“And a Big Stupid Swedish Boat (Also Made Out of Wood)”
Editor’s Note: So, this is a weird one, because, yes, you have seen this one before. This same post originally went live on October 25th, 2023, but I had to take it down in February 2024 because it, uh, got infected by malware, I guess? I don’t know how (or why) that happened, but it seemed to have been injected into the page via the comments section. So the best possible solution seems, at least to me, to be just to delete the old page and re-upload it here? I guess? No comments section this time. Sorry, mom, no cookies for you.
But, yeah, I’m not yet dead, despite the complete radio silence for months on end. Can you believe I uploaded to this website every week for five years and then I decided to stop just because I *checks notes* got bored/busy/depressed? Weird how our lives and priorities change, isn’t it? Anyway, I’m still writing, just not on here, and not as much as I’d like to. I still have stuff I want to post here, I just need to, you know, find the time and energy to write it out. We’ll see if that ever happens. I have projects that are more important to me right now. And since, in the five years I had this thing, it never once paid for itself, I’m finally comfortable saying “fuck it” and officially putting this blog on the back burner. If I’m going to write, it better be something worth writing. And half the shit on here? Not worth writing. The things I’m working on otherwise? Yeah, I think they’re worth writing. But I’ll post them when I feel ready. I’m not obligated to anybody, least of all some half-assed blog page that is now causing me immensely more trouble than it’s worth. Fucking Brandon, some sort of sales rep/”security adviser” has been calling me three times a day for over a week now because of this malware shit. And I just do not care enough about this blog to pay $300 a year to fix it. So, yeah, fuck it. I’m writing. Just not here.
Anyway, here’s the post. Let’s hope it doesn’t implode itself.
Original Post:
As I may have mentioned in my last run-up (or was it the run-down?) to the blog, my dad came to visit me for my birthday! And although my birthday was about two weeks ago now, I’m still celebrating! Or, rather, waiting to “celebrate”; and by “celebrate” I mean get properly, sloppily shitfaced and paint the town red blue and yellow. I haven’t done that yet, despite pestering my friends to do so with me. I did quite a bit for my birthday, though, and I certainly did celebrate (the exhaustion following that week combined with a project that took me eight hours a day for three days kept me preoccupied last week). And it was fantastic to have my dad (and his girlfriend) here for a real birthday celebration; he’s the first person from my friends/family to come visit me here in Sweden, and it was great to have a connection to home after about two months (holy shit, it’s been that long already?) away. That is an open invite, by the way; if you know me personally, come visit me in Stockholm sometime! And if you don’t know me personally and are just reading this blog, please kindly do not do that.
Hopefully this isn’t coming as a surprise at this point, but since I did literally anything of interest, I’m going to tell you about it and post an absurd number of pictures! More, once again, for my own sake than anyone else’s, but someone must get a kick out of all these photos because I haven’t really lost my web traffic, despite switching to a biweekly schedule (that is, every two weeks, not twice a week). So we’ll keep going with it until I say otherwise. Capiche? Capeesh? Quiche?
Anyway, once my dad and his girlfriend Jen got to Stockholm, the first thing we did was go to church.
Sort of. Not really. We did got to a church, after they got off the plane and visited me in the house I’m renting a room in and took the public transportation bus around Täby. They rented a hotel room north of where I live, somehow further from Stockholm than I already am, but the plus of this is they had super-easy train access (a luxury my house is lacking), and a very nice, very old church right nearby that we visited exactly one time. It’s over 700 years old, or something ridiculous like that, and the foundations of the church itself are now imbued with Viking magic, I guess, because part of the walls literally use Viking Runestones. Like, stones that people carved during the Viking age. Almost a thousand years ago. And here it is as a glorified LEGO brick:
Europeans, am I right? They’ve got historic ruins coming out their ass and they just build on top of them. But that first day was pretty loki (heh, get it? because low-key? right? amirite? Because vikings? Get it? Get it? This joke went over my head in American Gods.), because my dad and Jen had just spent a week in Iceland! Truth be told, them coming to Sweden was a bonus for me and a bonus for them because I think they’d been planning to be in Iceland anyway, and Sweden’s a hell of a lot closer to Iceland than the other places I’d been looking at, like, say, Japan or Kolkata. But we relaxed that first day, I went to Swedish language class and then didn’t go to Swedish language class because my professor was trapped in Greenland, and my dad showed me pictures from his trip. And then we prepared for the next day, where I got to be tour guide (what a surprise) and show them around Stockholm!
The next day was all a tour of Stockholm, basically. We started by hitting the Frescati campus of Stockholm University, where I attend classes most weekdays and get drunk every Thursday. If I had to break down my time on campus to which buildings I frequented the most, it’d be like 10% classroom and 90% this big green house, where the natural sciences social club hosts their functions/a legitimate pub.
So it was exciting to show them what I’m really learning in Sweden. The campus isn’t very large (still only about a quarter the area of UIUC, which is, again, bizarre), but there’s much more to see in Stockholm besides the big, green classrooms and boxy dorms of good old SU. There is, of course the PressbyrÃ¥n (a Swedish version of 7-Eleven, in the train station right next to an actual 7-Eleven) and the Kanelbullar! If you go to Sweden, you have to try their baked goods. They aren’t, like, exceptionally better than baked goods anywhere else (Chicago’s Pilsen still has the best bakeries per capita for my money. So good I broke a collar bone to get there!), but it’s Swedish culture to have a Fika, a coffee-and-baked-goods break between lunch and dinner. We ate ours at about 11am, so not quite true Fika, but the kanelbullar, these cinnamon roll things, are what really matter. We ate quite a few this week.
I’ll skip through Stockholm fairly quickly this time around, for three reasons; 1. I’ve already talked about it a little bit in my other Sweden post, 2. there are more exciting things in this blog to talk about, and 3. you know I’m going to be writing a hell of a lot more about it down the line. So I won’t step on future-me’s toes here, and we’ll leave it at the three of us walked around Stockholm for a whole day. We saw T-Centralen, we saw Gamla Stan, we saw Södermalm, we saw Östermalm, we saw a little bit of the royal city park, and we saw this fish which I spent in an inordinate amount of time looking at, so I’m going to share it with you, too:
If you, like I did, immediately recognized this fish, then congratulations! You have autism and your Special InterestTM is deep sea creatures and ocean horror. For those of you who have not spent an inordinate amount of time studying sea life for no real reason, this fish is a Chimaera. They aren’t exactly a rare fish, and they aren’t exactly endangered or anything, but they are over 400 million years old and they do tend to live more than a mile underwater, so I was absolutely stunned to see one up-close, in person, and for sale. Maybe this is a normal thing? I’m sure they’re bycatch all the time. But to see it stacked next to the red snapper, monk fish, wolf eels, and everything else they hauled out of the frigid Baltic depths, I felt for a second like that guy who first saw the Coelacanth in a fish market in South Africa. This is likely the closest I will ever get to the depths, where I long to be. What a surreal experience.
After that we walked around more and watched the sunset from Skinnarviksberget, a big rock outcropping over Stockholm. It was, I would say, a very successful first day. And we saw pretty much the entire city (Stockholm isn’t very big), so that was cool, too!
Here’s a few more pictures of our day in Stockholm.
The next day we did something that I hadn’t really done a whole lot of since getting here, believe it or not; we went to museums. How exciting! I joke, of course, but I do love museums, and I surprised myself by not going to any of these museums sooner. But you have to enjoy the Swedish sun for the four months you have it, so museums are a winter thing. We started at the Vasa Museum, which is effectively the Museum of One Ship That Sank. It has the entire ship, a 17th-century war ship built to fight the Polish, for some reason, and despite being dedicated to just this one boat, it’s a pretty damn impressive museum. I mean, look at the size of that thing. And in such a good state! The Landing wishes it could keep its stuff this preserved:
The reason, however, that it’s such high-quality preservation is that the good ship Vasa set sail for its maiden voyage from the Stockholm harbor and promptly sank 100 meters from shore. It then sat on the harbor floor, more than 100 feet underwater, for three hundreds years, totally preserved from decay. It is called by some “Sweden’s greatest engineering failure,” but they apparently felt the need to correct this because, through the power of engineering, they managed to raise the entire ship (in one piece, mind you) three centuries after it initially sank. It is now one of the largest, if not the largest, continually-preserved wooden items on the planet. They are still doing work on it today. Despite its lurid history, seeing the thing in person is damn cool.
Our trip to the Vasa museum was followed by a brief five-minute walk to the Viking museum next door. Most of Stockholm’s big museums are on this one long island, all right next to each other, which makes it super convenient to get to them all. We only went to two, the Vasa and the Viking, but those are probably the two best ones to see if you’re visiting Sweden for just a few days, anyway.
If the Vasa museum was as specific of a topic as you can get (i.e. one boat, one time), then the Viking museum is about as far the other way down the spectrum as you can possibly get. It is everything Vikings. Viking history, viking food, viking life, viking travel, viking pop culture, viking poop, for fuck’s sake. It is incredibly well-researched, and perhaps the most information-dense museum I have ever been to. It is also one of the most exhausting museums I have ever been do, because the signs are, uh, to put it as my boss used to say “books on sticks.” I certainly enjoyed it! I learned a lot about vikings! And it is a very cool-looking museum, and they have a Viking ride (for some unclear reason) in the basement! But it is one dense motherfucker. Better make use of the little space you have been allotted, I suppose.
Without going into great detail, my favorite anecdote from the Viking museum was that, during the Christianization of the Nordic countries, this was a process that went both ways. Sometimes you could turn a tribe of Vikings into good God-fearing Christians by pulling a St. Boniface and cutting down their fucking tree while taunting Odin himself, and then sometimes a bad harvest pulls them back into the Old Faith and you get a bunch of Church-hating Pagans again. So sometimes you see amulets like the one below, where there are two possibilities: one, someone had a Thor’s hammer necklace (a common motif even in Viking times) that they wanted to Christ-ify by carving Jesus into it, or you had a crucifix pendant (with Jesus pre-carved into it) that someone broke the bottom off of to make back into a hammer-shape. Either option is funny to me because the result looks like this:
But that’s enough about the Vikings. Besides museums and wandering Stockholm, we popped into a few bars that I frequent and had a drink or food, and then on Thursday (my proper birthday) we went to, well, another museum. What can I say, I’m that kind of guy. But this museum is special, because I know someone who works there and he got us in for free! (Thanks, Magnus!) Along with those international students I’ve mentioned before, I’ve gotten pretty close with a couple of my classmates in my major program, Johan and Joel (and Johan’ twin brother, Magnus). They’re Swedish and very friendly (much to the surprise of everything I had read online about the Swedes), and on my actual birthday we took the opportunity to go to Skansen, wander around, get a private tour from the guy who works there, and get my dad a chance to meet them.
Skansen is a really interesting place because it’s kind of a mix of a living history/historical reenactment museum (just like the place I used to work at!) and a zoo of Swedish animals and/or cultural activities. It’s got old buildings from all over the country, it has all of the major animals native to Sweden, it has festivals and fairs that regularly show off Swedish (and Sami) traditional culture and lifestyles, and it’s also got a small town with life craft demonstrations and things like that. It is a wild place, and a very, very cool space to visit. Skansen is what The Landing was but times a hundred and on crack, and Skansen is what The Landing could be if the park district cared about history. But, oh well, no point in crying over what you can’t change. Honestly, my dad said that it was his favorite thing that we saw in Stockholm, so that has to be saying something.
It is also on the same island as all the other museums, just south of the city center, so it is very, very easy to get to.
Magnus works there as a landscape manager (no surprise, then, that Johan is in the Landscape Ecology program with me), so we got a tour of what plants he’s been growing, how he’s been managing the landscape to achieve a true historic appearance, how he makes this old historic round pole fences that are everywhere, and also the kinds of pink beans he’s been growing. That’s not a euphemism, the beans are literally just pink in some of the gardens.
We also got a tour of the Skansen zoo, as well, though that part was self-guided. Please enjoy these pictures of Lynx kittens playing with each other:
And there was another Kanelbullar, made in a historic house by some guy who maybe/maybe not used a historic recipe? No clue about that but they were selling it for historic prices, so it better have been historic. But it was good! My favorite kanelbullar in Stockholm still goes to the lillebrors bageri in the Vasastan/Odenplan area, but my dad said the Skansen ones were his favorite. Perhaps not a coincidence that it was his favorite museums then, too.
After Skansen, no birthday is complete without a fancy birthday dinner. So we, of course, went to Stockholm’s cheesiest/most extravagant/most viking “Viking Food” restaurant in town, Aifur (also owned by the same people who have Stockholm’s “Most Pirate” restaurant, just down the street. Not sure how to interpret that). We were joined by my very good and very German friend Julia, who celebrated my birthday with me (and also sort of her own birthday, just a few days later) by donning Viking hats and holding swords and (foam) axes. I mean, what Viking dinner is really complete without foam axes and swords? She’s fun. It’s a good time. No one’s head was cut off.
Dinner included mead, a plate of mystery meats (containing but not limited to moose, wild boar, deer hearts, and more), a venison cutlet with some sort of root vegetable omelette(?), and other classic Viking foods like An Entire Dwarf Chicken. And mustard, of course. Can’t forget the mustard for the Germans.
After dinner and a quick trip back to the Green Villa (remember that one? Way from the beginning?) pub to meet the rest of my international friends, our time in Stockholm was nearing a close. But that didn’t mean the trip was over! In fact, it was just beginning (for me, anyway). The next day, Friday, we took a train through the Swedish-Norwegian countryside to get to Oslo, Norway! Since the train ride took about five hours, we didn’t do a whole lot that first day (and I spent the whole train ride working on a class project that I had been woefully unprepared for, so I was mentally exhausted by that point, too). We wandered around Oslo, went to the downtown area, saw some of the fancy buildings and the fancy streets through the rain (it rained a lot that day), and bummed around the city a bit. It kind of looks like this.
To be honest, I did not particularly care for Oslo as a city. It was too rich, too uppity, too modern for me. The big buildings were all goofy post-modern glass constructs, and the old buildings were not as impressive as Sweden. A friend of mine described Oslo as “sad Stockkholm,” and I agree with her, since I had independently come to the same conclusion that everything cool Oslo has, Stockholm has But Better. The exceptions to this are, of course, the things that you actually go to Norway to see. That is, the nature! And the buildings in the countryside! I don’t think anyone goes to Norway for Oslo itself (unless you’ve got that oil money and don’t mind blowing several hundred dollars on over-priced drinks and dinner), or at least if they do, they go to places that I didn’t have a chance to see. One restaurant did, however, have unlimited soft serve ice cream, so you know I made a mess of that.
So while I didn’t find anything particularly exciting about Oslo the City (and I sure am glad I moved to Stockholm instead), we did find quite a few wonderful things within Oslo At Large. Just outside of the city itself, in a sort of weird parallel to Stockholm’s Skansen, Oslo has the Norsk Folkemuseum. Honestly, I was kind of stunned by the sheer scale of the place. Although it lacked some of the amenities that Skansen boasts (like a zoo), I feel certain that the Norsk Museum had far more buildings than Skansen overall. Buildings ranged from thousand-year wooden shacks to an apartment complex that was demolished in the 1990’s (and, honestly, that apartment building was conceptually the coolest one they had. Didn’t look all that neat but the story there was fascinating). They had buildings coming out the wazoo, some of them over eight hundreds years old, and one of them apparently being the oldest preserved wooden structure on earth (at about 900 years)? That didn’t seem right to me, but it is what the sign said, and it was pretty damn old, so it’s something (although the building itself was boring so it isn’t pictured here, oops).
My absolute favorite was the old Stave Church, because of course it was. How could it be any other building when this church looks like this:
The rest of the buildings were pretty damn cool too, and we could go inside quite a few of them (though they weren’t exactly “dressed up,” so there wasn’t much to see). Nothing else comes close to the stave church, obviously, but there were so many cool buildings to see and to poke around in. The place just kept going, and going, and going, and we could have spent an entire day there, easy. But we didn’t. We’ll get to that after I show you the rest of the houses.
After the house zoo, though, our plans took a more oceanic turn; it was time to take a ferry and tool around on the Oslo Fjord islands! Per the recommendations of one of my friends, we got some ferry tickets, jumped on a boat, and drove about five minutes into the water from the city center. Honestly, these islands were ridiculous close to Oslo. They are still technically part of Oslo. And they’re just hanging out, right there in the middle of the water. People live there. They have electricity. They’re nice. It’s crazy!
Sure, Stockholm has islands too, and Stockholm is an archipelago proper, made up of thousands of islands of varying sizes, but it’s hard to really get a feel for the Stockholm archipelago unless you go way out into the sticks beyond the city. These islands in Oslo were right fucking there, five minutes from the harbor, and it cost you like ten dollars to get a day-pass for the ferries. Much cheaper than anything else we did in Oslo, that’s for sure.
Oh, and the islands had goats! Sheep? Some sort of critters that wandered around the thousand-year-old monastery ruins that just happen to hang out there. Oh, you know, just how it is. Take a ferry to this island, bring your picnic lunch, sit around the ruins of a culture and empire that was old before your great-great-grandparents were born. And pet the sheep while you’re at it, too, and see if you can spot the island’s single, individual fox. We did, in fact, see the fox, and he was very much a fox.
But we didn’t just stay at the picnic monastery island, of course, we also went to a couple of the more residential islands. And by residential, I mean we wandered around what is basically a small hamlet of tiny homes owned by people who I can only imagine have either been here for a hundred years or are very, very wealthy. Property like this goes for a lot these days. That being said, these are still people’s homes, albeit only seasonally. But it was always jarring to be totally alone among these quaint little summer cottages and then turn a corner and see some dude just standing on the roof, watching us. That was, uh, that was a moment. Closest I came on that trip to shitting my pants. Or the lady who watched us from her window as she unpacked her groceries. How did I know that she was unpacking her groceries? I mean, I did walk around her house a bit. Maybe we’re the creepy ones after all…
We ended the tour of the islands by leaving the summer cottages behind (I’m sure the residents were quite thankful for that) and going to a more natural island, one with a large park and a nature reserve and hiking trails and a weird little lighthouse that looks like a church. Yes, that building down there, the house that is inexplicably built on stilts and jutting out from the rocky shore, that’s a light house. Why? I don’t know. Did I got up to it? Yeah, of course I did.
By the time we had finished up on our tour of the islands, it was getting quite dark, so it was a cold, windy ferryride back to the mainland. But the views kept on coming, even then. I got to say, my favorite part of Oslo was, far and away, the stuff that barely counted as Oslo itself. But I think that’s what Norway is for, right? People are going to see the other stuff there. And I so desperately want to get to the western Fjords, to Bergen, to the Lofoten islands way up near the Arctic circle, I want to see the stuff in Norway that greater Scandinavia uses as a postcard. These islands, the folk museum, this is just a taste of what Norway has. So while I was slightly disappointed in Oslo, sure, I am very excited to go back.
Although Oslo did have a pretty exceptional weird little playground, and I’m a sucker for any sort of weird little playground, especially the particularly creative ones. So that was a very nice surprise.
I ended my time in Oslo by visiting a waffle shop, at the request of Jen, and got this sort of weird brown butter/cheese stuff on it. I guess it’s an Oslo specialty? Or a Norwegian specialty anyway? The brown butter, I don’t know about the waffle. And the brown cheese is good, don’t get me wrong, I did like it, but it tasted just like the snack cheese that’s on the inside of those cracker sandwiches I used to eat with lunch as a kid. You know the ones, they’re like neon orange and it’s closer to cheese-flavored sawdust than actual cheese? The Oslo brown cheese tasted just like that, but in a good way. If that’s possible.
After expanding our palettes with brown cheese, jam, and sour cream (?), we briefly visited the Oslo botanic gardens. They were cool! They are gardens! I always enjoy a good walk through a greenhouse to see some plants that would never, ever survive the northern winters. And they warmed up my hands after walking in the cold, so that’s a plus.
And then we were done in Oslo! I caught a flight back to Stockholm that afternoon, since I had that surprise presentation on Monday I had mentioned earlier. My dad and Jen spent an extra day in Oslo, and flew back to the States on Monday. And then they were gone! What a time it was, how quickly it came and went, how crazy it is that I’m already halfway done with my first semester of graduate school, how crazy it is that I won’t see anyone else of my friends/family until Christmas, yadda yadda, you get the idea. Time goes on. It sure was a great trip and a great birthday to spend with my loved ones.
But wait! One of you is asking. If your dad was with you, who had Alex and Julius, those fat, fat, cats you keep posting about? Well, if you’re a regular here, you’ll remember that Alex and Julius do live with my dad “permanently” now (though we haven’t settled on what happens when I come back in two years). Luckily, my mom was gracious enough to watch them for the two weeks he was away. Gracious, despite their pissing on the floor and shedding hair everywhere and screaming at nothing at three in the morning. But they are sweet cats so I think she was fine with it.
And you can’t go without a few memes from the trip first, either! First trip pictures, then cat pictures, then meme pictures, that’s how these posts seem to be going lately. So here’s a few of them for you. Pigeons and fart jokes and pot bread. What more can you ask for.
In all seriousness, though, it was a fantastic birthday, and it was exceptionally refreshing to be able to spend it not with just loved ones who have been in my life since (literally) day one, but also to be able to spend it with very new friends whom I hope to continue to have in my life for many years to come. I can’t believe how many people I have met already, and how much I have been doing since I got here. Things have exceeded my wildest expectations for what this experience in Sweden could be like, and I am exceptionally happy for that. Another year older, yes, I’m twenty-five now, but I am, glad to say it, another year happier, too. What a way that life changes, and how lucky I am to be able to experience this. Despite it all, things are good.
Thank you to everyone who wished me a happy birthday (especially those facebook friends whose posts I never even responded to; thank you for wishing me a happy birthday anyway!), and thank you to everyone who celebrated my birthday with me. Here’s to another year, and I’ll see you next week!
Or eventually. You know how it goes.
Editor’s note: Oh, and because I value paper trails and digital archival work to an almost unhealthy degree, here’s a screenshot of the only comments from the original post that were worth saving. There were also 69 (nice) other comments trying to sell a combination of insurance and “female viagra” (what?), and I’m pretty sure that’s where the malware came from. I deleted them, but that didn’t seem to help the problem. So I just deleted the whole page instead. And now we have this new upload, and it’ll probably be another month before I post anything else again. What can I say? I’ve been busy/depressed/heartbroken. But I’m getting better. Cry about it.
