« February 2009 | Main | April 2009 »
It is unclear whether there is one Swede out there who loves to adorn street signs with stickers, or if there is a crew running rampant through the Swedish streets with stickers and duct tape.
Some recent findings (bunny isn't new, but this bunny one has a little something else). Interpretations?
You may remember back to Semla Day where we properly stuffed ourselves with giant pastries just one month ago. According to the Swedish calendar, today is våffeldagen and Dave and I made sure in between work and errands to get a sampling of Swedish waffles. After a few successful errands, along with one frustrating failure having to do with getting our ID cards, we started looking for a place to pop in and sample Swedish waffles.
We were told that we could stop by any coffee shop and waffles would be available today, but the couple that we looked in didn't appear to have våfflor on the daily specials list, or anywhere in sight. As we stopped to run one of our last evening errands we decided to ask a Swede.
We were saved by the friendly pharmacist at the local Apoteket who recommended a nearby bakery. She felt quite strongly that we must not miss the waffles.
We took took her recommendation and stopped by one place, not sure of what to expect. We ordered two plates, served the two ways you could order it: one with raspberry jam, the other with cloudberry jam.
I recently learned both at work and thanks to Joel that the Swedes define spring a little differently than I am used to. Okay, yes, vernal equinox wasn't on the tip of my tongue but I did know that there was something about the earth's axis and the sun...you know, all that fancy stuff, that defined spring. But here in Sweden, or at least in Stockholm, I learned that Spring began yesterday.
It seems standard practice to declare the start of Spring after one week of above freezing temperatures. So, yesterday was the first day of Spring and today it hailed. Go figure.
A few shots of our surroundings as seen from my evening park trip with Zeke yesterday evening.
I had my first work meeting outside of the Karolinska campus today and had the opportunity to catch a train to Uppsala and explore a bit after the meeting. Not much to report and other photos will be posted on flickr, but I have to share my favorite find of the day. As I walked from the Science Park to the Cathedral I encountered the following:
(translation, I think, is "Snowmen require normal weather")
Look at the anguish in this snowman's face:
And then, this poor snowperson was off to the side:
The protest made the paper, though I can't translate the whole thing yet. Hopefully soon.
As someone who loves food, of nearly all kinds, I started to get a little annoyed that every time my Swedish instructor would talk about an American having food it was always going to the hamburger restaurant. I imagine that had I been my Japanese classmate I probably would have also been annoyed that everyone assumed I ate nothing but sushi.
Anyway, I just returned from a quick trip to a big grocery store in the city and stumbled upon the American section as I made my way from the bakery to the produce section. Lining the walls I saw this:
Okay, so let's do a quick inventory. French's mustard, Hershey's chocolate syrup, fluff, pancake syrup (read: NOT maple syrup), Goldfish crackers, Betty Crocker frosting, Starbucks coffee, some candy, jello, canned cranberry sauce, graham cracker pie crusts, coke, Stovetop stuffing, beef jerky, cake mix, canned pumpkin, baked beans...well, my favorite are these (sorry it's blurry):
and this:
I'm not sure why it cracks me up so much, but the fact that neither Pop Tarts nor Fruit Loops made it here but their knockoffs did, well, it makes me giggle a little. Oh, and the Scrunchy Fruity Floats cost more than two boxes of other cereal. Imports are imports, I guess.
But here's the thing I realized just about five seconds ago as I was inserting the image above, this is pretty accurate. I mean, what do you see when you walk into any gas station mini-mart or 7-11 in the US with a little food section? You see beef jerky, cereal, frosting, cake mix, candy, soda, StoveTop stuffing, jello...you see all this stuff and more. Hmmm...
