I keep my goddamn promises

A while ago, I promised y'all a picture of the frog tattooed jumping into Ashley's butt. And I always deliver on my promises.

Tjecken Takfest and a Stolen Hammock

At Sarah's birthday party yesterday, I discovered a hammock on the roof of building 3. It was sad and wanted wear, and it seemed to me that a hammock in Sweden must be a lonely thing indeed. I was talking about it in class today and Alexander the Belgian said he'd seen it too and he wanted to steal it.
I told him he'd have to fight me for it. He suggested a duel, like men--a one-on-one fight to the death via football.
In the true spirit of American foreign policy, I told him to bring it the hell on. We decided to meet at seven at the field north of the Engelska Parken.
I'm told he turned up there promptly at seven, football in hand, ready to beat the hell out the stupid American who doesn't even know how to play properly.
Of course, what the damn fool didn't know was that I was using that opportunity to be up on top of building 3, stealing the hammock in peace.

Went to a Czech rooftop party, which apparently will be the first of many ethnic-themed parties this fall. I'm already planning an American party, where we invade a smaller, weaker party and steal their beer. In my limited experience, all Czechs are great, and everything Czech is fantastic. Their food is good. Their beer is good. And everyone I meet here immediately tells me I must see Prague. So I'm making vague plans to stay with a friend of a Czech girl I sit next to--he's got a flat in central Prague where I can apparently stay for free during the winter break.

I've mentioned the Sernanders Krog before. It's a shitty bar in the bottom of building 1, and I have an overwhelming desire to scrape together money with some other people and buy the place out. We could get a German to handle the books, Czechs to make people feel welcome, Australians to drink the beer...Martin's building a jazz scene anyway, so he could use the place as his base...I could combine it with the stripper idea...I mean, it'd be the only bar within 5km of over 2000 college students, and the only place in that radius in which they could buy anything stronger than the 3.5% little people's beer. How can a plan like this go wrong:

Step 1. Women strip.
Step 2. Drink liquor.
Step 3. Profit!

Soooo...if you guys know any venture capitalists, send the slimy, soulless bastards over here! I want a cool bar to hang out in, and the current Krog sucks.

Errata

1) Just returned from my first day of real class. It was a small room in a big white castle, where a dour Swede showed us maps of Sweden and assigned us a textbook I've already read. The class meets five times this month, then we get assigned the "exam" and an "essay," both of which we have two weeks to do at home. I remember writing that my next set of classes last November-December, but only yesterday did I recall that there is in fact an entire other month in there, which the natives refer to as "Oktober." I will apparently have nothing to do in this month, so I guess I'd better start making some vague travel plans which can go hilariously awry.

2) There has been a certain degree of hubub--nay, even furor--over the recent change in my historically rather puritanical policy towards controlled substances. This is due to a combination of factors which I will now generously illuminate, mostly because I find myself and my own Escherian dementia endlessly fascinating to write about. First of all, I find the American college scene to be boring and boorish beyond belief--there is nothing less interesting to me than a frat boys and keg stands and empty-headed girls with red plastic cups. They congregate in shitty apartments or their parents' houses, stinking of quiet (and sometimes not so quiet) desperation. Out here, though, an Irish Beat poet sings a Finnish drinking song with a guy from Shanghai while Polish anarcho-syndicalists, like smelly relics of the past, debate Captain Beefheart with a kinky British biomedical student. Not just that, but I never, ever have to drive anywhere here. I walk a lot, but I find that rather enjoyable while intoxicated--I think just sitting around while drunk is boring, unless I'm with people who are already fascinating. Most of the time, though, the idea that people get drunk and have wild, brilliant, philosophical discussions has proven to be a myth. Most people just try to list to one another what they've had to drink, and (like watching our simian President attempt to give a speech), it ceases being amusing and gets really disgusting and really tedious really fast.
ALSO I've had a sort of strange revelation recently. It occurred to me that essentially, much of human construction consists of a holy triumvirate of drugs actual, political, and spiritual, all existing for the same purpose: to distract everyone from the fact that you're essentially born fucked, that life is a terminal illness and everyone who has it eventually dies of it, and that you will work your entire life at something you hate without knowing why in order to make someone else very rich, and that when you are dead and your children are dead, no one will remember you and your life will have been as meaningless as a sneeze in a hurricane.
As I already am have a strong (though creative) habit with one of the three, through an elaborate system of moral alcohol relativism which I developed after an extensive half hour of ijtihad, I see no reason not to indulge in others which suit my fancy.

3. A week or so ago Benny told me a story. It was long and involved a trip to the emergency room, an unrelated forceful eviction of an unwanted guest in the corridor, public stripping, and bad decisions made under the influence of cheap supermarket beer. It was a roller coaster ride with a surprise ending that will leave you breathless, and the moral was that it's important not to use the kitchen cabinet with the picture of the bison on it because someone shit in there back in April.

4. The only alcohol it's legal to sell in supermarkets in Sweden is beer with less than 3.5% alcohol by volume. They translate the Swedish word into either "small beer" or "people's beer," but I have decided to combine the two and refer to it either as "the beer of the midgets" or, when in exceptionally nerdy company, "[Dwarven Beer of Wallet-Raping +1]."

5. I have recently, against both probability and my better judgment, embarked on what you "humans" refer to as a "relationship" with "Sarah," who is (unflatteringly) pictured "below." The irony that I have travelled eight thousand miles to get involved with an American who once lived in Sacramento is not lost on me, I assure you. However, she's nearly as far to the left as I am, and is double-majoring in International Media (with a focus on corporate domination and hegemony) and physics. I do recognize the danger inherent in the situation, so like a midget at a urinal, I'm going to keep on my toes.

6. A problem has presented itself. Namely, I am poor. It is difficult to work in Sweden, and I am lazy. I beat my head against the brick wall of this predicament for a few weeks, until the Virgin Mary, Mohammed, and Joe Pesci came to me in a vision the other day and applauded as I came up with the following brilliant plan:
- there are nearly one thousand female exchange students in Uppsala who need work and can't find it.
- there are forty thousand college students in Uppsala altogether.
- there is no strip club in Uppsala.
I think the solution is clear here. I was explaining this to an Australian at a party (when he heard it, he clapped me on the shoulder and said "Leave it to a German to come up with that!") and he mentioned the regulations about bringing alcohol into the country. See, you can bring in 500 liters of wine, 400 liters of beer, and 100 liters of hard alcohol....at the same time. Therefore a lot of people get trucks, drive to Copenhagen, stock up, and come home. Whenever I tell this to someone, they always say, "Dude! We should totally do that!"
No, fools. We should have someone else do that. And we should have them sell their liquor in our stripclub/speakeasy, and take a cut. As well as free liquor off the top.
So what I'm proposing essentially is that I become the crime lord of Sweden, running the vast spider web of my illicit empire from my tiny room in Flogsta. Perhaps then I'd be able to afford a working bicycle.

7. In one of the worst decisions I've ever made, when I moved in I bought a large package of the cheapest toilet paper I could find. It's called "Ekonomi Toa," but I've begun mentally referring to it as "Bismarck Toilet Paper," as it forges its path with blood and iron. It is a bitter, disillusioned sort of toilet paper, a toilet paper of the proles, the sort you only are willing to use after anaesthetizing yourself with a heavy slug of bitter Victory Gin.

Trevor vs. 13 Guinnesses, OR How I became a Swedish grad student

As previously threatened, I am including in this post a small quantity of the peculiar imagery I captured at the pub crawl last night. I will spare you most of the gory details, and instead will only explain that the crawl consisted of visiting every nation in Uppsala (there are thirteen), ending up at Stockholms, which has both the biggest and the second biggest dance floor in the city. I remember quite clearly sitting in the Orvars Krog with Sarah (in the picture--that's us about halfway through), eating blood pudding and swilling ethanol-flavored Swedish vodka. I remember quite clearly when the pictured car pulled up and disgorged a half dozen small children and a goddamn live bird. I remember Sarah explaining her theory of essential metaphysical oneness of all things, and I remember then expressing it using the Hegelian dialectic. I also remember learning that the plural of "Guinness" is "Guinni." I had thirteen in a long, slogging battle of attrition which I am considering referring to as "The Brawla in Uppsala."
Anyhow, I stumbled home around 2 and had a wierd, stunted conversation with Emma and Benny on the balcony. I learned to my horror that there was a party going on on the roof of building 8, and when I asked if I absolutely had to go, signs pointed to "Yes."
So I went and eventually found my way back home at six or so. And read an email telling me that the only possible time to register for history classes was at nine.
When you're sufficiently intoxicated so as to experience a mild inability to stand up, it takes roughly an hour and a half to walk from Flogsta to the castle where they have history classes. I therefore had exactly enough time to watch Zombie Lake.

I have now registered for every history class offered in English (four, plus one independent research project). My "advisor" was concerned that this would leave me with nothing to take in the spring, so he sent me to his higher-up for guidance. I sufficiently impressed this guy with my rambling expertise on Garibaldi's unification of Italy, so he put me in a master's degree program in the spring. Lest ye readers find this prospect alarming, allow me to clarify a few things:
1) My first class begins Monday. It meets five times in the month of September. That is the class in its entirety. My other three last from mid-November to mid-December, and meet one day a week.
2) I can do the research paper on anything I want. I have been given a key to the Carolina, with its nine million volumes, as well as a key to the National Archives, where they have a copy of absolutely every document ever printed in Sweden. I raised the concern that while my Swedish is good enough to find what I need, I'd never be able to understand it--so this guy referred me to the university's translation service. He also got me a WorldCat password, so I can interlibrary loan any book from any library anywhere in the world. For free. And he got me borrowing priviledges at the Dag Hammarskjold library, where they have a copy of every UN document, resolution, and report in six languages, as well as over a million volumes on history, politics, and economics.
I decided I was probably hallucinating at this point, so I staggered home and had a sandwich, and that's how I'm here, still pretty well inebriated, writing this. Pardon the disjointed narrative, the spelling and grammar mistakes, and the general odor of "distillery."

Uh, yeah. So the pictures are that weird car, me (looking well lubricated) and Sarah, and Martin, looking irritatingly less like Hugh Grant than usual.

Marathon walks and Irish Car Bombs

Paid 100 kroner (little under ten bucks) last night to go to a welcome dinner for international students. Went with Sarah (from Sacramento) and met Handcuff Jodie and her crazy Irishman there. The governing logic was that the dinner would also provide us with the cheapest booze in Scandinavia: along with dinner they gave us two glasses of wine, two Czech beers, and a shot of Swedish vodka, which is actually a cleaning product. Sat across from an Italian girl who had arrived three hours before and had her luggage lost along the way, and her friend Martin, who is a German jazz pianist and who looks exactly identical to Hugh Grant.
So some things happened and some witty things were said and I think we ate some potatoes. We sang a long of songs. My favorite was entitled "Finnish Drinking Song" and goes like this:

Nuuuuuuuuuuuu!

That's it. That's the song. Towards the end of the dinner Jodie went around and let everyone know that there was a big party in her housing bloc, and that we all should go.
So we did, of course.
Now, some backstory: I mangled my bicycle horribly day before yesterday in an unfortunate incident with a kebab stand. Therefore I walked to my class yesterday morning from Flogast (3 km), then walked home with Sarah...except that we took a shortcut which went by way of Oslo. We seriously walked for about three hours in the rain, and probably covered a good 8 km before we came upon Flogsta from behind. Then we walked back into the city for the dinner (3 km). Then we followed Jodie to her housing bloc by the math building (again in the rain), which looks like a weird Alps ski resort. I was rather jealous, because Flogsta looks like Soviet utilitarian People's Housing, and she has quaint red buildings with white trim and stuff.
Anyhow, the place is 7 km from the dinner, so that walk put me at 21 already for the day. I wasn't feeling it much that point, partly because of the Swedish vodka, and partly because I spent the walk finding out that Martin has been performing jazz piano in Berlin for 15 years and is now going to single-handedly build a jazz scene in Uppsala.
We got to the party at Jodie's and found that it occupied three of the four buildings there. In order to get in, you had to take off your shoes and pile them in a giant heap, then squeeze your way through drunken, gesticulating Europeans. We did this, and after a lengthy expedition to the back end of the party we discovered the horrible truth: there was no liquor there.
So of course we found some shoes that fit and proceeded on to the other buildings, which were more low key and actually had liquor. We sat around for an hour or so while the crazy Irishman made me Irish Car Bombs (which, if you don't know, consist of Irish cream and Irish whiskey poured into a Guinness...and then you have to drink it really fast before the cream curdles).
Then someone blundered in wearing a silly hat and said that we really should go to the other party.
We scoffed. We'd been to the other party. It sucked.
No, the guy said. The other other party.
So we followed this guy through the woods for a while and finally came across this giant goddamn tent which was packed full of about a thousand people having some sort of wacky Swedish rave. Martin and I stood outside and watched a group of the pointy-haired, brown-cloaked cultists I mentioned in the previous post lead a group of about fifty people in a complex choreographed dance. It looked sort of like a cross between the macarena and eating babies. More and more people kept materializing and joining this dance, much to our great alarm. We tried desperately to crack the impenetrable code of their eldritch movements, but to no avail.
Some time later, when their ranks had swollen with the twitching damned, they turned as with one mind and charged the goddamn dance floor in a big, drunken, beer-clenching phalanx. People flew, beer cups shattered, and at least one table went over, taking a tent pole with it. The cultists jumped up on the stage, stuck out their posteriors, and began their ominous dance.

At that point, we thought we were probably hallucinating, so we decided to leave. Some time later, we realized that meant we had to walk back to Flogsta. That was a 10 km walk...and it brought my grand total for the day up to 31. For those of you who have no idea what the goddamn metric system means (and I am among you), that figures out to about 18 and a half miles. It sucked.

Goin to a pub crawl tonight. Gonna take the camera, and hopefully get a picture of those cultists.

The Girl Who Came and Asked Why

Yesterday afternoon I went to see my advisor at the International Office, whom I have been trying to get an an audience with for some three weeks now. It's like meeting the Pope, except this guy turned out to be an incredibly effeminate gay man who spoke no English whatsoever except for "Cheers." Using only that word and an elaborate system of improvised hand gestures/Pictionary, he was able to communicate to me that he no longer did whatever it was I was supposed to see him about, and that I should go see a fat woman in another office. She, of course was not there.

Trevor's First Law of Sweden: whatever you need, you cannot get it where you are. And when you get to the place that has it, that place will be closed. Always.

I wandered out of the office, which lurks somewhat anticlimactically under the shadow of the cathedral, and ran into Sarah, an American from Sacramento. She invited me to lunch with her friends at McDonalds--and who, really, could refuse?

Her friends proved to be Jody, a British biomolecular technology student, and Amy, who I think might have studied something somewhere once. We sat in the giant overstuffed lounge chairs they have in the McDonalds here and they swapped stories about their dads finding pictures on their cell phones of them having bondage sex. After that we spent two hours wandering around the city trying to buy tampons. I'm really not joking.
By then it had started to rain, so Jody begged off. The rest of us had heard vaguely about one of the nations serving pancakes and beer that evening, so we drifted over there. It turned out to be in this giant hall with a blue ceiling. The walls were covered in old paintings of priests and former rectors, all eyeing us disapprovingly. They must have known something and passed it on to their corporeal progeny, because very soon a worried Swede came up to us and asked if we had "signed up."
Now I've signed up for a lot of things in my life. I tend to regret it shortly thereafter. But I couldn't very well tell this guy the truth--that I had no idea who he was, where I was, or what these other people were doing here, and that I had planned to just show up, eat his pancakes, and make a break for it, perhaps using Amy as a distraction. Fortunately, nobody had apparently signed up, so when we got thrown out, it was in a big, unruly mob of Europeans. And you've never seen unruly unless you've seen Europeans thrown out in the rain when they think they're going to get free pancakes and beer.
We picked up another American there, also from California. Later on she was to tell the longest, most obscenely descriptive story I have ever heard, and also showed us the tattoo she has of a frog jumping into her asscrack. I'll work on getting you guys a picture.
We were wet and hungry and beerless, so we went to the closest nation, which was Norrlands. Norrlands is the very northern part of Sweden--a cold, dark, inhospitable place full of lemmings and the icy stench of death. Their pub is only a little worse. It took me three hours to get a garlic-sauce-drenched burger. We passed the time with four Frenchmen who asked us a lot of challenging questions about Melrose Place. When a group of about eight druidic cultists showed up (with giant spiked hair dyed alternating primary colors) and raised their brown canvass cloaks all around us and started chanting and singing, we decided to take off. One of the Swedes we met later asserted that they weren't druids at all, but in fact were part of the surviving remnants of Sweden's original death metal scene, but the lack of tight black clothes and giant pewter dragon rings makes me doubt that. Maybe I stereotype.
Anyway. We heard there was a party at Hotel Uppsala (which is the only block of student housing in the central city), so we wandered over there. The Frenchmen ditched us to go have red wine and tiny, overpriced food, which was wise of them because the Hotel Uppsala has these central garbage chutes which open onto every floor in the stairwell. So the entire building smells like if you took a giant hunk of Ass by Calvin Klein, wrapped in in smoked ass, and let it ass itself into a transcendent higher stage of ass so that its assery cannot be expressed with mundane words. Only with references to other asses. I'd call it a mix of Non-union Construction Worker, Welldigger, and Morbidly Obese Corpse...but I'm just using my imagination here. We got the hell out of there and took the trapped partiers there with us, out of compassion.
By now it's about ten at night. There's about twenty of us wandering the cobblestone streets of Uppsala in a thick misty fog, and I've had a sufficient number of Guinnesses that I'm explaining passionately to this Irish girl that it isn't the surplus value that's the problem, necessarily, it's the empirical econometric varification of it's expropriation. She agreed and drank some Jameson's and fell off the footbridge into the river, where she landed on a bicycle.
We made it to Upplands nation not long thereafter. It's got a basement pub with Bogart and Cagney (and, inexplicably, Wong Kar Wai) on the walls. The Frenchmen caught up with us there and sat around rolling their own cigarettes and looking really French. Ashley spent a solid half hour telling us this story about a sexual encounter with a guy in Oakland--it involved the flicking of an errant fly, acrobatics, and the controversial practice of motorboating the mammary glands. There were wild hand gestures and shouting and more onomatopoeias than I think were really necessary. She made a lot of friends.
At that point, the girls decided that we should a) leave, as it was beginning to rain again and we were trapped outside in tiny plastic chairs, and b) steal the beer glasses. I kept the wait staff occupied with my riveting debate with the Frenchmen over the effect of immigration on American voting demographics, and the ladies made a break for the door. One of the guys at the nation gave chase, but bicycles are suicide up cobblestone hills, so we made it back to Flogsta unscathed. The girls and I decided that there just hadn't been enough surreal things happening that night, so we retired to one of their rooms for pizza.
Now, this is one of those dorm rooms where you share a bathroom with the room on the other side. So the bathroom connects the two, you know what I mean? So it's like you really have a roommate you don't know.
Anyway, I was sitting there on the floor, with my back against the wall where the bathroom door is. And I started to feel this rhythmic thumping...and the sound soon followed. Indeed, it quickly became quite apparent that there were two people on the other side of the thin door engaging in a pasttime altogether different from parcheesi.
It went on for quite some time. We bit our hands to keep from laughing (or in my case from loudly saying distracting things like "WHERE THE FUCK ARE THE MIDGET'S PANTS?") and tried to give this girl some moral support, because she obviously had gotten overstimulated by now and was feeling too pressured to actually finish.
Now sometimes, in the throes of passion, people are given to saying things which often not terribly rational. Often these are religious pronouncements, or affirmations...but this girl posed a question. A question of profound existential importance the likes of which has stumped philosophers far and wide for milennia.
"WHY!"
We all looked at each other and tried to communicate furiously by sign language. Why indeed? I signed. Why not? Sarah signed back.
The questioning continued from the bathroom. "Whywhywhywhywhywhywhyyyyy....!"
And at that point, we pretty much laughed until we cried.

Stockholm

Stockholm is kind of upper Manhattan+Portland,
Oregon+central London.  It's built on two mainlands
and 13 islands at a place where a huge lake meets the
Baltic.  It's a big, sprawling city which covers a lot
of land area with terraced pastel buildings and lots
of parks.  It runs right into forests in the north and
south, and there's trees everywhere in the city.  Most
of the streets are cobblestones, and you have to take
really lengthy, roundabout ways to get everywhere,
since the islands aren't really connected in any
logical system.  Most of my pictures are from the old city,
where the Parliament and all of the old palaces are. 
Drove through most of the rest of the city, but didn't
spend any time there.  I liked it a lot...it's pretty
quiet, fairly uncrowded, and most of the traffic is
kept to central roads, so you don't always have
traffic noise.  I think getting around would be too
annoying to live there, but it's a great city to
visit, even with gray overcast skies.

I took a lot of pictures and put them all here.

Uppland and Snerikes

I'm still in the process of monkeying around with the pictures. Obviously. These are two pictures of Uppland and one of the big goddamn castle we went to today. Now that you've seen these two pictures of Uppland, you've seen all there is to see. It's pretty easy to tell why so many Swedes settled in the Midwest a hundred years ago--it looks identical.
Very little interesting to report about the trip...the castle belonged to the field marshal who commanded the Swedish armies in Germany during the 30 Years War and was full of crazy plaster decorations and thousands of 17th century guns. We stopped by a little tourist-trap town and had ice cream and mostly drove around through lots of yellow fields.

Went to the Sodermanland-Nerikes nation (henceforth Snerikes, since that's what everyone here calls it) with Benny and Emma (our recently re-arrived corridor-mate) last night. And that calls for:

A Few Words About Liquor In Sweden

Historically, the Swedes drank pretty much more than anybody else ever. It got to be such a big societal problem around the end of the 19th century that the state created a government monopoly on all liquor sales and raised the taxes like crazy. The rules have been relaxed a little bit since then, but they're still pretty strict. You can buy "weak beer," (which has 2.5% alcohol by volume or less) in supermarkets, but all other liquor has to be bought at the Systembolaget--the government monopoly liquor stores. And the stuff's goddamn expensive. You can still get beers at pubs, and the nation pubs serve beers at about half what other pubs do. So EVERYONE goes to the nations, and Snerikes, while not the biggest nation, is obviously the coolest, so pretty much everyone goes there to party.

The place consists of a big deck surrounding the pink castle, and a tiny dance floor inside where they rock out to tacky European dance music. And they don't do the cynical pelvis-only American style dancing here...it's a full-bodied flailing, sweat flying everywhere. Everyone seems to drink Carlsberg, which is a Danish beer and has the tagline "Probably the best beer in the world." For someone used to hyper-aggressive American advertising, this comes across as terribly equivocal, and just amusing enough to give the poor low-self esteem beer a try.

So after four hours of shouting conversations about Swedish tax law over the crazy music and making fun of this girl with the biggest goddamn nose in the world, we decided to head for home. We're all too poor to take the bus, though, so I found myself at two in the morning attempting to ride my bike through Uppsala with Benny sitting on the handlebars, still discussing law in his exceptional English, and with Emma (who is batshit crazy) sitting on the metal rack behind me, waving both arms around and going "I had sex there! And there! And in that laundry! And those bushes!"

I walked the bike up the last hill before we got back to our building and Emma hopped off and ran away.
"Benny," I said with great deliberation, "I think she might be a little bit crazy."
"A little bit? She just ran into the forest."
"I hope that works out for her."
So we went home and some Italians were throwing things off the balconies. I guess that's how they "fix" things here. We dodged a veritable hail of lamps, toasters, ottomans (ottomen?), and cooking utensils on the way in, to the tune of raucous play-by-play narration in Italian.

Here's another picture of Uppland, in case you didn't get the idea earlier.

Behold ye! Teh intarwebs!

At last I have internet in my room, so I am now going to post all the stuff I've written down over the last week. I've only figured out how to frontload pictures so far, so the ones above are:

the pink castle of the S-Nerikes Nation
the Fyris, the river that runs through the city
the Carolina Rediviva, the main university library
the cathedral
the botanical gardens across from the main university building (which is ALSO a castle)
the big cemetary across from my Swedish class
the street my class is on
my Swedish class is under that awning thing in the middle
the kitchen
the living room
view out my window
the view out the kitchen window
my room part 1
my room part 2
my room part 3
this was on my door when I arrived. Made me feel right at home.
do you see a goddamn flushing mechanism on this toilet? DO YOU??
the view when you step out of the train station. Look real close at that fountain.
the train station in the airport in Stockholm. Note how many helpful people there are around.

It is almost exactly five kilometers from my room in Flogsta to my class in the Engelska parken, Humanistiskt centrum. I walk it very early in the morning, as I have yet to get onto a normal sleep schedule and wake up at 3:30; in that hour or so of trudging, Uppsala could be a ghost town. I seldom see people; only endless trees and empty, trundling, lopsided, green buses. Appropriately, the Engelska parken is across the street from the biggest, most elaborately landscaped cemetery I have ever seen. The thing goes on for miles, filled with old trees and giant gravestones which seem to be carved on the same rocks Stonehenge is made from. To the best of my knowledge, I’m the only one of the two thousand-odd students in Flogsta who walk to class—everyone thinks I’m crazy for doing it. I’ll get around to getting a bike eventually, I tell them. Probably this weekend. Just learning my way around first, as it’s rather difficult to read a map while biking.

The city center is busy after class, and very typically European—everything is made of cobblestones and Vespas. There are a lot of outdoor cafes and small cluttered convenience stores, and thousands of blondes on bicycles. The buses are insufferably hot and driven by surly, taciturn guys with sunglasses. They shake terribly on the cobblestones, and the big plastic light fixtures tend to fall off the ceiling and land on your toes.

My room seems a bit excessive, as I have no less than two bookcases and a spare wall-mounted shelf, but only a half dozen books. I have more closet space than my first apartment had square footage, and the shower is gratifyingly powerful. There are at least ten other people in the hall—with the exception of that one guy, I have yet to meet any of them. The kitchen has more than lived up to its reputation of being “somewhat grotty.” There are four freezers in one room, three fridges and sinks and ovens in another, and all of them are littered with the detrius of human habitation. Everything is half empty and spoiling, covered in crumbs and unidentifiable little organic gobbets which have turned a uniform purple-green. Huge fat red flies, their energy dulled by the morning sunshine, mutter from crumbs to sticky spills in a stately waltz rotation, making a constant low moaning sound. There are cooking implements about, but I have yet to establish the governing system of ownership, so I have not yet endeavored to clean any of them and cook some food. I bought some pots and bowls and silverware at IKEA yesterday, so I’m mildly confident I can create some sort of pasta and/or rice concoction to feed my scrawny self.

I’ve been sitting around with my door open and Tom Waits crooning loudly, in an effort to let any passersby know that I’m inside and feeling like a chat. Nobody’s come by yet. Most students are still on vacation, and the bulk of the exchange students don’t show up till the last week of the month, so I’m not feeling terribly neglected, but it would be useful to have a local around to ask some questions to. Like who taped condoms to my door and why and if they’re female or not. I’m vaguely planning on venturing up to the sauna on the roof later, but if it turns out to be in a condition equivalent to the kitchens, that could be an unpleasant sight indeed. I invited a Belgian named Alexander and a rather flirty German girl over for Cuban rum and Bush-mocking, but as they can’t get into my hallway without a card/passcode, and I have no telephone for them to call, this may prove somewhat difficult.

The Swedish instructor never uses English. She says crazy things in Swedish, and sometimes we repeat them. Everyone else in the room (except for two hungover Australian girls) speaks at least three languages already. The aforementioned German (I sat next to her) speaks five. She decided to go here because it was the only study abroad program her school in Munich offered in a country where she didn’t already know the language. They all seem to be picking up the Swedish already too, something my feeble, ethnocentric American brain cannot comprehend. Generally, the class seems to consist of the instructor saying about five minutes of disconnected stuff in Swedish, sometimes in wacky voices with facial expressions, then a motion for us to do something. I then turn to the German girl and say, roguishly, “Whaaa?” and she explains that we’re supposed to ask each other our ages, majors, and places of birth then present one another’s answers to the class.

“Jesus Christ bananas,” I usually say at that point.

I took an immediate liking to this German girl, not the least because she speaks five languages idiomatically, and was the first one to chortle at the prevalence in Swedish of the word “slut.” She seems to have an alarming knack for organization and information retention, and she writes really weirdly, putting the pen between her index and middle fingers. I keep worrying irrationally, though, that one morning she will annex the Austrians and lapse into fascism. I can only assume that after that, poor Alexander the Beanpole Belgian would not be long for this earth.

I got to class about an hour early the first day, since I had missed registration the day before and had no idea where I was supposed to go or what I was supposed to do once I got there. I immediately met a group of nine exchange students from Shanghai, whom I now mentally refer to as “the Communist bloc.” They go everywhere together, asking people how to connect to the Internet. I see them all over the place now: at the Carolina Rediva today (the enormous library which I seem to be forbidden to enter), at the bike shop in Flogsta, on the stairs in the Engelska parken, in my underwear drawer. They seem to speak no English whatsoever, except for the words necessary to ask everyone they meet how to connect to the Internet. It is an impressive thing indeed to watch them attempting to learn Swedish from our teacher, who also uses no English.

It appears to be a great misconception that Swedish women are generally busty. After extensive research, I have not found this to be the case. They are almost universally tanned and attractive, but they seem to all possess a state-subsidized, general-issue B-cup. I think of this as the mammary expression of welfare state socialism. They are, however, improbably bouncy, even when wearing several bras and not moving. I passed a girl on my way home today standing perfectly still, and those things were bouncing away, like a pair of rats in a duffel bag.

Every morning, the Swedish instructor writes an agenda of sorts on the board. Whatever its strange and mysterious permutations, always ends with “12.00—Slut”

Now, imagine my disappointment day after day when noon rolls around and no government-issue sluts appear at the door. I rather liked my understanding of the word the way it was, but eventually I found myself compelled to look it up.

Turns out, “slut” means in Swedish: “end/ending,” “finish off,” “has a sad ending,” “leave school,” “finally, in the end,” “all gone,” and “there will be no more peace.”

…There’s always one WTF definition. Here’s another good one: “Kål” can mean either “cabbage,” or “attempted murder.”

I bet that makes for quite a lot of amusing misunderstandings in police stations.

“Sir,” the bloodied, bedgraggled man panted, “I have to report…a cabbage.”

Or

“Could I have an attempted murder on my salad?”

The guy in charge of the International Office is a small, trim, well-groomed man with a dry sense of humor, a very precise diplomat-style accent, and the general look about him like he’s just come from Metternich’s solar, discussing the junker estates in Prussia. He is also missing the last two fingers on his left hand, and they appear to have been chewed off, raggedly and unevenly, perhaps by a rabid animal or a large, fierce woman.

As everyone enjoys talking about that which they are passionate about and know best, I have found that the best way to befriend an Australian guy is to ask him what is the best pub in town. He will always have at least three answers, starting from what is cool and trendy, progressing to where he goes when he gets tired of the poseurs at the first place, and ending with what he will inevitably call a “meat-market.” This is where you want to go swill rotgut rum in the middle of the week after trying to find a way through the theoretical maze of econometrics to empirically verify the labor theory of value. If you ask a group of Australians, there will be disagreement and dissention, and there will be nothing for it but to go with them to all of the pubs they recommend, so that you may make your own judgment and resolve their dispute. The Australian girls all seem to have come here together. They hang out together, and apparently party till the wee hours together every night. Their industriousness impresses me—I’ve only just figured out how the goddamn toilets work.

The best way to befriend a Swede, it seems, is to think of a blonde or dead baby joke—preferably tasteless and offensive, and replace the operative noun (“blonde,” “dead baby,” “rabbi,” etc) with “Norwegian.” Kills ‘em every time.

The trip was actually fairly unremarkable until Heathrow. I sat next to a nice British guy who’d been traveling by train around the States for three weeks. He liked rugby union and had a sense of humor as dry as his gin. I watched “Brick,” which was one of the best (though rationally ludicrous) noirs I’ve ever seen. Watched “Ask the Dust,” which had a naked Salma Hayek in it, and otherwise was pretty terrible. It was a ten hour flight, though, which is never a hell of a lot of fun, especially for those of us who can’t sleep on airplanes, and always sit in the window seat, where you can’t stretch your legs or get up to pee because you can’t climb over the two sleeping Brits next to you.

I had an hour to get across Heathrow to my flight, which shouldn’t have been a hell of a big problem, except that they make you GO THROUGH SECURITY AGAIN. There were four 747s disgorging some three hundred-odd passengers each, and the line was…Biblical. That, combined with the daunting size of Heathrow combined to make me damn near miss my connection. I got there at last call, sweating, grumpy, aching from carrying my goddamn heavy laptop bag.

I have no memory of the connector flight. I guess I was on it. I do, however, remember getting all my bags, getting some kroners, and having to walk to the train area, which is four terminals over from the international arrival area. Altogether, my bags weighed about a hundred and fifteen pounds, and after eighteen hours of travel, I was not at my physical peak. There was a part where you have to go up this goddamn hill in the middle of the Arlanda airport—I mentally refer to this geographical perversion as “The Mountain of Despair.”

After an hour of Herculean toil, I made it to the train area, and somehow bought a ticket from the cryptic Swedish-only ticket machines. Descended into the dank, freezing cold basement area where the trains arrive.

It was an hour wait for the train to Uppsala. I was the only person there, talking to myself and walking around so as not to fall asleep and freeze to death. Here, rarely, I’m not exaggerating-- I could see my goddamn breath in there.

Finally made it on the train, and got off at the station in Uppsala. Called the Studentstaden guy, hefted my bags again, and wandered off into the maze of downtown Uppsala. Took me another hour of wandering, beset by flocks of cannibal pigeons and disdainful Europeans, before I found the Studentstaden office. Was met there a half hour later by the Officer in Charge—a rugby-player looking guy on rollerblades. He had a yellow beanie and a lot of tattoos. I signed some stuff (hell if I know what), and he advised me to get a cab, which I did.

Made it to my building, and carried my fucking bags up six flights of stairs. Naturally, the light is out on the landing where the hallways branch off on my floor, which makes it difficult to punch in your passcode into the crazy machine they have here. After a good deal of swearing and beeping red lights, I managed to get in and was greeted by a bewildered looking blonde guy with a plastic bag on his hair and a toothbrush in his mouth. He had a complicated cell phone ear-attachment jury-rigged around his head with a system of little ropes and pulleys. He said his name was Benny and he’d just finished throwing things on the balcony. He said he was a law student and wanted to know if I planned on getting a Ph.D. I told him someone had stolen my brain and replaced it with tater-tots.

Went into my room, discovered the toilet apparently had no flushing mechanism, and went to sleep.

Had a long conversation with Benny this evening, while he made some sort of mess in a cooking pan. I get the impression I’m sort of a combat replacement in a tired regiment: he’s obviously an old veteran, and he could easily remember the last two people who had my room. Emma, down the hall (who I haven’t met, but who has a great American Empire poster on her door) has apparently been here even longer. Got some good information out of him and managed to convey that I’m not a Bible-thumping, Limbaugh-listening, Pabst-Blue-Ribbon-drinking redneck gun-toting Jesus psycho. Mostly. He’s also a member of the S. Nerikes nation, which I guess means he bested one of their worthy members in single combat at some point.
Good guy, I like him.

They all seem rather entertained and mystified by what I guess they consider brash American ingenuity. Apparently, you see, everything you say with an American accent sounds terribly tough, and as I am also the only person in the entire country with facial hair, they seem to regard me warily, like a large animal which is pretty interesting, but which may prove to be dangerous.

Now, it’s oddly hot up here (I wasn’t expecting 90-degree heat—or 32 degree heat, to these crazy metric-ians—in Sweden), so I tend to sit around in my room in shorts and an undershirt, drinking rum from various inappropriate containers, since I keep my two cups in the fridge in the kitchen and can’t be arsed to go get them. Last night two of my hallmates who I hadn’t met yet knocked on my door. They were surprised to find a bearded, skinny American inside, wearing a wifebeater and drinking Cuban rum out of a cooking pot. They stood there for a minute: one of them a foofy-haired guy with dimples like ragged meteor craters, the other exactly what you think of when you imagine a Swedish girl, only more tanned.

They looked at me. I looked at them.

“We’re going to Portugal tomorrow,” the girl said.

“Have a good time,” I told them.

Going on a tour of Uppland tomorrow. Probably more pictures then.

I am mainly not dead

Having arrived at my Intensive Swedish Concentration Camp class an hour early (despite the long and bewildering walk from Flogsta), it would logically follow that I would use this time to put down all of the strange and tedious invasions of personal space I have endured over the past seventy-two hours. I am fully aware that my dear and faithful readers have been sitting at home, hitting the "Refresh" button again and again, their feeble hearts palpitating with anticipation of my first post from Sweden. Was the flight long and boring, you wonder. Was the food bad, and made of industrial solvents and fried hair? Was I singled out for extra scrutiny at every security checkpoint? Did this extra inspection involve the groping of genitalia, on the off chance I was smuggling plastique in my scrotum? Logic would dictate that these questions must be answered. However, logic cannot follow the crazy map they gave me at Studentstaden, and got lost somewhere around the six-way intersection of Karlsrogatan and Dag Hammerskjölds väg. Also, I am a lazy bugger and just can't be arsed right now.

This I will tell you, and it is of the greatest importance:

"Jag ar så otroligt full" means "I am so unbelievably drunk." However, if you remove the second "l" from "full," it means "I am so ugly, I can hunt caribou using only my face."

Also, fuck Heathrow. Fuck Heathrow with a rusty shovel. The last thing you want to do after thirteen hours in a pressurized aluminum tube, surrounded by screaming babies and fragrant fat people is pack into an endless line to go back through security again. "But we just got off a goddamn plane," I said to the security guy. "Are you worried we built something out of the goddamn plastic forks or what?"

Anyhow. I probably won't have teh intarwebs in my room till the end of the month, so no pictures until then. I have a temporary login ID which only works on one specific computer in one specific room in one specific part of the Kemikum Fysikum. Which I guess is where I am now. Will attempt vaguely regular updates, but no promises.