Pictures. Finally.

How Much Is Your Dollar Worth?
$1 = 5.8769 SEK

So here it is, the long awaited picture post. This is the first slideshow I've done so hopefully it works.

Video from "Log Island"

How Much Is Your Dollar Worth?
1 U.S. dollar = 5.9029


So as promised here is a video of our trip to Stockholm. As Agneta our guide told us "stock" is the word for log and "holm" means island. CiS Cultural fact #3: Stockholm is built on 14 islands and the log part of the name comes from a legend/story/history about the founding of the city that included hiding crown jewels in a hollowed out log and sending it down river and deciding to build the capital wherever the log ended up. So there you go.

That was part of the changing of the guard ceremony. It was about 45 minutes overall so this is just a piece. Also this video was the least likely one to bring on motion sickness. See, we care about our readers.

I'll post some pictures later today or tomorrow, I want to try something with them so I have to do some learnin' first.

Trains, Rats, Fires, Stockholm

How Much is Your Dollar Worth?

1 dollar = 5.9502 SEK

This past weekend we finally ventured into Stockholm. Here's Ragen with the Cougar flag outside the clubhouse of the Nobles from back in the day. We decided that for our first trip we would go see the old part of the city, Gamla Stan. It was pretty cool, old cobblestone streets, statues, churches, the royal palace, all the things you would expect to see.

Here I am with the Cougar flag in front of the royal palace. You can see I have the guard's attention. Go Cougs! I would like to point out that three other people took my picture while I was standing here, so I would like to officially announce my candidacy for official international ambassador of all things WSU. Allez les Cougs!.

This here is the royal palace, hence the guards. The royal family doesn't actually reside here anymore, they live outside the city, but the prince does live in an apartment across the street. He wasn't home when we were there though.

There are guided tours through the old part of the city and we decided to go on the English speaking version. Turns out we were the only ones so we got a private tour of ye olde town. Our guide was a nice woman by the name of Agneta, who speaks Spanish as well as English and Swedish. She also drives cabs and gives tours of Uppsala so we will try to find her up here as well. She is quite chatty and what was supposed to be about an hour tour turned into almost 2. I would say we got our moneys worth (70 SEK apiece). We will post more pictures as we go and try to post a video we took of the changing of the guards.

This is a cool statue of a kingly type person slaying a dragon. This is an old legend in Sweden and there are other versions of this statue around, including a very valuable one made of oak inside the church that is adjacent to the palace. Our guide told us that the dragon represents the Danes.
Oh Thank Heaven for 7-11. I've mentioned before that we have yet to see a Starbucks anywhere, take that as you will, but the 7-11s may be more ubiquitous than McDonald's is around here. No nachos and SLURPEES though. Well not like American SLURPEES at least. This one is right outside the train station.
Here is another one that is down in Gamla Stan on the main shopping avenue whose name means "the long west road" or something like that. You can see that the body shop is next door. We also ventured into the shopping district in the new part of the city, same idea, a long street with shops + some malls. But hey, we did find a fast food Mexican type place, the Taco Bar.

We took the train down from Uppsala and when we went back to the train station we to head home there was about 15 police cars out front. We were a little worried about what was going on. We went inside and saw that there was a lot of police officers there, but they were letting people in still so we decided that there was no danger there. There were however a lot of soccer fans inside. Earlier in the day Malmö FF had come to town to play Djurgårdens IF, so all the Malmö fans were waiting to take the train home. Once their train left, the police seem to have disappeared, imagine that. Anyway, we looked at the departure board and noticed that our train back to Uppsala had us leaving from a bus gate. There was also a message about a fire near the train tracks at a place called Sollentuna and that no trains would be running until about 3 pm the next day. We were not sure if that meant our train because we had never heard of that town before so we went to the customer service office which seemed to have plenty of upset people and no one working. Then two customer service agents came out, helped a couple people, then disappeared to the back room again. This repeated itself a couple times and we still had no idea what was going on. Ultimately we decided to go to the bus gate where we found a couple people who spoke English. They explained that the fire in Sollentuna was too close to the train tracks so we were going to be bussed to a town north of the fire where we would catch the train the rest of the way. We made it home, but two hours after we were scheduled too. Makes for a good adventure. Later we found out from talking to my parents that a rat was perhaps to blame for the fire. It had crawled into a transformer or something, caused a power outage for a portion of Stockholm and a fire that we had to be bused around. The story made the The Daily World back on the harbor. Now don't say that rats only get bad press. Actually that isn't good press but it is international press so that is pretty good I guess.

"Our COPS is On"

How much is your dollar worth?

$1 = 5.9979 SEK

Last night we found an episode of COPS (two episodes are on every weeknight, FOX cultural ambassador for the United States worldwide) and one of the segments had stuff from one of the Spokane episodes. Ahh, if that doesn't make you homesick... Why is it that they never pull over some fancypants lawyer or CEOs or Vice-Presidents for East Coast Television and Microwave Oven Programming for DUI or causing a ruckus for being fired huh? Instead we get episodes full of mullets, mustaches, motorcycles, AC/DC t-shirts, kitten t-shirts, bare feet, half naked, unintelligible representations of American life. No wonder people expected Ragen and I to be awesome bowlers when we went out a couple weeks ago.

NEXT TOPIC (how's that for a segue?)

Speaking of television, "What's the deal with..." game/reality shows? I've always been on the reality tv will become the new opiate of the masses and will spread like, things, that spread quickly... There is always a question of which show came from what country, like Who Wants to Be a Millionaire came to the US from the UK and stuff (actually I guess most come from the UK) and Big Brother came from Scandinavia, I think. We have started to notice that there are a ton of those type of shows made here in Sweden. There is now, Power of 10, Deal or No Deal, So You Think You Can Dance Scandinavia, Who Wants to be a Millionaire, Dancing With the Stars (called Let's Dance), Sweden's Got Talent (not really the title), Swedish Idol (also American Idol), Big Brother of course, the Singing Bee, and others I'm sure I can't recall. Oh and we also get The Apprentice UK with the role of the Trumpster being played by some guy I've never heard of (for shame you ethnocentric American). Ok I lost what point I was trying to make about this except there is a lot of those reality/game show shows on here.

In other news:

It's been nice and warm here and in the 50's most of the last few days. Cold back on the Palouse and snowing in Seattle for Opening Day? Crazy. Also we are now on European Summertime so once again we are now 9 hours ahead of the west coast and 6 hours of the east coast. Apparently that means SLU changes their hours as well. Ragen's work day is now 8 to 4 instead of 9 to 5, kind of like what WSU does but this is for like seven months. As far as what I'm doing, I'm starting to get some applications together. I'm really looking at some jobs in the legal department of a subsidiary of the Shinehart Wig Corporation. Looks appealing. I let you know.

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!!!!!!!