Where the hell is my towel?

In a shameless emulation of another far less bewildered traveller, I give you the highly accurate account of my year in Uppsala, Sweden. Like the great man says, persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; those attempting to find a plot in it will be banished; those attempting to find a moral in it will be shot.

Saturday, May 12, 2007

Oh, Europe...

Remind me to blog about my recent trip to Riga. I'd do it tonight, but I'm a bit lazy and can't be arsed to put all the pictures on here. Next time.

Instead, I'm going to offer up another of my (mildly rare) observations on Life in Sweden:

The Eurovision Song Contest is a big deal over here, and the Europeans get endlessly upset and disappointed to learn that absolutely nobody anywhere else in the world gives a handful of monkey shit about it. I guess it's been around since like 1956. I, with my ostrich-like knowledge of contemporary music, had obviously never heard of the damn thing, but the buzz surrounding it here is of the likes I have only seen during the bandy championships a few months ago. The Swedes have been excited, and that is worth taking note of.

What it is is pretty straightforward: each country sends some band to the competition, people vote, one of them wins. In between acts there are little segments which can apparently be pretty much anything imaginable to fill thirty seconds of film. My favorite involved "Moo Claus" (a cow version of Santa) playing chess against the real Santa in some sort of mountain chalet. Now, apparently Sweden is historically something of a Eurovision powerhouse: indeed, this is where Abba (Sweden's first, last, and only claim to pop-culture fame) got their start. There is a bitter rivalry with Finland, who apparently did something dastardly to win last year's competition. The contest is in Helsinki this year, which has the Swedes quite upset. There's talk of jihad.
This year's Swedish entry is by a band called "The Ark" and has been playing incessantly, non-goddamn-stop on every radio station in Sweden for the last month, thereby ruthlessly supplanting the five songs Sweden usually plays on its radio stations over and over and over (for the record, they are: Shakira's "Hips Don't Lie," that "Everytime We Touch" song, "Destination Unknown," and two other things that sound exactly the same). They're on TV commercials, talk shows, inserted into ending credits of TV shows...they're goddamn everywhere. And they're of a caliber of weirdness that I previously thought only Japan could produce. I will inflict on you an example:



WHERE IS YOUR GOD NOW?

Anyway, the final round of the competition was tonight, and everyone in the corridor gathered in front of the TV to watch with bated breath. And it was one of the weirdest two hours of television I've ever seen.
See, it's strange being an American and watching these things, because you can't help but fall back on the natural assumption that when you see something like this where each country produces one performance for the rest of the world, that these performances are somehow examples of that country's culture. This has now led me to believe that the Ukraine is filled with heavily made-up old men with fake breasts wearing small dresses made of tin foil and large hats with a massive metal star on top, that France is inhabited by bald men wearing tight pink clothes and brandishing dead black marmots around their necks, that in Bulgaria women yodel and pound on drums while surrounded by hairy shouting men, and that all Serbs are butch double-chinned lesbians in black and red outfits which are oddly reminiscent of Gestapo uniforms.
And Sweden...oh, Sweden. That crime against music and fashion up there actually is fairly representative of Sweden. You see, the guys here especially are weirdly fashion-conscious, but they aim for the looks you see in fashion magazines that are on that weird cutting edge, where you know nobody in their right mind would ever in a million years dress like that. But Swedes do, and they are all, down to the last dour one of them, identical.
The uniform of the young Swedish guy is a tight striped shirt with very short sleeves, really really tight pants that are also too short, so as to show off the thick white socks, some sort of arm band or two, and hair with long bangs all slicked down on their heads. I spent a month convinced that the reason Sweden's birth rate is declining is that absolutely every guy in Sweden was gay.
The Swedish girls seem to like that look, though. They opt for about a kilo of makeup apiece and weirdly feathery blonde hair, generally with small dresses and tights.
There are other obligatory things. You must go to Snerikes on Tuesday nights, Stockholms nation on Thursdays, Värmlands on Fridays. There you must dance to the exact same five songs over and over, drinking five-dollar beers in plastic bottles, making out with ten different people before choosing one at random (if you're female) or striking out miserably (if you're male). How they can still get excited about this when they do it three times a week, every week, for years, I dunno. But they do. That is Uppsala's nightlife, right there.

So. I don't know who won this year's contest yet. Considering every entry seemed to consist of finding the half-dozen most outrageously dressed gay guys in each country and hopping them up on amphetamines to caper around the stage for a while, yodelling more often than not, I'm afraid I can't muster up the same degree of life-altering concern as my corridormates. And to think they enjoy nothing more than harassing me about contestants on American Idol.

Anyway. In other news, we had a corridor party last night. Nothing especially amusing or noteworthy happened at it, I'm afraid, except that I was the last man standing at about five thirty in the morning (surreal now, since the sun goes down at 11 PM and comes back up again at 3:30 AM) and that some bastard stole my Tunisian wine. Otherwise, it was The Usual.

Oh, and I put up something lengthy and cranky over at the other blog.

What I'm Reading
Thomas L. Friedman, From Beirut to Jerusalem

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