Still Stockholm, Sweden

August 29, 2006-Still Greek to Me
(photos:Royal Family,
City Hall,
Ice Bar)

Could I be getting lulled by being a follower for so long? Perhaps I’m turning into a willing sheep. I’ve become passive. Sitting on the bus has become my cocoon. I doze and look out at the world and doze again. At times I’m sorry I have to move myself out of my seat. Eighteen days and counting has made me lazy.

We had to be in the lecture hall at 8:30AM. The doors were to be locked and they wouldn’t be opened until 9:30AM. Why all the drama? I thought I’d figured it out when I saw the “Blodbussen” parked in front of the hotel. I guessed there was a blood drive on and we were captives to the vampires in the bloodmobile. Yves assured me that wasn’t the case. Our room was part of the secure office suites for the hotel and admittance was by code. It was too hard to keep opening the locked door for latecomers.

We were introduced to Marie, our city guide for the next two days. She had a British accent when she spoke English as many have but is a natural born Swede. All children here learn English from grade 1-9. Since Swedish universities draw from the whole of Europe and there aren’t many books in Swedish lots of the classes are taught in English. Lucky us! She said she spoke English precisely as Swedes spoke their language. Swedish, Norwegian, and Danish belong to the same Gothic language base as German and Dutch. To Swedes, Norwegians speak quickly with a musical cadence and Danes speak as if they have a hot potato in their mouth.

She was high on education here. It starts late by our standards. At age six children go to what we consider kindergarten. They start first grade at age seven. Class sizes vary from 18-25 students with two teachers per class. Eat your hearts out! After the first nine grades a child has to choose whether to follow a technical or academic track for the next three years. University education is free and each student gets $1,000/month subsidy for living expenses. A portion of that is a repayable loan. If you finish a major and decide to change fields it’s free with the same stipend.

Q & A

Sweden is the third largest country in Europe. It’s the size of California. Its population is proportionately small since 50% of the land is forested and there are 97,000 lakes. Almost 30% is above the Arctic Circle. To make matters worse, between the late1800’s and early 1900’s twenty-five per cent of the population (1 million) left for the U.S.

Marie seemed to enjoy the back and forth of Q and A. One person asked what she considered to be the biggest success and worst failure in Sweden. She immediately said that education was the best. But when she explained the new private schools that were cropping up and getting state money we cringed. They sounded like our charter schools and we know what that’s doing to our public schools. The worst was their inability to integrate recent immigrants. Immigrants are paid to learn Swedish but the most recent Muslim immigrants don’t go to language school. They’re covered by all social services and while 80% of Swedes are Lutheran, Islam is now the second largest religion in Sweden.

Swedes are liberal in some areas and rigid in others. There’s a heavy sin tax: 88% on liquor, 70% on gas and tobacco. Abortion up to twelve weeks is the woman’s choice. Sweden was the second country in Europe after Denmark to allow gay marriage yet they just recently allowed gays to adopt. As for joining the EU in 1995, she thought it was a good move. They have low unemployment and still need to import workers. She was pleased with how the economy was going. Still there have been rumblings of dissatisfaction with EU interference. Sweden’s very strict environmental laws had to be loosened but their neutrality is acceptable. She was very proud of their neutrality and cited how they came through WWII intact. Several of us felt their position during that war was immoral, not neutral.

They love their monarchs, King Karl XVI Gustav and Queen Sylvia. Swedes think she’s the most beautiful and exotic woman. She’s part German and part Brazilian. They adore her brown hair and eyes. When we drove by the palace Marie was sure to brag that it has one more room than Buckingham Palace in England.

Nobelity

That brings me to the drive-by bus tour. A 180-mile long lake and the Baltic Sea border Stockholm. A lock separates the bodies of water. Not too shabby! The traditional older houses are painted peculiarly. The facades are ochre or gray but the sides are red. As it turns out 200 years ago the king took a trip to Rome. He so loved the colors of the buildings there he ordered all people in Sweden to paint their homes like the Romans. Swedes were a lot poorer than Romans and red was the cheapest color paint. They only painted the fronts to please the king.

We did get off the bus for City Hall and despite what I said at the beginning of this email it was something I’d been looking forward to. Built in 1923 the building looks much older architecturally. I’ve never seen a public building kept so lovingly pristine. We entered a great hall where the Nobel Prize banquet is held. Nobel was born in Sweden so the Dec. 10 festivities take place here. To say the hall is cavernous is to diminish it. It’s brick and colonnaded and the staircase was built so the royals could glide down the marble steps. The wife of the architect put on a gown and walked up and down until the correct height of the risers and depth of the steps was achieved. Nothing was too good for the monarchs.

The council chambers were built to resemble a Viking hall with painted beamed ceiling. The mayor of Stockholm is a woman and over 50% of the representatives are women. There are 100 stone vaults detailing the ceiling and dome of the tower in which the famous clock of St. George fighting the dragon is housed. A small anteroom is draped with a complete set of French tapestries dating from the 1700’s. The colors are brilliant with the gold background offsetting lustrous reds and blues of garlands of flowers and graceful figures inhabiting the work. Each stitch is intact. It’s the most perfect set of tapestries I’ve ever seen.

The golden hall was smaller than the great hall and was used for the ball following the Nobel banquet. The walls were encrusted with eight million mosaic tiles. Each tile was a sandwich of glass-gold leaf-glass: a triple-decker. The mosaic designs were modern in style and depicted modern themes. The entire project was so expensive that the city went bankrupt and had to ask for donations.

Marie left us with a joke showing how polite and boring Swedes could be. Two Finns, two Danes, two Norwegians, and two Swedes were stranded on an island. On the first day the Finns built a shelter; the second day the Danes gathered firewood; the third day the Norwegians went fishing; on the fourth day the Swedes did nothing because they hadn’t been introduced.

Brrr!

Lunch was preceded by a taste of Matjes herring, a toast that was sung, a nip of aquavit, and a demo of making Swedish meatballs. The ingredients for the meatballs are usually ground pork and beef but today it was only beef courtesy of Grand Circle. We don’t know if that was due to our personal food restrictions.

Yves had a surprise for us. This too made me want to get off the bus. He was able to get us into the Ice Bar. Seventeen years ago some daffy Swedes built an Ice Hotel. Everyone said it was a folly but it’s been full every year since. They have to re-build it yearly. The idea for the Ice Bar in a regular hotel came from the Ice Hotel. The bar doesn’t have to be re-built yearly but there are rules to be followed when in use. Not more than thirty people can be in it at a time or the collective body heat and breath will melt it. The bartenders can only work one hour before taking a break. Patrons cannot stay longer than forty-five minutes. That might be for their own safety. Drinking and being cold aren’t always a good thing. Ninety percent of the room is ice. I thought it would be much colder but it was twenty-three degrees. We had to put on silver parkas with faux-fur lined hoods and thick thermal mittens before entering. Our mittens were fastened to our sleeves like kindergarteners do. We looked like the cast from the Star Wars movie bar scene. I thought the floor would be ice and was anticipating a slippery time but it was textured metal. The walls were carved ice as were the bar and tables. There was a bench covered in reindeer pelts. We had to be careful how we put our square ice glasses down on the ice tables since they slid off easily. Several of us danced to the piped in music to keep warm. There was no rule about taking the glasses as souvenirs. They wouldn’t get far. Visiting the Ice Bar was something we just had to do. It was like flying over the Nazca Lines in Peru. We were here and it was a must. For those of you who remember our experience in Peru, the bar was a lot more pleasant than the flight.

Pay or Pray

The rest of the afternoon was spent wandering. The retired Lutheran Bishop and his wife wanted to see St. Nicholas Church (aka the Big Church). We trailed along. We could either pay to go in if we were going to visit it as a museum or go in free and still be able to take pictures if we were going to pray. We opted for prayer. It had the Hebrew for “Yahweh” over the door as we’d seen on other Lutheran churches in Scandinavia and a seven-branched menorah in front of the altar. The building was simple with soaring brick pillars but some appointments like the pulpit and chandeliers were gilt and grand.

We left them, went to a 7-11 (believe it or not), bought diet Cokes, and sat at the counter in the window and people-watched until dinner. There was quite a parade. We could identify the day-trippers from cruise ships and the locals. There were people wearing tank tops and some wrapped in sweaters. There were a large number of extremely tall people, blonds predominated, and some people watched us watching them. Our main focus was a small tan dirty poodle-mix dog tied up across the lane. The dog’s person worked at the millinery store and every time he walked out of the store it was like a reunion of long lost friends. When the store closed for the evening we left to find a restaurant. People eat early here (6-7pm) and we were on the late side. We found a nice Greek place for a change of pace. We followed it with an ice cream chaser and were set for the night.

Tomorrow is our last day in Scandinavia.

Toby