A Few Key Points and Some Pics

1.  It has been confirmed by some people "in the know" that smiling at babies and dogs on the street in Sweden is perfectly acceptable. Their parents, however? Not a chance. 

2.  I am going to get started on a massive sociological survey here in Helsingborg. The early hypothesis is that there are more hair salons per capita in this city than in any other on earth. Even more curiously, they open quite early in the morning and seem to always have a single stylist sitting in a hair chair fiddling with his/her phone because there are no clients. What's going on here? This may be a case for Hercule Poirot.

3.  Speaking of "his/her," I learned that there is a gender-neutral pronoun in Swedish.

he = han

she = hon 

gender neutral = hen

There's an interesting article about this here. Even more interesting is that it originated at two nursery schools in Stockholm. 

4.  Erin and I have made it through our first "real" week in Sweden. We have been in the same apartment for more than seven days now, her final day of the work week is underway, and I have managed to keep myself productive every day. I have also been devouring Glamorama by Brett Easton Ellis and am nearly finished with it. If anyone out there has also read it and wants to discuss, please let me know. I was dreaming about the book last night and have so many questions about confetti and foreign camera crews. 

5.  On Wednesday, I took the train to work with Erin in Landskrona, where I met her colleagues and drank coffee in their canteen and eyeballed the auto parts they engineer at the facility on display in the lobby. While there, a crazy loud alarm went off and a fire truck drove up loaded with men who put out some sort of kitchen fire while we all stood around on the lawn.

6.  We left the plant after lunch in the canteen, where I ate some sort of mixed bean salad atop some very thin pancakes, and hopped on the train to Malmö to finish up a few things for Erin's work visa. We managed to get to our destination after riding our first Skånetrafiken bus and walking alongside a fairly busy road for 15 minutes without really knowing where we were headed, and then felt so mentally exhausted afterward that we wound up back in Helsingborg having wine at a bar near our apartment called Pitchers. We have to return to Malmö in a week or so to pick up her identification card, when we may be brave enough to have a meal and take a few pictures while we're there.

7.  I have forgotten to mention that it's semla season here in Sweden. Semla is basically a giant cream puff that is absolutely everywhere this time of year. People eat these things during fika like it's a religious miracle. There's even a place in city center that has semla in picture frames hanging in the window. I tried to take a picture of one of these, but didn't want the man sitting nearby to think I was a paparazzi, so I took a pic of this instead.

8.  We are anticipating some unseasonably warm weather this weekend and intend to be out in it as much as possible. I will leave you with a few pics I took on one of my walks earlier this week. 

Happy Friday, everyone!