Eurovision and a Boat Ride

We had an exciting weekend close to home, starting with an afternoon in Malmö that consisted of a walk through The Emporia, one of Scandinavia's largest shopping malls, and a few loops around the international food festival taking place in city center. If you guessed that we worked an afternoon glass of wine and a snack into all of this, you'd be right. While the mall was really no more remarkable on the inside than any other shopping mall, it is pretty cool from an architectural point of view. 

Eurovision

Yet another benefit to living in Europe is access to all the splendor of the Eurovision Song Contest, which we had the pleasure of watching for the very first time this past weekend. Eurovision is basically a bigger, flashier, more exciting version of American Idol. It's been going on since 1956, and we were two of nearly 200 million viewers that tuned in to watch the grand final this year. Abba, who brought the top prize home to Sweden in 1974, is one of the best-known winners of the contest.

Many Europeans get super excited about Eurovision. Some have parties or gather at their favorite gay bar to ogle the smiling Europeans in splashy costumes singing and dancing beneath dazzling lights on live television. It is pure cheesiness at its absolute finest, so Erin and I were honored to experience this cultural rite. To be fair, we didn't see the whole thing and missed what is supposedly the best part (the voting) -- I was asleep by 10:30 and it went on until well past 1:00 a.m. -- but I did whip up a homemade pizza and we toasted with prosecco to celebrate our initiation into this fine institution.

This year, Sweden's own Måns Zelmerlöw won with this performance, so of course we were pleased as punch. The rule for voting is that you cannot vote for your own country, so the whole thing can get very political. The winning country then hosts the competition the following year.

Boating to Mölle

After the flurry of excitement that was Eurovision, we had the pleasure of joining our friends Simon and Julie on their lovely motorboat for a ride to Mölle, a beautiful little town in Skåne that was the site of Sweden's first nude beach in the latter 19th century. This may not seem like a big deal, seeing as nude bathing is a fairly common thing here, but I understand that those folks got involved in a little more than splashing around in the water, if you catch my drift. Nowadays, it's less a place for titillation and more just a quiet, cozy little seaside town.

The full force of the wind wasn't apparent until we were well out into the Öresund. Since the water was pretty choppy, Simon had to keep the boat moving at a fairly low speed of nine or 10 knots to limit the feeling of being on a roller coaster. I haven't been on a boat in quite a long time (ferries do not count), and the cool wind blowing through my hair and on my face, the spray of the salt water on my cheeks, and the beauty of the blazing yellow canola fields dotting the Swedish coastline made for quite a romantic combination. I distinctly realized that I've never seen any place as beautiful as Sweden, never mind that I also saw my first wild jellyfish -- there were dozens of them floating in the harbor. 

 

What wasn't romantic was feeling seasick as soon as we entered the marina, and I worked very hard internally to avoid leaning over the side of the boat and retching the remnants of the östsmorgas I had for my morning snack into the water in front of all the tourists lining the pier. Thank goodness this did not happen, and the walk around town calmed me instantly. We also enjoyed a lovely picnic of bread, cheese, fruit, and pastries on the boat. Thankfully, the ride back was quite a bit smoother, and Simon was able to crank up the speed to around 20 knots. He even let Erin drive!

On a sad note, Erin and I have just passed the halfway mark of our time here, so we're frantically trying to pack in as much travel as we possibly can in these last three months. Norway and Iceland are booked and in our near futures -- stay tuned for more news on the travel front!

Stockholm

Stockholm is hands down the coolest city I've ever visited. My veins coursed with both contentedness and excitement the entire four days we were there, which I spent with my mouth hanging open and my eyes agog. We ate and drank like queens, walked approximately one gazillion miles, and saw some amazing sights.

Spread out over 14 islands on the Baltic Sea, Stockholm is both Sweden's capital and most populous city. It's about 350 miles and on the opposite coast from Helsingborg, so we took advantage of the cheap airfares available within Europe and let Norwegian Airlines take us there. We stayed at a lovely boutique hotel called Nobis in a neighborhood filled with fancy stores like Prada and Tiffany but which was within a 20-or-so-minute walk from anywhere we actually wanted to go. The hotel had two restaurants and a lounge in the lobby, inside of which I had the first cocktail of my entire time in Sweden: a Bulleit bourbon and coke. Ahhhhhhh..... 

King Carl XVI Gustav and Queen Silvia live in the Royal Palace in Gamla Stan ("Old Town"), which is the oldest part of Stockholm that dates back to the 13th century. A beer and an afternoon snack in this neighborhood was our first stop after checking into the hotel. 

The Old Town is a touristy area that comprises the Nobel Museum, cobblestone streets, narrow alleyways surrounded by medieval buildings, and about a million restaurants and tourist shops. It's also home to a gay bar called Torget, where we were served wine by a bitchy bartender with heavily glittered eyelids while Whitney Houston played overhead, making us feel right at home. The neatest thing about Old Town is the many and varied alleyways, which have little foot traffic but the seemingly most interesting bars, restaurants, and shops in the neighborhood.

Our second day in Stockholm was one of those uncomfortable Scandinavian days where the wind makes you wince and the rain moves in and out like waves on the shore, but only after the taste of a beautiful, crisp morning. We took in as much as we could on foot, including the lovely grounds of the library and two parks that required hiking up some pretty steep hills, eventually making our way through several indoor and underground malls to escape the weather, enjoy fika, and ogle the stylish, beautiful people. Below are a few of the pictures I took that day; imagine a narrator saying "I love it here!" over and over again, because that's exactly what Erin and I took turns doing. 

That day, we walked past a small lunch spot boasting an all-American menu with a BLT that had curry on it.

We had dinner that night at Jamie Oliver's Italian, consisting of bruschetta, three types of cannelloni, and calamari for the seafood eater. Holy crap, that place was amazing! After dinner, we walked along the water and caught an amazing sunset.

We started out the next day with a 4.3 km (about 2.7 mi) walk to Tantolunden, a large park on the island of Södermalm. One very cool thing about this park is that it is home to nearly 100 allotment gardens, consisting of brightly colored cottages that are surrounded by flowers, vegetables, and other greenery in plots that are carefully maintained by each individual owner. These gardens can be found all over Sweden (our balcony overlooks one in Helsingborg), and the Tanto allotment garden began in 1915. After one of the best fikas (Swedish readers: is it OK to pluralize "fika"?) we've ever had, we spent the rest of the day walking around different neighborhoods near the hotel, discovering various market halls, shops, and cafes. We estimate that we walked 10 miles that day. 

One of our last stops was at the Vasa Museet, a museum dedicated to a ship that sunk on its maiden voyage in 1628, spent over 300 years on the bottom of Stockholm Harbor, and was brought to the surface in 1961. The ship managed to stay in pretty good shape, which I read had something to do with the level of salt in the water, and they were able to restore it with 98% of its original materials.

While we were in the museum, it began pouring, and the rain did not stop until long after we were at the airport waiting for our flight home. Lesson learned: if the front desk clerk at your hotel offers you an umbrella when the sky looks crazy, take it. Waterproof hoods are not always enough; we got drenched!

We're already planning our next trip to Stockholm, which will absolutely include a trip to the archipelago. I hope everyone out there gets a chance to visit this amazing city!

Random Items

Erin has two days off of work this week due to another Swedish holiday I'd never heard of until I looked it up 30 seconds ago: Ascension Day. Many of you Christians out there probably already know this, but Wikipedia had to tell me that this holiday has something to do with Jesus's bodily ascension into heaven, which is celebrated 39 days after Easter. The Internet also told me that Swedes go into the woods at sunrise on Ascension Day to listen to the birds singing, and it is thought to be good luck if a cuckoo is heard from the east or west. Swedish readers: if I make the journey to the woods at sunrise tomorrow, will I bump into many of my neighbors? Do you commemorate this holiday in any cool way other than with just a couple of days off of work?

This past week, we consciously chose to avoid adventure and stuck with our habit of indulging in very long walks, fika, afternoon wine, quiet evenings, and other predictable things. So, I'm afraid I don't have much to report outside of the following random items.

1. While I have yet to indulge in any smörgåsbord, rarely does a day pass when some sort of smörgås (literally "open-faced sandwich") is not a part of my diet. The Swedes eat a lot of smörgås for breakfast -- and I'm not talking about the egg-and-cheese-on-toast variety that food trucks on the U.S. east coast know how to do up so well. I'm talking about lunch meat, sliced cheese, some variety of lettuce, tomato, red pepper, or cucumber atop fresh, delicious bread that is buttered -- the very sort of thing we Americans might wrap in wax paper and eat alone over our keyboards at work during the sad little ritual we call lunch.

2.  "After Work" is the Swedish version of happy hour, and it happens at most bars/restaurants on Fridays only, usually from 16:00 - 19:00 when you can get low-priced wine or beer and often some sort of snack. For example, one of our favorite places provides salad, olives, brie, salami, and crispbread gratis to anyone stopping in for an After Work drink. Though many bars are fully stocked, we have not observed many people drinking any alcoholic beverage besides beer or wine, though we understand that snaps (i.e., schnapps) are a very big deal, particularly at the holidays (Ascension Day commemoration activity, perhaps?). Anyone seeking a reliable recipe for chive and pepper snaps, look no further than this article. 

As an aside, we did recently learn that cocktail culture is becoming more popular here, and that they are most often consumed after dinner (unlike in the U.S. where they are often consumed before, during, and after dinner).

3.  There are a number of things that I think Sweden does better than the U.S., and the item that tops my personal list is garbage. For one, every little bit of garbage is sorted, and nearly everything is recycled or composted. We have a drawer beneath our kitchen sink that pulls out to reveal six different sorting bins, which we must then take out to a separate, smaller building to sort into larger bins that include soft plastic, hard plastic, packaging, paper, metal, colored glass, clear glass, organic waste, and a more general "other" bin. This room was super confusing when we first got here, but now we don't think twice about it (though I do breathe through my mouth in there and try to get in and out as quickly as possible). 

Less than 1% of all Swedish garbage winds up in landfills, and their waste management system is so efficient that other EU countries export their trash to Sweden for incineration, which is then converted to energy for heating and electricity. I've lived in multiple places in the U.S. where my neighbors couldn't even be bothered to put their empty cans in the recycling bin and haul it out to the curb, no sorting necessary!

If you're into podcasts, there's a very interesting story on waste management in Act 3 of this episode of This American Life.

*****

We are leaving tomorrow for a long weekend in Stockholm. Happy Ascension Day, everyone -- may you hear a cuckoo calling from the east or west!

May Day Weekend Recap

In the event you haven't already heard, Erin and I are engaged! You may want to hear an elaborate story involving a brass band, a plane dragging a banner with our faces on it, the scoreboard at Olympia Stadium projecting our names in flashing neon lights, or Erin on one knee in the sand, bathing in the light of a sunset over the Öresund while sobbing out her devotion to me, but none of that would be true. We ultimately decided together and are thrilled and excited to be taking such an awesome step that feels exactly right. I am filled with lightness, peace, and contentedness when I think of spending my life with such a kind, loving, supportive, motivated, family-oriented partner who looks so cute when she wakes up in the morning. Lucky Jenny!

We are still trying to work out the details regarding the ceremony and what kind of celebration we will have, so it may be a little while before I have any more info. Thanks to everyone for all the amazing support we've gotten!  

In other blog news, Erin had a four-day weekend because of the May 1 holiday, May Day, which some leftist Swedes celebrate by holding political rallies and demonstrations (we did not witness any). We crammed a lot of activity into the weekend, so this post may be a bit longer than usual.

Landskrona

May Day is preceded by Walpurguis Eve, which we celebrated with some of Erin's HR colleagues in Malmö. Prior to the festivities, I took a train to Landskrona to explore the town where they all work. Landskrona is an odd place for reasons I can't quite explain. Perhaps this is because it was periodically raining and very windy for the duration of my time there, I was already coming down with a cold that Erin gave me as an engagement present, and I was a little irritable. Maybe it was the odd bar/cafe I stopped at where a strange man who made an unnecessarily loud "AHHHHHH" sound after every sip of his gigantic beer was staring at me every time I looked up. Or maybe it's just an odd place and therefore requires no explanation whatsoever.

My first stop was at the Landskrona Museum, which contains totally unrelated but fascinating galleries of both art and historical artifacts. One was a photography exhibit by the French artist Eric Antoine and another of paintings and sculptures by Carl Fredrik Reuterswärd, who created his non-violence work in honor of John Lennon. 

Another gallery consisted mostly of ancient stone hand tools, which was very dark and had an eerie soundtrack playing to make you feel as though you were actually walking around in the stone age. There was also a gallery that reminded me a bit of the Detroit Historical Museum* in that there were a couple old shops reconstructed that you could walk into, along with other cultural artifacts from the region. I even took a selfie with a polar bear statue that was hanging out in the stairwell because, why not?

*NOTE: For those of you in the Detroit area who have not visited the excellent Detroit Historical Museum, I highly recommend making a trip out there and coupling it with a walk to the main branch of the public library next door to check out the wholly underappreciated frescoes on the top floor. 

After the museum, I made my way to the Landskrona Citadel, a defensive fort near the beach that is surrounded by moats. If you guessed that the Danes and the Swedes used to take turns possessing this fort, you'd be right -- those two were like siblings who couldn't get along back then. I walked through the pristine grounds while the sky turned from gray to black and then started pouring. 

The happy young lady above was laying in the sculpture garden just outside the grounds of the citadel. She had other plans and was therefore unavailable to fika with me.

Malmö

After parading around Landskrona, I then joined up with Erin and her colleagues for the trek out to Malmö, the third largest city in Sweden. We first took a nice walk along the beach where I snapped this photo of the famous Turning Torso building, the tallest skyscraper in Sweden.

We then had dinner at Bistro Stella, a lovely and delicious gastropub owned by the husband of one of Erin's colleagues. This cozy place is situated across the street from Thai House, a restaurant with awnings over windows flanked by Bodhisattva statues that proclaim it to be a pizzeria and pub named El Conquistador. Go ahead, take a little time to process that one; the rest of the post will be here when you get back.

At Bistro Stella, I inhaled a special three-course vegetarian meal consisting of white asparagus, risotto, and a lemon tart while Erin got down with some white fish, potatoes, and a chocolate mousse. We then walked down to the beach to experience the bonfire that had been lit on the water in honor of Walpurgis Eve, a time to gather together to celebrate spring and the upcoming summer. The lighting of bonfires is a tradition dating back to a time when Swedes considered April 30 the last day of winter and believed the bonfires warded off evil spirits. 

Loads of people were gathered along the shore, and tons of little kids were skipping rocks, a practice called "throwing sandwiches" in Sweden. While I didn't see any stones actually skipping over the water's surface, I did see a bunch of tiny kids in full snowsuits -- including one in a complete alligator costume -- picking up anything in sight and chucking it a few feet into the water. Seaweed, rocks, shells, and handfuls of sand were not off the menu for those dedicated kids. We truly had an amazing night with lovely company!

Sofiero

On May Day proper, we took the bus out to Sofiero Slott, the castle here in Helsingborg that was first occupied by Crown Prince Oscar and his wife, Sophia, after whom the castle was named (they would go on to become king and queen of Sweden and Norway). Sofiero easily made it to the top of my list of favorite sites in Sweden so far -- something about that place is pure magic. 

Many of the gardens weren't yet in bloom, though there were plenty of gorgeous spring flowers to ogle at on the immaculate, stunning, and expansive grounds. I took about a million pictures and will post a few below, but they really don't do the place justice; pictures can be funny like that.

The castle sits atop a tree-lined hill carved with walking paths leading down to the Öresund, some of which are lined with the rhododendron bushes for which Sofiero is best known. The nearly 500 varieties on the property should start to bloom in the next few weeks, and you can bet your buns that we'll be back to get a look at them. 

The rhododendrons were originally planted by Crown Princess Margareta, wife of Crown Prince Gustav Adolph, who received Sofiero as a wedding gift in 1905. Margareta did loads of gardening on the property with her kids, and also took color photographs of her work. They had some of the photos hanging in one of the greenhouses, and I really wish I could've gotten my hands on one or two of those prints. They were so cool!

While there, we also took a tour of the castle, enjoyed some wine from their cafe on the balcony overlooking the water, and observed some of the sculptures and modern art on the property. 

Our final adventure of the weekend involved a trip to Lund, where we poked around in some shops and eventually wound up at Restaurang VED for one of the best meals of our travels so far: a margherita pizza and an appetizer of grilled asparagus with Chèvre, walnuts, and raspberry vinaigrette. Perfecto!

Have a great weekend, everyone!