Fika Law and Other Swedish Notables
My apologies for the lack of a coherent narrative in this post. What follows is essentially a collection of anecdotes and notables from the past few weeks. A lot of those notables have the same format: I noticed something cool about Sweden, then I imagined what it might look like in the US, and finally concluded sadly that it would never happen in the US. Please pardon the sporadic style.
But first, with the olympics going on (well, at least they were when I wrote this part), I find it somewhat poetic that the Nordic countries dominate the winter sports. As of writing, Norway, with just under 5 million people, has 26 medals and 9 golds. That’s almost 3 times as many medals as the US. Sweden’s no slouch either. For a country of 10 million people (and markedly less mountainous than Norway), we’ve got 7 medals! There’s a sense of everything being in its rightful place when countries that survive winter professionally are given a stage to publicly demonstrate their mastery of the cold elements. My loyalties were seriously tested during the Sweden vs. USA gold medal curling match.
Groundhogs Day came and went, and with it, a consideration about whether Sweden might have its own version of Punxsutawney Phil. That thought quickly faded, however, as I realized that such a mammalian weather indicator would be utterly useless; there will always be 6 more weeks of winter in Sweden. Alas, on March 15, there is still no sign of temperatures breaking out of the low 30s.
At a hockey game about 2 hours north of Stockholm in the remote town of Östervåla (population: 1000), I got my first taste of Swedish geographic tensions (well at least of the kind directed at my group, since lampooning the southern province Skåne and their Danish-sounding accent is an every-day activity). This time, though, Stockholmers were the target. After an illegal crosscheck by one of our guys, one of the fans yelled in disgust, “Jävla noll åtta” = “Damned 08”! Lest you think I might have been confused and he could have just been angry with #8 and saying it in a bizarre zero-prefixed way, I was soon informed by a teammate on the bench that 08 is the telephone area code for Stockholm. It would be like yelling “freakin’ 212!” at a New York City team.
Digging a little deeper into this, I’ve discovered that Stockholm doesn’t exactly have the best reputation throughout the rest of the country (and especially the north). Stockholmers are considered glitzy sissies, and there’s a Swedish word with no good translation that is used to disparage 08-ers all across the country. True, Stockholm residents don’t give off the same winter battle-tested aura that was on full display during my weekend in northerly Sundsvall (see below for evidence), but the Stockholmers still slog through the rain, snow, and sleet on the regular.
I recently learned of a Swedish TV game show called På Spåret (“On the Track”). The show has been on since 1987, and at many points in its history has attracted audiences that comprise half of Sweden’s population. The format is this: two teams of Swedish celebrities are shown filmed journeys, usually from the front of a train, and the objective is for each team to identify the destination of the train, using clues from the host.
Yet far more interesting than this game show — which is still in the realm of sensible entertainment– is the cultural phenomenon popular in the Nordic realms called “slow TV”, described perfectly by Wikipedia a “a genre of marathon television coverage of an ordinary event in its complete length”. Originally conceived in Norway, where the “pilot” was a real-time 7-hour train ride from Oslo to Bergen, the genre came to Sweden in 2013, when Sweden’s public broadcast company SVT aired an entire 6-day boat ride along the Göta Canal, a 190-kilometre long waterway in southern Sweden. Having now been on a cruise through the archipelago towards Tallinn, I can actually say that footage from a boat could be entertaining.
For anyone who thinks that the US is the most progressive country in the world, I’ve got some bad news for you (at least in the realm of challenging traditional gender stereotypes). Here are some anecdotes from past few months, obviously not entirely representative of all of Sweden but still pretty telling. On the largest electronic billboard in Stockholm’s largest square, I saw a beautiful commercial in which a man sitting on a train starts putting on jewelry, nail polish, and lipstick, then emerges from a restroom wearing a dress. The words “Vem du är än, vart du än ska” [Whoever you are, wherever you are going] display as she walks out of the station. This would be an impressive display of acceptance even if this were an advertisement for a transgender advocacy firm, but get this: the ad was for Sweden’s national rail operator! Can you imagine Amtrak showing such an ad? I can’t even imagine Amtrak caring enough about its customers to buy an ad.
Then, sitting through movie previews before Star Wars, they showed an ad for the Swedish armed forces that at one point featured two female soldiers making out. The next week, my advisor used only female pronouns in describing a professorship the Electrical Engineering department is currently hiring for (e.g. “she will work on substation security”, “her lab will have 2 post-docs”, “we hope she can start around July”). This was followed up by several instances in which men went out of their way to use “he or she” in talking about user studies for smart home monitoring applications, in which the participants were described as “total techies”. It was incredible and uplifting to see gender-inclusive language in areas with large gender imbalances like engineering and tech.
One metric I’ve used to track my Swedish language progress is the number of face palms that result from discovering false cognates. This week, I realized that a Spotify commercial about ominous avocados was actually an advertisement for a law firm (advokat) specializing in accident claims.
Several fun facts about Sweden were ascertained last week, but perhaps the most bizarre came from my main man Johan Andersson (yes, that’s a real person, I didn’t just use the most common name in Sweden for an imaginary friend). For his high school prom, all the boys and girls were sorted into three sets of hats based on height, then paired based on random draws. The other big one was the Swedish national ski holiday, a one-week vacation in February/March called Sportlov where going up to the mountains for winter sports is virtually mandated. The 4 major urban areas each take a different week to spread out the crowds. Lastly, I finally caught a glimpse of a bandy match. Depending on your departure point, bandy is either like big outdoor hockey or soccer on ice. It’s 11 v. 11 on an outdoor rink the size of a soccer pitch, with two continuous 90 minute halves, large nets, a small pink ball, and field-hockey looking sticks. If you think skaters can pick up speed on a regular hockey rink, wait until you see what happens when the ice doubles in size. Damn these guys were flying, and thank god hitting is illegal because there were a few instances that would have been near-death experiences otherwise.
I’m getting quite used to being the only person sitting at a table with dark eyes. This happened not once but twice last week, and this was with at least 10 people at the table both times. I’m not calling it inbreeding, but when a recessive allele has lasted this long, something’s going on.
I’ve dipped my toe into the Stockholm running scene, and let me tell you these people are winter warriors. Running in the mid 20s is routine for Swedes, but nothing quite compared to when a member of our group made the impromptu decision to strip naked and take a dip in Lake Mälaren (in near freezing temperatures) to cool off.
I’ve written plenty times before about the daily coffee break — and Swedish cultural institution– “fika”, but this week it went to the next level. I was informed by a coffee-loving Swede (also known as a Swede) that all companies in Sweden are required to give their employees two fika breaks per day. That’s right, there is literally a fika law. There’s also a law prohibiting leaving your dog at home unattended for more than six hours, but that’s a different story.
I need to dedicate at least two paragraphs to the marvel of Stockholm traffic management. Likely an oft-overlooked aspect of the city, the vehicle congestion engineering is a work of art no less impressive than the National Gallery’s collection. A complex network of tunnels, highways, and 54 bridges connects Stockholm’s 14 islands in such a way that diverts cars around (or under) the city’s major pedestrian through-fares. The city’s largest boulevards are often completely devoid of car traffic. On many a drive to an away hockey game, I have marveled at how we can pass through all of Stockholm without stopping at a single red light
The crown jewel of this network is Slussen, the connection point between the tourist haven Gamla Stan (the Old City) and the once-edgy, now hipster Södermalm. In the 1920s, the traffic situation there was so bad that it was called slusseneländet (the Slussen misery). A massive construction project in the 1930s produced a cloverleaf interchange, the first of its kind in Europe, followed by a tunnel running under the entirety of Södermalm, which together were a massive success in alleviating congestion. The interchange is so beloved that when the city proposed a renovation plan in 2015 that would have destroyed it, a member of ABBA (who in Sweden has more influence than the king) started a campaign to “Save old Slussen!” and pledged to reunite the group if the construction plans went through.
I’d now like to present my favorite photo from my 6 months in Sweden.
What am I looking at, you may ask? How did a picture of a fast food restaurant menu take the top photo prize, beating out such wonders at the sunset over Lake Mälaren or the plaster facade foliage in Gamla Stan’s narrow streets? I’ll tell you how. If you look closely, you’ll see, next to a few menu items, the designation “Low CO2”. This picture comes from the Swedish fast food chain MAX, which is far popular here than McDonalds, uses all Swedish beef, and yes, advertises low carbon emission meals. I imagined an American consumer approaching that menu thinking in bewilderment, “What does CO2 have to do with a chicken sandwich? This isn’t an electric car dealership!” I’ll tell you what! According to a National Academy of Sciences study, beef requires 28 times more land to produce than pork or chicken, 11 times more water and results in five times more climate-warming emissions. I found it incredibly uplifting that MAX provides even the slightest nudge away from red meat, which adds one to a long list of environmentally conscious behaviors the Swedes practice every day. Another item on that list: no grocery baggers. It is the customer’s responsibility to bag his or her own groceries, and you must explicitly purchase a plastic bag (by putting it on the checkout counter right next to your food) if you’d like to use one. This, combined with a ~$0.50 per bag charge, has led to a situation in which most people bring their own reusable bags to the grocery store, saving thousand of tons of plastic waste from the landfill. In fact, Sweden has set a national goal of 40 bags per person in 2025 and to help gather data for that target now require all suppliers to report the amount of plastic bags they have produced.
I can’t help but bring up this next story as evidence of the potential wonders when you have a small population and competent government. On September 3, 1967, Sweden switched from driving on the left to the right. You’d think that such a change would be impossible in a modern industrial society, but Sweden pulled it off.
There was a massive public information campaign leading up to the switch and specially appointed traffic volunteers who wore different color gloves the day of to make sure everyone had made the switch. Again, Wikipedia’s affectless description matches well with the Nordic sensibility that inspired those Swedes to believe they could pull off a nation-wide traffic switch: “On Dagen H, all non-essential traffic was banned from the roads from 01:00 to 06:00. Any vehicles on the roads during that time had to follow special rules. All vehicles had to come to a complete stop at 04:50, then carefully change to the right-hand side of the road and stop again (to give others time to switch sides of the road and avoid a head on collision) before being allowed to proceed at 05:00.”
Another big one that somehow I’ve never mentioned: you know how in the US (and most places on Earth), the affirmative sound for “yes” goes something like “uh huh” or “mm”. Well the Swedish affirmative noise is a literal gasp, especially if you’re talking to northerners. Several times I’ve been scared half to death thinking that what I said was totally unacceptable or that a fire just sparked behind me only to be met with a look of pure confusion. This video sums it up pretty well:
Last-second points:
- My office-mate Jack recently explained Swede’s proclivity for wearing only black not as a minimalist design statement but as an attempt to absorb the sun’s energy most effectively. I think he was only half joking
- I learned that there are two words that translate to the English “cloudy”, which are used to indicate the level of cloudiness. This is important in a climate where blue skies can be seen one out of every eight days.
- Might have mentioned this before but the Swedish alphabet has three extra letters (ä, å, ö). How it took me six months to hear the alphabet recited is another issue entirely, but I was shocked to learn that the three extra letters come at the very end, after “z”. This further drives home the point that the funny little double-dot and halo are not accent marks for o’s and a’s. They comprise completely unique letters.
