Mystic in Sweden

oh hej hej!

Wednesday, JUNE 3, 2009

onsdag 3 juni 2009

Yesterday the Vega left for good (ok, until the day after I leave, which is just not fair), goodbye Tommy + the family Bergström, tack så mycket!!!

But another weekend without consistent posting, how shameful.

Friday was of little consequence, I don't even remember what I did, probably drank a beer or two and read on deck. I must have gone somewhere closer to town for some reason (Systembolaget?), because I definitely wanted to see when ferries left for Vaxholm, like I told you I had planned. Ed. note: I just reread the blog and I totally wrote a bunch of stuff on Friday....maybe I'm going crazy. I wanted to make a Stockholm Syndrome joke here but that's just not even funny.

So let's skip my Friday recap and move on to Saturday. I woke up early, at, like, 10, and had plenty of time to put clothes on and eat something before trying to catch the boat at 12. I guess the last time I took one of these boats I had just missed the 1200 tour, but in that case, I was one of the first in line to get a ticket for the next one, 1330. However, getting to the ticket counter at 1145 on one of the busiest Saturdays of the year for a ride at 1200 is just dumb. This isn't the T-bana, there are only so many places on a boat! So the girl very nicely pointed me in the direction of the other ticket counter, where I could buy a ticket for the 1500 ride....which would have gotten me to Vaxholm at, oh, 1630ish. Most museums, etc, close at 1700 so...because I have no friends with lovely beach houses at Vaxholm I did the next best thing and went to 7-11.

This specific 7-11 was later described to me by Odd as disgusting, dirty, unfit to sell food. When I walked in, literally the first thing I thought was how clean and bright it looked compared to the ones we have in America, especially ones in, say, Lynn on route 1A or whatever that is (no offense, Lynn...ok, actually, SO MUCH OFFENSE, LYNN, you're gross). But I had gone in thinking that I just wasn't up to trying to say kanelbulle one more since, NO ONE apparently can understand me when I try to say it. Fortunately, I walked into the one store in all of Stockholm where the counteress did NOT speak English. Although I knew she was asking me what size coffee I wanted, I SWEAR she was saying small when hand-motioning a large, and vice versa, and I got flustered and confused, completely unnecessarily. Thankfully, the most Swedish-looking man I've ever met here was behind me...Swedish-repairman-by-day-cliche-adult-film-star-by-night-looking man I've ever met, complete with long blonde hair. But he was very nice and helped me with what should be the easiest exchange between two people, pointing at a cinnamon bun and then holding your finger up to indicate one, which somehow turned out to be another miscommunication between Ms. Eleven and me. Do I look like the kind of person who wants two?

Well, once I got to the park and had demolished the first, I totally wanted two...maybe she's the secret yin to my yang; although we can't communicate, she knows me.

I read in the park for a while, which was just perfect, excepting the singularity of my kanelbulle, and decided to go to ICA, because what else would I do with my time but go to the supermarket?And when I got back to the ship, what did I do? Read, obviously. I considered going for a walk, and just like how when I see people lying around in the park I feel like I should be Outside and Taking Advantage of the Sunshine instead of...what, outside in the sun on a boat? So I stayed put.

This weekend was a funny sort of festival-cum-boatshow...but both and neither at the same time...There was a row of tents selling mostly vacations to Finland and food, but also solar water heaters ("that's dumb, why don't you just put some water in the sun, same thing"--Johan), this sort of self-bailing apparatus that attaches to your bowline and is activated by the boat pulling against whatever it's tied to...hard to explain, and faux Crocs, obviously.

I had walked through it the day before, completely unprepared for the capitalistic nature of the boat festival, although not surprised, after being here for however long, by the commodification of hantverk, or, maybe obviously, handmade things. Especially mittens and brushes, of course.

But Johan wanted to see the boats, and I invited myself. Along the way we saw a man in a...well I was going to say antique, or vintage...an old-ass diving suit, like in cartoons, or promotional material about the Vasa. I can't tell if people could pay to go down in them or if they were professionals, but apparently the man, whom it had taken 30 minutes to dress in the suit, was just walking around near the kaj describing what he saw...sometimes I'm not that upset to not be able to understand. But when he came out he looked EXHAUSTED, and the suit was so heavy when you're not in the water that the helper men had to remove it for him. This is one of those suits with LEAD shoes, so cool to see in action!

We continued and right across the way from the Crocs-and-plain tshirts seller, who somehow had a lot of business, we explored the docks. It's strictly a transient dock (I'll get the number for you, Dad), and this weekend it was full of some of the most beautiful wooden boats, Scandinavian and American, maybe others I couldn't identify. All perfectly varnished. I wish I had taken pictures but obviously I forgot my phone. (I'm going to take a moment here to say there probably will not be any pictures for the duration of this blog; I can't afford to keep buying batteries my camera will EAT FOR CAMERA BREAKFAST...8 pictures that I can post is not worth 40 kronor. So, instead, I will use my phone and take 40 pictures I will post later, when I have a computer that acknowledges iPhones, stupid Dell. But back to boats.) We saw one of the boats made at the school a few years back, and tried to avoid eye contact with the three creepy shirtless guys in Capris blasting Eastern European Dance Music and drinking beers on their boat (weird, no girls?). We walked back to the dock next to Sankt Erik and took a little self-guided tour of Tre Kronor (Three Crowns), a repro ship that Johan had worked on...I believe the original was late Victorian, I want to say 1870s or 1880s.  It's another beautiful boat, obviously.

They tried to get Johan to go with them to Vaxholm (where I wanted to go in the first place!!!) but he didn't want to, for the same reason I refused when they offered me his place--too long and crazy to get back on the bus...which is a REALLY DUMB REASON...but I was also a little intimidated by not knowing the crew and accepting a free ride that cost the only three other passengers 500 kronor.  Anyway, I hate the public transportation system here, anyways.  It's really beautiful and tells you what time the next one's coming and stuff, but it's SO EXPENSIVE and since I don't need to get anywhere in a hurry (other than 10 m away from where I live), it's just not worth it to me.  Plus all this walking is feeling really good, although my feet would beg to differ, and I've certainly been spending more money on bandaids than I usually do.  Sorry, Mom, I WILL buy sneakers sometime, but I'd rather go to Marseille, which totally don't cost the same, but....

So we were down below when the ship was about to take off, and we almost were accidental stowaways, since I was telling...one of the skippers, maybe? all about the apartment hunting I was doing in New York, blah blah blah, WHY WOULD HE CARE....but once someone asks me a question I've thought about way too much (i.e. any question at all), they are let in on my whole mental (hah!) conversation.

And then Saturday was spent discovering WitzPickz and the end of a box of wine, which makes me sound like a wino shut-in, but I enjoyed thoroughly, as evidenced by the late-night post of the link.

So...next is...Sunday, which was pretty awesome too.  I bought a bunch of food, and it was the most beautiful day ever, which is hyperbole for kind of hot, like I'd say 30 degrees, since, if you can't tell, I've officially switched to the metric system and celcius, because nothing says Pretentious like European customs (I bet everyone's totally into the 24 hour clock system I've been using here).  But what a day for a picnic!  I packed up that food, my bedsheet (awesome), put on my bathing suit, and prepared to sunbathe...on a lawn.  I am so uncomfortable with that idea, probably since we're also on the water here...but...it's grass.  And although so many other people are way more naked than I would be comfortable with, which should give me confidence, there are also HUNDREDS of tourists walking by you all the time, since every place is so public.

ALSO, there was an antique car show, which I walked by with mild enthusiasm until I saw all the people dressed up in the decade of their car (or whatever their interpretation was...but that's a different post).  Especially intriguing to me was the red sports car (boring), being fixed or whatever by two youngish men (opposite of boring) in these very hip interpretations of...well...since they were interpretations I can't tell you what decade, since I don't know cars and men's clothing is so...the same, which I tend to love.

Anyways, after that distraction, I walked FOREVER before I came to a place that wasn't full of people or two inches from the path everyone was walking on.  But man, was it worth it.  I listened to old Selected Shorts I had, while wearing a bathing suit and my Selected Shorts (see what I did there?), since I just couldn't bring myself to wear only a bathing suit in such a ridiculous place.  Although some girls (and, ick, some not-so-svelte women) had very little shame, and my favorites were couples wearing only matching bottoms (aka monokini, see, I know my fashion history already).

I came home and readied myself for CLEANING THE VASA.  I have some great pictures of this that you will see later (like, a month.  everyone will be so over it by then).  I put on my tan carhartts and a summer t, because there's nothing like a v-neck for ship-dusting.  But finally a good use for the carhartts!  Wearing them constructing the IKEA furniture was a stretch.  I got there at 1730, we ordered dinner for 1930, and got to work!  I was given a dust mask, headlamp, earplugs, gloves, a brush, a vacuum, two extension cords...and started to wonder what I got myself into.  Emma and I worked on cleaning parts of the inside of the ship that can be seen by visitors from the outside....which sounds impossible, but they closed the hatches of the gunports, and we vacuumed the lions on each of those.

http://www.traveladventures.org/continents/europe/vasa-museum03.shtml

Kind of a random site, but I didn't feel like combing through the Swedish Vasamuseet site searching for en lejon, and the English version is not as thorough.

So, it was on the easy side until after dinner, which we ate on the company rooftop patio on beautiful wooden patio furniture, which is what makes working at a Swedish company so crazy.

But then we moved to the övrebattredäck, which is so much harder to type on an American computer without ö, ä and å, my favorite letters of all time.  And let me just say, there are many surfaces on an övrebattredäck, hoo-ee, you wouldn't believe.  Anyway, I got home at 10ish and had a beer, and was that manual-labor tired, which feels so good.

Monday!  On the work front, I will officially be writing that chapter on buttons, OMG!  So exciting.  So excited.  So thankful.

On the social front, a few weeks back I met Laurel, a girl whom I should have met, like 20 years ago, since we're both from Mystic, but just did recently (at DPI, of course).  She is a dancer in New York City (um, awesome, esp since I'll be there and interested in Cultural Events, which dance falls under), and as randomly as my presence here, came to Sweden for one week? two? to teach dance, and I think go to a workshop....something.  But she texted me (I.O.U. something like $2.50, Mom) and I met them at the Tekniska Högskola T-bana stop...which I walked to.  I actually walked my new boat-mate to the grocery store, three of which were on my way, and then met them.  I actually stood next to her friends for a while, which I totally guessed would happen in my head, but hadn't had anyone to tell before it happened, and ergo to gloat to afterward (about what, my ability to guess at probably comical situations? HAH, eat that, friend...I'm also getting good at guessing the end of Law and Orders, but maybe that speaks to a different issue).  They brought me along to a senior recital, a word which totally belittles the weight of the performance....so....it was like a thesis presentation, but with more body movement...and flour, people in underwear, and confetti. Do I need to mention this was modern dance?  I definitely enjoyed the experience, and I totally get and appreciate the legitimacy of the visceral reaction/aesthetic emotion, I want to know more about dance before I talk about it...otherwise my reactions are mine, all mine.  I want to hear other dancers talk about it, instead, although I didn't press them, since they had many other interesting things to talk about.  I asked the wrong question: "how do people know it's ok to laugh?" at intermission, after what I can only describe (breaking my reaction rule) briefly as an exploration of sound connected to movement where people were CRACKING UP at her wailing...which I kind of took to be serious.  So my thought, and here maybe it will become obvious why I so enjoyed working BEHIND the scenes, was, how do they know her intention is not serious, and that she won't be offended or hurt by your laughter?  But everyone assured me that they're long past caring about what people think, plus, it's all about your individual reaction, etc, etc.  And all that reminds me of is my philosophy of art class at Bates, which I quote a lot (right after telling someone the time in 24 h clock and informing them of the current temperature in celcius), but really appreciated for the professor's dreamy eyes, although I can't remember his name.  But they're right, and I totally should have given them more of an opinion, but they're probably...no, definitely, not thinking about it this much, so....continuing on, we went on a tour of the school, and everyone flipped out, talking about how much bigger the rooms were, etc, etc...apparently they're twice as big as the ones in Portugal, which are in turn twice as big as those in New York, which are 18 times as big as those in Japan, which was essentially the showing we had going (hah!) for the night.  We watched a choreographer and her dancer rehearse what seemed to be a very cool dance (see, that's where my vocabulary for my visceral reactions ends, who needs that).  We collected one of the dancers (a Norwegian) from the performance and she took us to a cheap falafel place in Södermalm, which was obviously amazing, although who goes to a falafel place and gets chicken?  Me.

Then to the bar!  We looked a few techno-bumping places, which made me quickly realize that I was with a lot of people for whom dancing in public was not only not embarassing, but encouraged and desired.  But we decided instead to go to Carmen, which I believe is in SoFo, which I have described before.  It. Was. So. Hip.  Like I thought the Silhouette was bad (and by bad I mean full of glorious, glorious hipsters that I appreciate no matter what anyone says), this place was full of EUROPEAN hipsters.  Oh lord, the mustaches, the glasses, the OLD L.L. BEAN SWEATERS.  I almost went up the kid, who has the opposite version of my blue sweater with the little white diagonal lines, but I could tell by his haircut he was not going to be amused by my plain t-shirt, jeans, and flip flops, which by all accounts should make me hate him but I just can't be mad at them for thinking that the more unflattering something is, the most hip it is.  I just can't.  So it was heaven.  I got a Tuborg Guld, which is not only Danish, but I've had it before, which is like getting chicken at a falafel place, who does that?  And then, obviously, a Russian beer, which was cheap, and thusly I felt hip.  I'm surprised they didn't import PBRs. Anyway, we left at like 0030, and I WALKED ALL THE WAY HOME, which was dumb, but really not because it's unsafe, although I'm sure it is.  To the point: "Hey, what's your name, mine's Andreas, we're looking for the afterparty, want to come along" sounds way less attractive in Swedish than you'd think.  But it was nice of him to offer?  Fred suggested I should have taken the ferry, but I felt better walking all the way home than waiting for a ferry at Slussen, which creeps me out a bit, although that logic is way skewed.

Tuesday!  Bastu!  Not a Swedish dirty word, unless that's the kind of sauna you're into.  Work, work, work, all day, lots of staring at the sheets for buttons I can't locate, hoping I'd put my hand down to write on the page, and be really frustrated by something button-shaped obstructing my flat surface, only for it to be THAT VERY BUTTON!  An amateur archeologist can dream, can't she?  Meanwhile, I've been learning some very important lessons, like, "You should have paid more attention in math instead of passing notes with Latham and trying to keep Gil from putting his feet, nondairy creamer, or whatever into your pockets so that now you can apply it to situations as the Missing Buttons/Miscatalogued Find fiasco you're in right now."  It's addition, y'all!  But I've created this intricate, yet useless, system of accounting for the buttons in my head, and I'm just so not used to having to think in a way that makes sense to anyone else.  I think, when I'm called upon (and have written it out a few times beforehand), I can communicate my thought process relatively well...but this ish is somehow different.  I'm kind of mixing days of work, because most of the confusion happened today, but all the same.

Also, unrelatedly, although it IS what my mind felt like today, I'm pretty sure that it's a tropical storm outside, but, like, colder.  Like an Arctic Circle storm, because we're closer to that than the Tropic of Cancer, which, as a book, I did not enjoy as much as I'd hoped.  So dramatic.  Like this Arctic Circle Storm that's occurring.  When Stockholm gets windy, it gets flipping WINDY, and the boat won't let you forget it, whipping lines and squeaking gangways.  Creeeeppyyyyy.

But oh, lord, the bastu.  I wound you up and let you down, I'm sorry.  At 1630 I was again asked to join the sauna crew, and although I feel bad for ruining guy time and making everyone wear towels, I'M NOT SORRY AT ALL because it was amazing.  There was no beer, so I ran home and got mine...all...5 of them, only two of them cold.  But better than nothing!  Carlsberg tallboys, hell yeah.  So Matt, my new boatmate, and I ran to the boat, then ran back to the museum.  We searched for towels in our respective dressing rooms (because my Swedish workplace has dressing rooms, not only for changing in and out of Manual Labor Clothing, but for your sauna toilette), and, finding none....were promptly told that we obviously had to bring our own...but can they take the beer? Oh, right.  So we ran back to the boat, and ran back to work, not knowing how long they would wait around for us.  I got a my towel on and knocked on the door....only to be told that you obviously have to take a shower...so I showered, worrying the whole time that I wasn't taking a good enough shower, or if I was being an idiot and it was just a rinse-off, before-pool shower?  Oh, to overthink everything.  Never a dull moment here!  Then when I tried to go in again, I was told to remove my glasses, unless I wanted them to burn my face, and, I imagine, melt.  Finally, I was allowed in, although I could no longer see, and had the immediate negative reaction I have to heat...although I wasn't aware until a few minutes later that it was 86 degrees in there--STILL CELCIUS...so....google translate....to....180 degrees F!  I was regaled with tales of Finnish sauna competitions, which max out the temperature at something like 115 degrees Celcius, maybe 110, which is JUST OVER BOILING.  The longest time is like 15 minutes or something, I don't think I even lasted 15 minutes in the 86 degrees.  I'm sure it takes some getting used to.  By the time my beer can was burning my lips, I had already taken two cold shower breaks, which were awesome, and when we all finally gave up, I felt beyond magnificent, if a little dehydrated.  If it weren't such a pain to start the coals every day, I might try to persuade everyone to make it a daily thing.  Holy sweatmarks.  Speaking of which, it was so nice to finally have an outlet for that sweaty, sweaty part of me that hates light-colored cotton (remind me to tell you the story of the Connecticut Accepted Students Welcome Get-together if I haven't already)...I felt...at home.  But remember how I never get cold?  I was freezing all night, which was actually kind of nice.  But a funny experience for me.

I will miss the bastu on Friday, because in a few short hours I will be waking up et aller au Marseille pour passer le week-end!!!  I don't know if there's a timestamp on this, or what timezone it's in, but I'm up irresponsibly, embarassingly late, and it's all because I love you and want you to know what is happening in my Swedish life, because it's monumentally important to me, and should be to you too.

Thanks for sticking by me through thick posts and thin, I probably won't post in Marseille, but you'd better get ready for some kind of recap, if this mid-length novel is what I give you for a few days in Stockholm, which is, like, totally old hat by now.  Psych(e?).

Bisoux, bisoux, bisoux,

Arianna