Happy Birthday WSU

Happy Birthday to WSU today. 118 years old. It doesn't look a day over 87 if you ask me but I'm a little biased. Just a drop in the bucket in academia though considering we live in a city with a university that was founded 400 years before WSU did. That's old. Remember to wear your crimson and gray today, just maybe not the same tear stained things you wore yesterday.

Sad to see the basketball season end yesterday but it really was another great year for the Cougs. They just ran into a buzz saw yesterday against North Carolina. I have to say Aron Baynes did a great job against Tyler Hansbrough until he fouled out. I think they were even in points and rebounds when Baynes left. If that's the kind of performance he can put up against the guy most people think is the National Player of the Year (I'm not buying it) then next year should be another good year for the Cougs with Taylor "McLovin" Rochestie playing the role of the cagey senior walk-on, Daven Harmeling, Caleb Forrest, and Nic Koprivica and the younger guys it will be fun to watch. Hats off to Derrick Low, Kyle Weaver, and Robbie Cowgill for four great, and often tough, years as Cougs. Those guys will stand as legends of Cougar basketball for years to come. If any of them end up playing in Europe, don't be surprised to see our vacation schedule coincide with some of the areas they will be in.

We heard that it's been another glorious spring on the Palouse, and throughout the state too (snow days in Seattle in March?). It has been nice and sunny here since Easter, even though we are about parallel to Anchorage on the globe. Maybe it's a little cold but really quite pleasant.

Ok now for some of the "Swedish" stuff that people visit this site for. CiS Cultural Fact #32 (I really need to keep better track of which numbers I've already used, thank goodness that every word I've put up here will be on the internet long after the Earth is recolonized by an alien race after the coming ice age that will follow on the heels of rising global temperatures wipes out the machines that have risen up to take the world back from humanity): you can buy vegetables here, mostly lettuce and fresh herbs, that are still planted. That's right; buy a head of lettuce at the store and it still has roots, in dirt, in one of those black plastic planter things. It's nice for the herbs because we can keep them going until we use them, not so beneficial for the lettuce though. We have a picture here for your amusement.

And now for a new feature here on CiS that we will include in every post, "How Much is Your Dollar Worth?" This will probably be at the top of each post where we will let you know what one U.S. dollar converts to in Swedish krona, krowns, or SEK. So today, according to Yahoo Finance: $1 = 5.9551 SEK

That is a new low since we have been here. The high was 6.5 after the first couple days we were here. For perspective I'm trying to think of what you can buy for 5 or 6 SEK and the first thing that comes to mind is plastic bags at the grocery store that you have to buy to carry your groceries in. Good times.

Glad Påsk

Glad Påsk everyone! Ok so I'm day late and I should be saying Happy Easter Monday from beautiful sunny Uppsala where we got almost an inch of snow. The picture here of fat rabbit was taken on Easter morning so he's good. We've enjoyed a nice long weekend, Ragen has been off since the university closed early on Thursday (people really like Easter here).







One of the Easter traditions here is this drink called Påskmust. It is... interesting. We provided an article about it from
www.economicexpert.com. It talks about Julmust instead of Påskmust. It is in fact the same thing, just Julmust is consumed around Christmas and Påskmust is for Easter. Funny, Jul is the word for Christmas and Påsk is the name for Easter, what a coincidence eh? Different labels, same drink.

Julmust is a soft drink that is drunk mainly in Sweden at Christmastime. For the rest of the year it is found under the name must. At Eastertime the name is Påskmust. (jul=Christmas, påsk=Easter). The content is the same regardless of the marketing name although the time it is stored before bottling differs; however, the beverage is more closely associated with Christmas and somewhat less with Easter. It is often hard to find the drink in off-season.

Must was created by

Harry Roberts and his father Robert Roberts in 1910 as a non-alcoholic alternative to beer. The syrup is still made exclusively by Roberts AB in Örebro. The original recipe is said to be locked up in a safe with only one person knowing the full recipe.

Must is made of carbonated water, sugar,

hops extract, malt extract, spices, colouring (E150), citric acid, and preservatives. The hops and malt extracts give the must a somewhat beer-like taste, but must is not fermented and contains no alcohol. Must can be aged provided it is stored in a glass bottle. Some people buy must in December only to store it a year before drinking it.

Julmust might be the source of some annoyance for Coca-Cola in Sweden, since Sweden is the only country where the consumption of Coca-Cola drops during Christmas. Many Swedes drink julmust instead. This was quoted as one of the main reasons Coca-Cola broke away from their contract with Pripps and started Coca-Cola Drycker Sverige AB instead. Ironically enough, Coca-Cola later felt it was necessary to make their own julmust.

The thing to take away from this is that Påskmust = Beer cola. Mmmm, beer cola.

In other news:

The Cougs beat Notre Dame something good on Saturday to advance to the Sweet 16. Score that one: Easter Bunny 1 - Zombie Jesus 0.

Go Cougs!

Allez les Cougs!!

(Photo taken by Adam Shay of the Daily Evergreen)

Not a post about us but to fulfill our duty and remind everyone that the Cougs play the Winthrop Eagles today in Denver for the first round of the NCAA Tournament. Tip off is at 4:20 pm (PST) and 12:20 am tomorrow (Uppsala time) on CBS. And thanks to the miracle of the internet we will be able to watch the game live on www.cbs.sportsline.com (where you can watch every game from the NCAA Championship live online for free). I know it's a shameless shill, but they are almost the only network player that we can actually use outside of the US, so there. GO COUGS!!!!!!!

The Day After Yesterday

CiS Cultural fact #43: St. Patrick's day is kind of a big deal around here. I suppose that could just be the perspective of the hundred or so people that showed up to the pub last night. Maybe for the rest of the country, not so much. We had a good time though. Here are some pictures from the band that played "Traditional Irish and Scottish Music" (Hence the kilts and bagpipes). The name of the band is Pure Malt (http://www.puremalt.nu/) and they aren't bad, considering they are all Swedish. We bought their cd, 60 krowns sounded like a good price, until we realized that there was only 5 tracks. D'oh!

The crowd was really into it and knew the words to most of the songs the guys played. It kind of blows my mind that people were so into this and singing along to music in another language. The Pogues were quite popular here it seems. And the band played that Proclaimers song that sticks in your head for weeks at a time, twice.

We met an Irish dude that lives here and he was in the same boat. He told us that he went to a cultural celebration here and went to the "Authentic Irish Music" part and found there was only two guys, one on guitar and the other on fiddle, and they were both Swedish. He said they were pretty good but had some thick accents, like dropping their "J"s when they sang. He said he was sure if he should clap along or cry, but he thought it was pretty cool that people dig his culture and music here. That does make you feel all warm and cozy inside. It got me thinking of what an American culture celebration would look like, and then I remember that most of the television and movies are American, Coke flows like water, and you can find a McDonald's or Burger King on every 5 blocks (although still no Starbucks surprisingly). Oh and they have demonstrations against US foreign policy every few weeks.

But back to the band. The guy in the middle is pretty intense, makes a lot faces when he plays. The bagpiper was pretty impressive. Not only did he play the bagpipes but the banjo, lyre, and assorted penny and tin whistles. Also our friend was quite taken by him.








The pub was pretty quiet for the first couple hours we were there but then picked up steam as the night went on. There was plenty of Guinness and green beer and whisky, so by the end of the night, some people were pretty hammered, like this dude in the Celtic gear (representing Scotland on St.Patrick's Day). Also the moshing started towards the end, with people crashing into tables and other people. This guy ended up crashing into the band and another guy crashed into a table and got a bloody nose.






We had a good time. We had planned to stay only for a couple hours because, well it was Monday and Ragen had to work today, but we ended staying until 2:00. That meant the buses stopped running so we had a nice stroll home in the light snow. That's another nice thing about Uppsala, you can feel pretty comfortable walking through the city at 2:00 in the morning. Waking up in the morning is another story. So if anyone wants to come out and see how the Swedes do St. Patrick's day let us know, we're in.

St. Paddy's Day

Happy St. Patrick's day everyone. We think he may be one of the guys in the dark grey stone. It's snowing on and off here in Uppsala, hope it's nicer where you are. Have fun and be safe. Remember, tomorrow is only Tuesday.











This is where we are going to hang out tonight, O'Conners. We've heard that you have to check your coats at the door, but the coat check price is ridiculous, so we are planning to go sans coats. In the snow. Woo Hoo St. Patrick's Day!!!

Scenes of a City

So we decided to put up a picture post so people can get an idea of what Uppsala looks like. Here's a picture of the church from the river. There are two things that dominate the skyline and you can see from about anywhere in the city and that is the church and the castle.

Here's one of the stained glass windows that overlooks the courtyard of the church. This picture was taken from the backside of the church.

Here's the other major stained glass window. It's really tall and really ornate. I know you can't really tell from the outside but inside the church it really is quite something. I always feel funny about taking pictures inside a church even though other people do. I don't know, it's not like I'm a religious person but there is something sanctimonious about being inside one that I feel like it's bad karma to do so.

This is a picture of the side door. We found out later that this is a Lutheran church so we are guessing that the light grey statue between the doors could be Luther himself. It's hard to tell in this picture but in the dark grey arches above the door are little guys that we think are saints maybe? Inside the door here was a cool wood statue of skeletons on a cross but like I said before, I feel weird taking pictures inside.

Here's a cool Gothic gargoyle/drain spout at the main entrance.

I like cool pictures where the building looks really tall. It was a pretty nice day out, even though it was drizzling when we left the flat.

This is a good picture of the church taken from the castle. It looks alot like the old Gothic Catholic churches, including the little display/tombs that line the inside, but there was no big altar in the middle or cross hanging up.

Here's a picture of the river, not the prettiest of angles. This is where we took the picture of the church at the top of the post. Look how grey the sky is here. Also notice all the bicycles along the rail. There are thousands of bikes in the city, but crime must not be a factor because most of them
are not attached to anything, but have locks just on the back tires. I guess people just don't come in and grab them and walk off. It's the little differences you know?

This is one of the newer buildings in the city. The Uppsala Kongress och Konsert hall. We'll get closer picture of it later. It's also pretty cool at night.

This is a picture of the castle. It's kind of plain compared to some of the other castles in Europe, but it is pretty big and there is a fountain out front. I bet the pink color comes from the pink granite they have everywhere around here. That's what the gravel is they use for traction in the winter. This is taken from the botanical garden in front of the castle.

This is taken from the main square. In this building is an Irish pub where we will be for St. Paddy's day. The pub takes up the second floor with apartments above that. The police are here because they were watching a rally that was taking place. It was the second one we saw within two days. Not sure what this one was about but the one we saw the night before was a pro-Palestine march. That may have been the first time we've been nervous about being Americans here because one of the banners people were holding said something about the USA and the middle east.

Another building from the central square which is called Stora Torget. The bottom of this building had a restaurant in it but is vacant now. I'm not sure what else is in it but it has a statue holding the scales of justice in its hand.

Another building at Stora Torget. The bottom floor is a Swedish fast food/burger place. The website on the building is for lawyers, or advocats, and I'm guessing that is what the yellow offices are. CiS Swedish cultural fact#18: For your fries you can choose from a variety of dipping sauces including salsa, curry, ketchup, and Bearnaise among other things. Usually for 5 krowns. Yummy.

Another building at Stora Torget. This one is for a bank. Notice the orange banners that are hanging up. This is to promote the upcoming Bandy National Championship games being played here this weekend. Bandy is like ice hockey with a ball, but on a rink the size of a soccer pitch, eleven guys a side, and the goalie/keeper doesn't get a stick but has to use his hands. So other than that, it's exactly the same. It's kind of a big deal around here. We're going to go and get some pictures. Stay tuned true believers.

The most modern building in Stora Torget. This one has a department store and a grocery inside. That is a bus stop in front. Compare the sky here with it in the picture of the front of the church. The day definitely improved. Also notice that most of the people in these pictures are wearing black. It's is very popular here, along with skinny jeans, and boots worn over them. Crazy. Jamila, I think you would fit right in.

The Space-Time Continuum

You can tell it's getting closer to Spring when the kanin start multiplying, well like... So happy Daylight Savings time back in the U.S.A.! At the moment Sweden and the states are an hour closer to each other. Swedish cultural fact #17: While Sweden does not observe Daylight Savings like the US (thanks to the passage of the Energy Policy Act of 2005) but instead uses the European Summer Time standard, which means we don't change our clocks until the last Sunday of March. So right now we are only 5 hours ahead of the East Coast and 8 hours ahead of the West Coast, for the next couple weeks. See, you learn something new every day.

Keeping with the timely theme, it has now been a month (albeit a short month, thanks February) since we left the states. However, it's not until tomorrow that we will have been in Sweden for a month. Trippy huh? No perhaps it is the way in which we perceive time that is indeed trippy. "Then I realized I could have just said 'yeah.'"

[Cut to Kristen] Kristen - "Awww Mitch!"

[Narrator]
Everyone Ragen works with has been pushing for us to say longer. Maybe pushing is not the right word, but they are trying really hard to sell us on how great it is to live here. And to be honest, that's what we are leaning towards, staying her for at least two years, maybe longer. We are going to apply for an extension of our residence permits and the like so maybe we can get that personnummer thing. That way we could get cell phones and rent movies apparently. It's been a pretty good first month but is that really enough to make a decision like staying here for two years? Probably. Sounds good to me. I like it here so far, Ragen does too. Once we get over the language barrier it will be even easier to get around, once we can read all the signs and things at the grocery store. Plus that gives everyone more time that they can come visit. See, everybody wins.

We went to the movies for the first time last week. We went on a Tuesday night because we were told that the ticket prices are cheaper from Monday to Wednesday. Still we ended up paying 90 SEK each, or about $15 to see Rendition. Apparently movie prices are not uniform but vary depending on the film. It looks like the big films cost more, around 100 SEK. The movie was in English but the title on the poster was in Swedish. Sometimes they do that for films and sometimes they don't. When we were trying to decide what to see we saw the poster for Rendition and I recognized it because Reese Witherspoon and Jake Gyllenhaal were on the poster but I could not for the life of me remember what it was called. It wasn't until the opening credits that we figured it out - ok it told us the name of the movie then. Swedish Cultural fact# 8: Swedish multiplexes have small rooms to watch the movies in, the one we were in had about 30 seats, and you purchase assigned seats for the film. All the seats are numbered and they ask you at the window how far back you want to sit and if you want the aisle or in the middle. We were in the middle in row 4 of 5, and there was only two other people and they sat behind us. Also they sell bulk candy at the theater (I realize that lots of theaters in the US do that too) but they have some weird candies. Of course they have Swedish fish and above you can see one of the licorice salt fishes like you can find at IKEA. We had never tried one so we grabbed a couple. Man, they are definitely more salt than licorice, so keep the water bottle handy. They had a lot of licorice flavored things, chocolate with marshmallow filling things, and liqueur flavored chocolates. And most of it is kind of stale.

Another common flavor here is Pear. You can get pear juice, soda, ciders, ice cream, creamcicles, and these foam, marshmallowy, mushroom shaped things. It's not bad. For one of us, pear is her favorite thing next to chocolate. I won't tell you which one of us that is, but I'll give you three guesses and I think you'll only need two.

Now that we've been here awhile, CiS promises to be more timely (see how I tied that back to the theme set at the beginning) in our updates. So stay tuned loyal listeners!

Now for other, random picture time!

Here is the schedule for the 7 bus that stops outside of our apartment. Notice that they call the days of the week diffent names here. Plus they use a 24 hour clock. Kind of blows your mind a little doesn't it?
Nice name for a shop eh? We thought it might be one of those lost in translation named shops so we had to check it out. It was a punky skateboarder type clothing shop, lots of stuff from Element and the like. As well as some house brand t-shirts, so, get ready for Christmas presents y'all.

Kanin

Yup, that's a fat rabbit.

Hej.

It's been awhile since our last post. I really need to get better at it. I'm sure everyone is quite curious as to what we've been up to, and the answer is not much really. Our biggest accomplishment has been paying our rent. I know, makes you feel all proud inside. It was actually a lot more difficult than it sounds. CiS (CougsinSwedeland, new shorthand, let's see how it works) Swedish Cultural fact #54 - people don't use checks in Sweden, they use debit cards and pay most things online - this country is years ahead of the US in online banking capabilities. So when we had to pay our rent, the first time we have done it ourselves, we had to deposit our rent money, in SEK or crowns or krona if you like, into the account of the woman we are renting from. Ok no problem right? Well like I said, it wasn't as if we could write a check. Well what about paying online? We do have an online bill pay service back in the states, but bill-pay is set up by finding the vendor, and obviously there isn't a vendor for our rent. So that didn't work. Ok how about transferring money from our bank in the states into our bank here? That would require wiring the money because our bank won't transfer money to banks outside the US (with our piddly little account at least). So we called customer service but had to wait until they opened on the west coast (9 hour time difference) because we had opened the account in WA, and apparently that state is on a different system than the rest of the states our bank operates. We finally got a representative on the line and she told us that to wire money we would have to fill out a wire transfer agreement, which had to be done in person at a branch. In otherwords we would have to physically go into a bankbranch... which of course are only located in the states. That didn't help and it wasn't as if anyone told us that before we left (even though we spoke with several representatives at bank locations in several states across the US) or we could have done that, although we didn't have a bank to send it to yet. So our last option was to go to the ATMs here and withdraw money, deposit it into our bank here, and pay our rent online (which turned out to be the easiest part, as long as we had someone that spoke Swedish to translate the bank page for us). However, since our US bank is bent on making sure that if our ATM card is stolen no one could empty our account there is a daily limit for ATM withdrawals. So we would have to withdraw some money and wait 24 hours to withdraw more, rinse and repeat as necessary. We asked the customer service folks if they could give us a temporary increase in the amount, but they couldn't do it unless we wanted to upgrade to a high roller account. Basically they have our money and don't want us to use it. Sure that's how banks work, but it still sucks. Anyway, it took a few days to get the money out of America and into Sweden. Blah.

In other news...

There is this European music competition called Eurovision (that's convenient, but why call it vision if it's about music, Euroaudio would be more appropriate no? Or an awesome stereo.) So each country has these long drawn out competitions American Idol style where each week some bands/singers compete to represent their respective countries at Eurovision, in Belgrade this year. The competition here in Sweden is on this show called Melodyfestival 2008, and it's a pretty silly show where 8 groups compete each week and half are eliminated, blah blah blah. Why do I bring this up you ask? For one, this is what Ragen and her colleagues discuss at coffee breaks - mostly her colleagues, we haven't watched it before this week. And B - there was this band on it called the Nordmen I think and the only way I could describe them is to say that if songs paint pictures, then there song described "Van Art," chock full of dragons and Valkyries and viking ships. Sweet. Needless to say they advanced past the first round this week.

And in other music news... there are a lot of commercials here for The Cardigans Greatest Hits cd. My first thought, and I'm sure most of yours, was "the Cardigans had enough songs for a 'Greatest Hits' cd?" Now most people remember "Lovefool" and a few people remember "My Favourite Game," but there were others? Actually it has just come to my attention that The Cardigans are Swedish. Now these commercials start to make sense. Ok well I guess that maybe makes them number 2 on my list of favorite Swedish bands - which looks like this:

1) The Hives

2) The Cardigans

3) Abba

4) "Van Art" guys

5) and maybe Ace of Base?

(Also, cds/dvds/videogames are all really expensive here. Just thought you should know.)

And speaking of "Van Art" here is our week in pictures:

Another American favorite. This time it's American #1 Pan Pizza. It's just ham and cheese and sauce. Makes me long for the days of hanging out in New York city, drinking some Chocolate Banana soda, watching American Idol, before getting ready to go bowling back in the New World. Notice the picture of the baseball in the background.

People have asked what the weather has been like while we've been here. For the most part it's ranged from the low 30's to the mid 40's, with a couple days in the low 50's. It's been pretty gray and drizzly most of the time, kind of like Seattle. But it has snowed twice. Here's a picture of the first time.
Just keeping it real.

People have been worried that I wouldn't know what to do with myself until I find some work. So I decided to resume a hobby that I had started I don't know how many times and do something constructive so I've decided to learn the guitar. I saw this blue one in the window of a music shop downtown, and I knew that my wife would approve of it.

When in Rome... we just had to get and put together (it looks simple in this picture but actually required several complicated folds and wiring/attaching a plug that would fit in our ceiling socket) a Swedish lamp for the living room. It looks like it came from IKEA, but it didn't.