Johanna gave me a list of things to do and places to see and on that list was Ystad.   

When I googled Ystad it turned out that there was some sort of asparagus celebration going on there on the weekend, and I figured that was a good reason go.  Also, Ystad is on the water so I would be able to see the sea.  

I booked my train ticket for a day trip to Ystad and got ready to enjoy what I envisioned would be an interesting, if eclectic, festival focused on asparagus.  What I discovered the day before my trip was that the asparagus event was taking place somewhere out of the town proper, probably on a farm, given the theme. 

I decided I would have to play it by ear as far as the asparagus event was concerned.

Saturday morning I woke up early to catch my train but I also woke up with a cough and not feeling completely without illness.  Evidently I need to climatize to Swedish illnesses since this is the second time I’ve been sick since arrival.  However, I had purchased my train ticket already and it was a beautiful day, so I was not deterred from heading to Ystad.

Upon arrival I realized immediately that there had been no real reason to get there so early because nothing was open.  I had the entire town to myself as you can see from the distinct lack of people in the photographs. 

From the train station, with no one to really follow, I wandered across a square and found the tourist information center, which was closed.  Fortunately, they had some brochures outside in a metal cabinet thingy.  It was here that I found out about Ystad’s most famous author – Henning Mankell -- who writes detective novels set in Ystad.  It turns out that there is a tour on an old fire engine that takes you around the city and shows you all the places where different scenes from the books are set.  It is called the Wallander tour, named after the main character of the books.  Obviously, this would make more sense as a tour if you had read the books, but I am a nerdy book person, so even having not read the books, I figured this was the way to see the city.

Last weekend at the book store in the Malmo train station, the book store guy didn’t tell me about the Wallander books, he didn’t even mention them, which seems to show a bias against detective novels, really.  He recommended, and I have now read, a Swedish classic – Doctor Glas by Hjalmar Soderberge – which I will acknowledge is an awesome book, and as the bookstore guy said, very contemporary given it was written in 1905.  The Swedes are clearly more advanced in every way, including their adoption of Nietzschean morality or at least the literary discussion of it.

Anyway, I wanted to go on the fire engine/Wallander tour of Ystad but for inexplicable reasons, the brochure that lists all the books and movies and dates when they were published or produced and maps of all the places the tour will go, did not include any information at all on where the tour started.  My “international” phone, which is really more trouble than it is worth, was not working.  I’m guessing I need to add more minutes because that thing drinks them like water.

Since the tourist center was not open and it was too early to do anything yet anyway, I decided that I would wander around the city and check out all the sights. 

It is a flat city but there was no need to go fast.

Early morning really the best time to wander around a city because you can take a lot of pictures before anyone else is up and then they don’t really know you are a tourist.  

Leaving the tourist center via one of the many small alleyways

Main church in the town square

Heading towards the town square

Shopping district

I liked this sign because of the cat poster

So I walked around a bit and as it got later more people started to emerge from wherever they were staying.  I came across a public square were they had set up a flea market.  This had exactly the same types of things you would see in an American flea market – used clothing and shoes that you wonder who buys or who thought was worth buying, lots of dishes and strange knick-knacks.  I will admit, I am very attracted to glassware, but am saved by the fact I don’t speak Swedish and have very little room in my luggage.

The Rose Garden (from the sign above)

Not really part of my door photography, but a cool one.

Neat monk sculpture with flowers

After stopping at a café close to the city center for some tea and second breakfast, I determined that I would need to be a real tourist to spend the day most effectively in Ystad. 

What do tourists do? 

Well, since I couldn’t find the fire truck/Wallander tour, I figured tourists like to shop. 

I am not a good shopper. 

I buy most of my clothing used and I tend to do targeted need-based shopping.

I tried to convince myself that I should buy some new clothes since mine are hopelessly out of fashion.  However, it only took a few clothing stores to make me realize that even on a normal day I don’t have the energy to do this, and I wasn’t feeling all that well today to being with.

Then I realized I should look for a can opener.  

 It isn’t the typical tourist purchase, but my Lund house has a can opener that is rusted shut and the replacement one is a Swedish design and I can’t figure it out.  

 

Trust me, it makes no sense as a can opener

I know it doesn’t look complicated and it could be that being left handed I just can’t use it, but the one time I tried, I basically just bludgeoned the can until a hole opened in the side large enough to shake out the contents.

While I'm on the subject of things I don't understand.  I don't understand the garbage bag outside the garbage can thing either.

My office garbage can which I can't figure out how best to use.

Anyway, since I was not going to be updating my wardrobe, I spent some time looking for a can opener. 

Which I found. 

But it cost something like $20 and this seemed expensive for a can opener, so I didn’t buy it.  I'm really more a catch and release sort of shopper.

Having failed to buy clothes and a can opener, I wandered around the city some more and took pictures of doors.  

Shopping route until my Garmin ran out of batteries -- thanks Doug and Sarah for this awesome gift by the way!

The doors in this city are really amazing!  Aside from taking pictures of street lights, which I also think are super interesting in their incredible variety, doors are my next favorite thing to photograph.  

I think it has something to do with form/function and the fact that both are super functional and thus utilitarian and yet come in so many varieties!

Besides rocks of course.  I like taking pictures of rocks, there just are not that many rocks in southern Sweden.

Periodically, I wandered back past the visitor’s center to see if it was open yet so I could ask about taking the fire truck/Wallander tour.  

For a tourist town, the visitor’s center opened really late.

After the second pass past the visitor’s center, I walked back towards the town center and went into the H&M store.  I’m pretty sure that if I were to buy clothes, I would buy them from here.  When the airlines lost my luggage a few years back when I went to Berlin for a conference, I finally (after two days without clothes) went to H&M and purchased some stuff to wear, including my favorite Hello Kitty bra and a pair of black pants, which I have now lost.  I have no idea how I lost these pants and I am very sad they are gone.  I keep thinking they will reappear on their own, but I fear they are gone forever.

Anyway, that is backstory to say that I do have at least one good memory of shopping at H&M. 

Probably because I wasn’t feeling well, I made it so far as to pick up some new black pants and wander around the store for a few minutes before putting them back on the rack and going outside to sit on a bench and stare at nothing.

I was sitting on the bench watching people go by and thinking about fashion and my lack of it and otherwise just feeling sort of tired and without energy when a man sat down next to me and said something in Swedish. 

I really do blend as long as I don’t say anything.  People have already begun asking me for directions.

Since he had addressed me directly, it meant I had to respond in order to be polite. 

I said I didn’t speak Swedish, so of course he switched to English, even though he was German and this means he speaks at least three languages, just fueling my American-induced monolinguistic inferiority complex. 

A short aside on European masculinity.  

Now, culturally speaking, it seems that most European men are different in their masculinity than most American ones, in a general assessment of this concept devoid of all the appropriate nuances of course.  The differences are most striking in the fact there is a distinct lack of interest in guns and monster trucks, or trucks of any kind, here in Sweden combined with a willingness to wear pastel colored pants or capri pants and ride bikes with baskets on them. Plus the fact that the former constituency (scary gun/monster truck men), because they don't exist, cannot beat up the later constituency (pastel wearing bike riding men) or call them names.  I find all of this very civilized.  I should also note that many of my male friends in the U.S. would fit in in Europe, even if they don't wear pastel colors or ride bikes with baskets probably because they are afraid, but I digress.

All this being said to set up the very minor observation -- that despite the differences between American and Swedish men, they seem to share a lack of interest in shopping.  Though, to be fair, there were a lot of men in all the clothing stores as well. 

Back to the bench I was sitting on and to make my sidetrack into European masculinity relevant to my new bench companion, this particular man was waiting for his respective spouse and female children to stop shopping in H&M.  I could see another male (with baby) sitting on the steps by the H&M, presumably waiting for his wife/partner as well.

So, after said bench sharer explained that his wife/children were shopping, I was less suspicious of why he was talking to me.  He was just bored and I had monopolized the bench closest to the entrance to the store.

We chatted a bit and at some point his wife and kids stopped by to get a credit card from him.  They did not seem surprised that he was talking to a complete stranger sitting on the bench.  

They left again.

I asked what he did, because that is what Americans ask – what is your work – and he said he was a tour guide. 

At this point I became afraid that the reason he sat down and started talking to me was to perhaps get me to hire him as a tour guide.   I cannot remember now if I had already asked what he would recommend that I see in Ystad or if I asked that after he told me he was a tour guide.

Either way, I became immediately concerned that he was trying to get me to be a client and perhaps he was offended that I asked him for advice about what I should do since that was professional advice from his perspective.  At this point it was getting towards later in the afternoon and mostly I just wanted to sit on the bench and be quiet and feel kind of sick and didn't want to be a tourist anymore anyway. 

However, he asked what I had in mind for my time in Ystad and so I told him I wanted to take the Wallander/fire truck tour but I didn’t know where it started.  He of course knew, being a tour guide and all.  I said that I wanted to read one of the books too, to which he replied that there was a bookstore across the square if I wanted to buy one. 

I already knew there was a bookstore across the square because I have bookstore radar and I also had been walking around Ystad for five hours at this point and it isn’t a big city.  However, he offered to take me over to the bookstore to buy a Wallander book and so I said, sure, why not?

So we got up from our bench outside the H&M and started walking towards the bookstore, as his wife and kids were walking past us in the other direction.  A conversation ensued in Swedish.

I was still not sure if I had just hired a guide to take me to the bookstore or not.

At the bookstore he asked about English books and we found the right section and then he showed me which one was his favorite, so I bought that one. 

I still was not sure if this was now some sort of commercial transaction or not. I kind of got the feeling that perhaps he thought I wasn't competent enough to buy the book on my own, but that probably isn't a nice thing to think about a complete stranger going out of his way to be nice to me in a strange town where I don't know the language.

Anyway, it wasn’t that I was opposed to the idea of paying someone to walk me across the square to a bookstore, I just wasn’t sure if that was what was going on or not.

It turned out not.  He was just being nice and he was bored.

So after I bought my book, he said goodbye and went to rejoin his family and I wandered away to check out the marina and then go by the tourist center one more time.  

There are people on this beach in swim suits but I was wearing a jacket -- it was not warm enough to be sunbathing at the beach if you ask me!

It was open finally, not that I needed it anymore.

I did decide to go to the attached museum, however, where there was a really nice collection of contemporary Swedish art. 

Then I caught the train back to Lund.

All things considered, I mostly failed to be a tourist.  I didn’t buy clothes or a can opener.  I didn’t get to take the Wallander tour on the fire truck or see the asparagus festival.   

My success for the day was being helped buy a book by a German tour guide. 

Still, I liked Ystad.  As my ersatz tour guide had said, for a town of not many people, there is always a lot happening.  

Sadly, I never did get to see any asparagus.  

Bergen is like Seattle only more so

Bergen is like Seattle only more so

Flying into Bergen

Bergen is like Seattle in the sense that there are mountains and water everywhere, but not like Seattle in the sense that the beer costs something like $15/per glass and there was only one Starbucks that I saw after walking around the city for hours.  Ok, technically several of those hours were spent walking up a mountain, so no Starbucks there, but still… despite its global branding, Starbucks hasn’t made much of a dent in the Scandinavian market as near as I can tell.  I will interpret this to mean that even when it comes to globalized corporate visibility, Americans tend to think we are more important than we really are.

This looks a lot like the Pacific Northwest to me

But before I get derailed by a rant about global capitalism, let me explain why I ended up in Bergen.

I headed to Bergen to meet a guy named Jon about possibly racing with him in June on his sailboat. The Internet is a marvelous thing and one site that exists is called Find a Crew, which is an international website for sailors who have boats and are looking for crew and for people who want to be crew.  Jon wanted crew and I wanted to be crew and the dates for what he needed fit perfectly with my free time.

The race Jon is registered to do the Bergen to Shetland to Bergen race, a 194 nautical mile race (I think one way, so almost 400 nautical miles) across the North Sea.  This seemed like a good idea to me.

Jon said he and his crew were enthusiastic amateurs, that they had done this race last year and enjoyed it very much, and he was looking to put together a crew for this year as well.  I told him what my sailing experience was and he invited me to come sail with them on a short day race to see if it might work out for both of us.  The race was on a Thursday, which was a national Norwegian holiday.  Norway celebrates Ascension Day despite the fact they are not particularly religious as a people.

Hence my trip to Norway to couchsurf/sail with a complete stranger I met on the Internet. 

I figured the worst that could happen is that I booked a flight to Bergen, he decided he didn’t need me to race after all, and I spent a couple days seeing a really cool city. 

Of course, I was super worried that he would think I was a bad sailor or that I was not experienced enough and possibly test my sailing skills in some way and I would fail the test or do something incredibly stupid.  I figured to the degree I could practice on the plane to Norway, I should do this.  The only thing I could think to practice on the plane that was sailing related was tying bowlines, which I did with my camera cord. 

Then I closed my eyes and thought about how to gybe a spinnaker from the bow since it involves thinking backwards and given my issues with all directional skills could be an issue if for some reason I was assigned the bow position.  However, this just made me sleepy so I went back to the bowlines. 

 Upon arrival, I took the bus into the city and spent the day wandering around, which was only made slightly tiring by the fact I had a backpack filled with all the warm clothing I brought and my computer which I justified bringing because if the sailing thing didn’t work out, I’d need to occupy my time somehow. 

Close to the fish market but I forgot to take a picture of that.

Sort of strange design... part of the World Heritage site they are rebuilding using "authentic tools"

I had been in Bergen once before, 14 years ago to be exact, and my only remaining memory of the city was trying to find rock climbing on the mountain right by the city center.   

Looking up towards the mountain

On that trip we wandered around the mountain but never found the climbing.  I decided it would make sense to repeat that experience, except instead of lugging climbing gear I just lugged my sailing gear and computer up the mountain.   

I found one moss-covered route, but nothing else.

After coming off the mountain, I found a really cool bookstore/coffee shop and read while I waited for a call from Jon and hoped he wasn’t going to decide I was too much trouble and just ignore me, which I always assume as a starting point for all interactions with others.

I don't think they were for sale

Also, Jon had foreshadowed the possible lack of a race in his last email. The boat’s engine had been acting up and a screw that held the alternator on had fallen off.  The race on Thursday was contingent upon the motor working again and the alternator being affixed properly. I’ve sailed enough to know sailing is always contingent on everything working and since things break all the time, sometimes you just don’t get to sail. 

However, despite the caveats and fears, it seemed as if everything was going to work out.

I met Jon and his girlfriend Monica that evening and got to find out a bit more about them and the race.  They are both doctors that work at the medical school in Bergen.  Jon is originally from Washington State but came to Bergen for University and never went home.  Monica is from Bergen.  She also plays the cello semi-professionally (or perhaps professionally since she was very modest) in different musical venues around town and so is both brilliant and multi-talented.  One of the reasons they are looking for crew, it turns out, is that she is spending the week of the Bergen-Shetland race at a music school playing and performing, which indicates a lean towards the professional.  

After some pizza we went out to Jon’s house in a suburb of Bergen close to where Edward Grieg used to have a house evidently.  Edward Grieg is one of Bergen’s more famous people.  I’m not sure if that is a commentary on fame in Norway or not. 

Along the way to Jon’s house I kept getting excited every time I saw a Tesla until Jon informed me that there were more Tesla’s sold in Bergen than pretty much anywhere else in the world.  Norwegians have good taste in cars and evidently excellent tax breaks for electric ones.  This initiated a discussion of the carbon footprint for a Tesla versus a regular car once you factor in how your energy is created.  Norway, it turns out, consumes primarily hydroelectric energy, which is fine except when they have to import energy fueled by coal, which is not.  Still, given that much of their electricity is hydro, they are doing better than most.  We will ignore their vast oil reserves for the moment.  Being they are also a democratic socialist state, with free medical care and college tuition among other things, they are using their oil money for the good of the people more generally.

Anyway, I tried not to be excited every time I saw a Tesla after that. 

Given Jon is a medical doctor in a socialist country and from the U.S., I also spent some amount of time asking questions about comparative medical systems.  It might come as no surprise that he is for the Norwegian way.   

In terms of sailing, he grew up sailing in Washington and bought this boat about 3 years ago.  He and his crew do the weekly races and the local regattas.  The race we did was around an island and I can’t be more specific than that because there are tons of islands here and I didn’t at any point know where we were on land or at sea.  It was called the Huftarøy Rundt so if I had to guess, I’d guess the island’s name was Huftarøy.  Call it process of deduction.

After pizza and getting food for the boat and stuff, while it still seemed early, that was just a factor of how far north we were.  I had been up since 4:00 am to get the train and the plane and the bus to Bergen and after meeting and talking with Monica and Jon and getting everything organized, it wasn’t until 11:30 that I finally went to bed, and it was still light outside.

The next morning after breakfast, Monica went to get her brother Bjorn, which is probably not spelled that way, but I could only remember his name if I thought of the Baby Bjorn products, so that is how I am spelling it.  I went with Jon to pick up another of his crew whose name I cannot spell or pronounce.  I learned while trying to pronounce his name that evidently, like in Sweden, there are regional dialects that do different things to pronunciation.  I’d imagine it is like speaking with a Southern accent, but for Swedish and Norwegian.

Then we went on a really windy trip to a marina. Pretty much everyone but the U.S. uses roundabouts for intersections instead of signage. Another factor in American exceptionalism is our grid structure for cities.  This has a lot to do with car culture and a lack of a significant medieval experience, I know.  However, it contributes to my sense of disorientation since you never really know when you are getting off the roundabout.

Jon’s Crown 39 named Kelso is docked at this very beautiful marina whose location I could not ever find again on my own.  People from Washington will recognize the name of the boat – which also turns out to be where Jon is from. 

Kelso, not the city

The marina

When we arrived at the marina, rigging the boat didn’t take much time. The motor was key because we had to motor out to the start, which was about 30 minutes away past marvelous scenery of trees and granite.  Fortunately, it favored us with starting and moving the boat forwards.  At this point there was no wind so having the motor was essential.

It is in Norwegian

Not too much wind

 

There ended up being five of us for the crew that day and while I am used to a hierarchical sailing structure with strict, if sometimes implied, rules about who can do what and who can touch what, this was a much more fluid and relaxed way to race.  Also, most of it was happening in Norwegian so I didn’t necessarily know what was going on.  I figured if they wanted me to do something they would say it loudly in Norwegian or tell me in English.  They were super accommodating of my Norwegian language deficiency. 

We could not have asked for a more beautiful day and the race itself included somewhere around 20-30 boats which is more than I’ve ever seen in a Hawaii race with the exception of the Lahaina return.  Our start was not optimal because we had timed our approach a bit badly and some of our tacks took a long time because we had not yet figured out the best system and the grinding was difficult.   

This was the start before ours....

That being said, the wind was light but steady and we were holding our own until we rounded the back of the Island and hit the windless part.  The first part of the fleet seemed to have gotten through this part while there was wind while the rest of us quickly fell behind. 

Before the wind died

We even were able to hike a bit

 At some point coffee was made and we ate sandwiches.   

There was lots of helpful and informative information provided to me about Norway and so I learned about the salmon farms (we passed some very close) 

Fish farm from the plane -- we got close enough to see them jumping

and that Bergen is called the city surrounded by 7 mountains because there are 7 different mountains you can climb and you can even do them all in a single go, which 20,000 Bergenites do every year in this one celebratory hike.  They are a very fit people.   

I won’t go into the details of the race but basically aside from getting stuck without wind, it was a great day of sailing and super nice people who were incredibly accommodating and friendly and would talk in English when they figured I needed to know what was going on.  Fortunately, I did not break anything, fall overboard, or do anything super wrong.  Also, nobody made fun of my bowline knots or said the tails were too long or short or the wrong direction, even though they were probably all of these things.  Still, I’m glad I practiced those.

I don’t actually know how we did in the race, though we did beat at least one boat and so didn’t come in last.   All the boats come from all over and just disperse afterwards and while there was a party somewhere and evidently they were serving soup and sausage there, we didn’t go to it.  Also, there were still lots of boats to finish and then corrected time to figure out so it was going to take many more hours. Jon’s boat has a pretty good rating because it is mostly a cruiser and not a racer, but that being said, there were lots of boats a really long way in front of us. 

Our crew dispersed with handshakes all around.  It would appear that Norwegians, like Swedes are not into hugging, which makes me incredibly happy and relieved. In fact, the only hug I’ve received so far is from a German – go figure they would be the emotionally expressive culture around here.

Monica took her brother home and went home to prepare for work.  Jon took me to the hotel I had booked, mostly because I figured I needed an exit strategy if things went horribly wrong, but we made plans to meet up later to hear some music.  I think he was being a super nice host that wanted me to see a more complete picture of Bergen, which I appreciate immensely.  The rest of the crew went home to continue celebrating Ascension Day in whatever ways you celebrate that.

By the time I had showered I was so hungry that my decision-making abilities were impaired.  I left the hotel and went into the first place selling food I could find.  I tried to order a chicken kebab by pointing at the picture of a chicken kebab on their wall menu.  Instead I got ½ a deep fried chicken and french fries.  Since I was really hungry and not too picky about what I eat, I had deep fried chicken for dinner. 

Jon and I met in the city center and went to one of the venues part of the International music festival that just so happened to be going on in Bergen that week.   Things were said in Norwegian that ultimately meant we got in for free, but I was just following along wide eyed and helpless and full of my deep fried chicken.  We did buy $15 beers.  Jon says that the high cost of beers does not function as a deterrent to drinking, which is an interesting lesson for something, I’m not sure what.    

We listened to the bands until the last one, which was just so fantastic that dancing had to be done.  So the night ended in a truly global experience dancing to a Danish/Mali band in Bergen, Norway.

As I walked back to the hotel at 11:30 the sun was setting I just couldn’t think how a day could get better than this. 

Plus I was deemed sufficiently satisfactory as a sailor that it looks like I’m heading back to Bergen later in June to race the Bergen-Shetland race. 

Now I just have to worry about what to wear.

There and back again squared

There and back again without the excitement of Tolken...

In the past two weeks rather than idle away my time in Lund, I have set out on several different journeys.  I have gone twice to Malmo, the larger city just a short train stop away and learned how to use the bus system there.  In between my trips to Malmo I went to Bergen, Norway, which is only close in the relative sense that all of Europe is closer to me now than it normally is.  Instead of narrate in a linear fashion, I decided to be geographical in my approach.

It should go without saying that most of my time remains focused on work and not travel.  That being said, work at the Pufendorf Institute and the Lund Internet Institute continues.   

Technically we are not working here -- but this is the Pufendorf Staff and Director and the Visiting Scholars.  They took us to lunch

I spent a good deal of my week(s) figuring out how to respond to this comment:  “We would be happy to consider a paper on this subject that makes a sustained intervention in, and contribution to, securitization theory or competing frameworks. We would also be willing to consider a paper that links the substantive discussion to major cognate normative or conceptual work.” 

Since I have very little idea what is meant by the second sentence, I’m going to attempt to revise my paper with the first sentence in mind, which at least seems to have a clear point.   So I’ve been reading everything I can about securitization studies.  At some point I will force myself to try to integrate this theoretical construct into my own paper at which time I will make a “sustained intervention,” or at least attempt to do so.  I’m going with the Copenhagen school variety of securitization studies, not the Paris or Welsh schools, and not just because I am living within a few miles of Copenhagen, though this could have been a good a decision rule for picking a school of thought on securitization studies as any other when you are agnostic about the deeply held beliefs of the various schools.

So along with making sustained interventions and running around in loops instead of out and back runs because I no longer think I will get disoriented and lost and being frustrated by bouldering at the climbing gym, I have also taken the train to Malmo twice.  Malmo is a larger city than Lund and easily accessible by train.  I can even brag that I managed to purchase my train ticket from a kiosk and didn’t have to ask anyone how to do it. 

I cannot say much about Malmo’s culture or history, though I did walk past its castle (and moat)

Looks a lot like the castle at Landskrona

 and an archeologically important rock.  

Clearly it was a neglected archeologically important rock.

I think they painted in the holes so they would be visible.

The information sign about the rock.

I can comment on the window displays to be found in their sex shops because I walked past two sex shops in different parts of the city.  I was sort of shocked by the display windows, since you don’t really see things like this in the U.S., where there is probably some law against it, being a free nation and all.  I would have taken a picture but that would be inappropriate and make me look weird, and not at all cosmopolitan. I’m guessing I was shocked mostly because I’m an American and our attitudes towards sex are convoluted at best, especially when it comes to female sexual pleasure, though I have serious doubts about at least one of those dildos being pleasurable to anyone. 

Anyway, I don’t want anyone to think Malmo was all about sex shops, even though they have at least two.  It seemed like a really great city but as you can tell from my google map, I only saw a few miles of it. 

When I arrived in Malmo and emerged into the city from the train station, I adhered to my general rule of thumb for traveling while disoriented and unsure of where to go – follow someone.   I acquired this particular technique from reading Douglas Adam’s lesser-known work Dirk Gentley’s Holistic Detective Agency.  Unlike the character in the book, I don’t follow people to their homes.

In this case I was following a goth girl, because aside from the tattooed biker couple, she was the most interesting person going somewhere from the train station.  Her destination, however, was the bus stop outside the train station and I didn’t want to get on a bus because I am afraid of busses since I don’t know where they are going and I could end up lost and disoriented out of walking distance from where I want to be.

At this point, however, I could see buildings so I wandered towards them and crossed a square with a statute.

Then I heard some drums in the distance and figured going to where there was outside music was as good a goal as anything.

This brought me to what I imagine is Malmo’s central shopping district – because it was filled with shops.  Unlike American cities, however, this was a walking street with outdoor cafes and the shops faced a wide walking mall.  No cars here.

I tell you the Swedish like brass bands

The drums turned out to be the percussion accompaniment for some outdoor glittery-bikini clad dancers. 

Random Street Entertainment

I wandered on and found another square with small little political cabins like the ones I had seen in the Lund Square.  I had mostly figured these were permanent fixtures of political outreach and it hadn’t occurred to me that the cabins meant the various parties were trying to generate electoral support. 

This shipping container was the pirate party -- the bull horn guy was on the far right.

So, it turns out that in the run up to the EU elections, political parties campaign by setting up these little cabins in town squares where they can leaflet passerby and give them candy.   Unlike Hawaii where everyone stands on corners and waves signs at drivers, here you just stand by your little house and presumably wait for people to ask you questions.

A very nice man in a light blue vest with the light blue party offered me a button and candy.  When I told him I wasn’t able to vote in the election he encouraged me to take the candy anyway.

It would appear that much like artificial sweeteners in the United States, all parties in Sweden get a color.  I already knew the Pirate Party color because they are ostensibly one of my research projects – their color is purple with black.  Then there was the feminist party, which was light pink, a color I don’t typically associate with feminism. However, it was a nice pastel and soothing color and since at least in the U.S. everyone is afraid of feminists as just a slippery slope to Nazism, maybe using the color light pink was an intentional ploy.  I’m sure lots of market research went into the impact of light pink on the potential voter. 

The light blue party was there with what looked like the most prosperous little house and the most volunteers, all wearing light blue.  I was told later they were a more mainstream/conservative Swedish party. 

Then there was the guy standing by his car with a bull-horn giving a passionate speech that nobody was listening to.  Clearly, he represented one extreme or the other, given everyone else was standing by their cabins and not yelling at people. 

Since this was Sweden, if he was a conservative, even if he wanted less government regulation he was still for universal health care, because even the conservatives here believe this is a public good.  Getting rid of health care is not on the political table.

If he was a leftist radical, he probably wanted more socialism, though given that all the basics are already covered including free health care and college education after free K-12 education (or the equivalent) plus ample vacation time for everyone and maternity and paternity leave, I’m not sure what else he could have been arguing for.  The state system here seems to be functioning pretty well all things considered. 

Anyway, given the EU elections were the next day, everyone was staffing their little cabins in full force. The true heartbreak was that the Swedish Pirate Party didn’t do very well and of course they were the party I was hoping would win the most seats.  Maybe purple isn’t the best color choice.  At least in Lund they had done the most leafleting outside of the little house.  Here, you leaflet bikes, not cars. 

Politics behind me, I kept walking and found the American Store.  That is what it is called, “The American Store.”  There is one in Lund too. 

I went to look in the window and the following items were for sale and thus summarize American culture from a Swedish perspective:  Pop tarts, BBQ sauce, Hawaiian kitsch, American flags, Betty Crocker cake mixes, and other junk food like cheese whiz and candy.  Evidently our primary contribution to the world (besides as Neal Stephenson has already pointed out, movies, software, pizza delivery services and one other thing I’ve forgotten) is heavily processed food products.

I continued to wander, got an ice cream, but not what I thought I had ordered, but that is ok because it happens all the time when I attempt to order things in foreign countries even when we are both speaking English.  I wandered through a cemetery accidently while eating my ice cream and felt sort of bad about it because it seemed too celebratory and not morose enough. 

Then I walked through a park, saw a windmill, wandered by a castle, found the important rock that was seemingly of little interest to anyone. 

I took this because there were SUPers in the water, which seemed crazy to me.

Not sure what the story is but this exists in Sweden too....

Then I went back to Lund to work and prepare for my trip to Norway.  You can read all about going Norway in the next installment.

For continuities sake, I decided to just talk about the second visit to Malmo I took this past Sunday.  Stephan, who is my colleague that organized this trip, and his wife Anna invited me to lunch.  To get to their condo (they call them apartments but they are privately owned) I had to take the train again, which I now feel I have figured out, and then a bus, which I am afraid of.  Stephan gave me the bus number and then the address of their house.  I figured all sorts of navigational issues could emerge that would make me late for lunch but I tried not to let that bother me, even though I don’t like being late to things.

The train part went much like planned – I have this train thing down.  However, in Sweden you get this multiple purpose card that you put money on that gets you on the train and the bus and I knew busses didn’t take cash but I didn’t know how much it costs to ride, so I was sort of nervous about my card being too low to get on the bus or perhaps not having enough to return to the train station.

This meant that once I arrived in Malmo I spent some time engaged in a convoluted effort to re-charge my Jojo card – that is what they are called.  I don’t know how you pronounce it in Swedish.

One tip for Americans traveling to Europe – get a credit card with a code!  Everyone here uses codes for the credit cards, which actually makes a ton of sense from a security perspective. They also don’t really have the interest and in some cases the facilities to deal with signature credit cards.  This means I am literally shut out of using kiosks with a credit card.  I fear the day I may have to try to pay for gas.  If you deal with a human they can make it a signature transaction but then they hate you for it.  Hence, I’ve been buying all my groceries with cash.  My bankcard, even though it has a code, won’t work in the kiosks, so to put money on the jojo card I had to find a cash machine, get cash then go to the ticket machine and use the cash.

Fortunately, I’d factored in time for such transactions.

Given I had done reconnaissance the weekend before, I knew exactly where the bus stop was and got there just as the bus I needed was pulling up. 

It turned out to be a brand new bus – put into operation that day.  The card reader wasn’t working yet so the ride was free.  All that stress for nothing.

I managed to find their apartment, which was this very airy and light feeling space on the fourth or fifth floor of a walk up building.  It was build before elevators evidently and so when they moved in, which was only a few months earlier they had to haul all their stuff up the stairs.  That is an incentive to never move again if you ask me.

Lots of people live in apartments like this.  Here you rent or buy things based upon the number of rooms, not the number of bedrooms, so they talk about living spaces differently.  There was also this really nice enclosed community garden and play area that everyone could access and where we had lunch.  Stephan and Anna said that often all the neighbors will have impromptu potlucks which seems like a nice way to interact with your neighbors.  I only know two of mine in Hawaii if you count my landlady, three if you count the woman with the amazingly awesome dogs named Pepsi and Cola that live on my way to work.  But then I’m an introvert and my immediate neighbors to the side are mean and frown all the time.

Lunch was really nice and because public transportation is amazingly efficient in this country, it was not only easy to get back to the train station but fast.

On the way to the bus I had noticed a bookstore with English language books in it and since I figured I wanted to hedge my bets against running out of things to read, so I stopped inside the store.  The clerk came over to help me, mostly I think because he was bored, and I asked what Swedish authors he would recommend that had books written in English that I could read.

As he was pointing out a book to me, this older man wearing a suit and tie came up and started talking to him in Swedish and then they both started looking at me and then the clerk was introducing me to the old guy.  I didn’t really understand what was going on, but figured maybe this was normal for Swedish people so I just kept smiling.  We had a strange and awkward conversation translated by the bookstore guy about where I was from.  Then as the older man asked me in English if I spoke Spanish, which I don’t, but it would seem he did speak English.

As I was leaving the bookstore the old man was standing outside and waved me over.  Being a nice person and not really having any train to catch and figuring he was mostly harmless, I walked over.  He then proceeded to tell me about the geography of Hawaii and where the islands were located in English. Then he asked where I was born and when he found out I was from Washington, he told me that Seattle was named after Chief Seattle who didn’t embrace the idea of private property in the same way as the settlers did so they killed him. 

I didn’t remember this from my limited Washington State history back in the 9^th grade.  All I remember from that class, to be honest, is making up a journal of a settler that documented their journey to Washington and which I wrote in calligraphy and bound between wood planks because I figured that would make it look more authentic.  However, Wikipedia doesn’t confirm the Swedish version either, but who am I to argue with an old guy explaining Washington State history to me in the Malmo train station?

As we were talking the old guy waived a friend over and I was then introduced to his friend and the entire conversation happened again, but this time he spoke to his friend in Swedish and his friend told me about Chief Seattle in English.  His friend seemed to be aware of how strange and awkward the conversation was getting when the old guy asked if he could come visit me in Hawaii.  At this point, he kindly said goodbye and steered the old gentleman away, which was good because I was running out of pleasantly noncommittal things to say. 

I went back to my usual introverted don’t talk to strangers self and read one of my new books all the way back to Lund, which technically only takes about 10 minutes. 

With the trip to Malmo under my belt, I believe I will try to go further afield this weekend.  I hear there is an asparagus festival and that sounds like a fun thing to experience, if it isn’t raining that is.