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.

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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!