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.