Swedish Fish and Reindeer

I would greet you with some Swedish phrase I have learned over the last 5 days… if I had learned any. I gotta say, Swedish is incredibly NON-intuitive for me. Nothing sounds like I think it will sound, and they can say a whole phrase or sentence with one word. Reading street signs makes me go wide-eyed every time.

Anyway, so as I mentioned last Wednesday, I am in Stockholm! I am here on a 6 week temporary assignment to help out on a project. The first notable thing about Sweden is that almost everyone speaks English. It’s a little embarrassing how high their fluency is when hardly any Americans are fluent in anything… including english. Regardless, it makes it a MUCH more accessible country to visit. If I were going to be here longer I would still feel some sort of obligation to learn a little, but frankly my brain is full trying to learn Italian, so I think I’m going to play the lazy American card here and just roll with English 100%. Say what you will, but I’m doing it.

Second notable thing about Sweden is that they are apparently very strict rule followers, which I can totally get behind ;-) . Most of my backup to this statement is heresay from others, including swedes, but I believe it.

Third notable thing is related to the second, but swap rules for.. “Tradition.” So a cultural.. Norm?… routine?… is to have a “fika,” or a coffee break around 930am and I think 230pm every workday. Fika is not only a time to refill your coffee cup, but to spend a few minutes socializing with your coworkers and snacking on something sweet! This project is being run by mostly non-swedish folks so the fika is a little more casual and haphazard… except on Friday. I was told that Friday fika is the only holy time during the week haha. Again, I can totally get behind that. Last Friday someone brought some sort of danish or pastry or something that was truly magical.

(Actual sign in break room)

So Thursday and Friday were a lot of meeting people, getting generally acquainted with the job, and trying to jump in as I could. Everyone here seems to be super nice, and I had multiple people offer to invite me to dinner or whatnot over the weekend. It was very kind and very appreciated. The worst part of this job is that Swedish people cannot work overtime without MAJOR permissions from very high up sources (for tax reasons) so they all leave promptly by 530 at the LATEST whereas all of the Irish, British, and Americans on the job stay until 6… 630..7pm. It makes it feel that much more ridiculous when the room clears out and there’s only about 3 people still there doing work (although in America, working until 6 or 630 was totally normal for me…)

There is a group of 4 of us Jacobs folks from the US that are all staying the same hotel, so we have had Every. Single. Meal. together, as well as carpooling to and from site. So thursday morning the one guy somehow recognized me as soon as I came down for breakfast and I was able to join the group. Then they took me to lunch at the local… wait for it… car dealer. Yes. I am serious. No, I am not exaggerating. A Volvo dealer near the site has a small restaurant leasing space (I guess) in a room on a second floor off to the side. To get to it, though, you do have to walk through the showroom floor, ha. So Bizarre. Apparently Thursdays, at least at this place, they serve a traditional “Pea soup and pancakes.” That sounded like a ridiculous combination to me, but I gotta say, it rocked. The pea soup was actually more of a pureed kind of bean soup, and the pancakes were like crepes that came with strawberry jam and another yogurty looking substance. Definitely delicious.

Thursday night we just ate at the (semi-fancy) restaurant in the hotel where I had duck breast with like a green pea puree and lemon gravy or some such deliciousness. Friday morning, breakfast with the crew, lunch at another local joint with a good buffet (apparently buffets are very popular here), and dinner at an Italian restaurant (go figure) in Old town which is the island called Gamla Stan. If you did not know, Stockholm is essentially an archipelago and each island is its own little neighborhood if you will. It’s really pretty neat. There are bridges with sidewalks connecting all of the islands, but also a T system that goes UNDERNEATH the waterways. So we were on the island that holds some of the oldest origins for Stockholm as a city and they have a bunch of shops and things. They may be all tourist traps, but they’re still neat so we wandered the streets a bit after dinner and looked in windows and happened upon the film crew for a TV series of some sort!

So all of my Jacobs folks are very, very nice, and honestly not difficult to be around, otherwise I would have been driven me mad after day 1 of spending so much time with them, but definitely by Saturday morning I was feeling a bit… claustrophobic. To remedy this feeling, I got up at a strategic time, got down to breakfast, hurriedly filled my plate with food, and sat in a back area with tables that is kind of hidden from the other 80% of the dining area. I ate quickly and then made a run for it before anyone I knew saw me. Successful in my goal, I started walking towards town. The weather ended up being PERFECT, and I spent the entire day wandering the streets and hitting up museums and such.

While walking to my first destination, I happened to see a sign by a boat… so I read it

Neat!

I then started my history hopping with a tour of the Stockholm City Hall. Beautiful brick building built in 1921 I believe that is relatively iconic for the city.

You begin the tour in the blue room, though it is not very blue. Apparently the architect originally wanted it to be a big open plaza in a similar style to renaissance architecture, but then everyone reminded him that they were in Sweden, and Sweden gets freaking cold. So he put a roof on it but then wanted to paint alllll of the walls and the ceiling blue so it still FELT like you were outside. After the space was complete, though, he fell in love with the brick colors and decided to keep it unpainted. The bricks, however, were machine cut and too “smooth and clean,” so he had the builders go in with hammers and damage the bricks to make them look handmade. Architects, man. This room is not only the location of a humongous organ overhead, but also the location of the Nobel Banquet after the Nobel prizes are awarded each year.

We then moved throughout City Hall, which is actually used as City Hall where politicians meet to discuss political matters. This room also has an incredible ceiling which is said to replicate the roof of old Viking houses.

They also have some neat artwork including a fresco done by the brother of the architect…

..and the Golden Room. A huge room meant for banquets where the walls are completely covered with mosaic tiles, most of which have a thin layer of real 24k gold sandwiched between two pieces of glass.

I then moved onto the next island where Riddarholmen Church is located. This church is the oldest preserved building in Stockholm and the burial location for many important people (couldn’t really tell you who, but… I’m sure they were super important).

On my way from there to the Tre Kronor Museum at the Royal Palace, I happened to see a public bathroom… that you have to pay to use! I thought that was both hilarious and genius.

I took a few pictures at the Tre Kronor Museum.. But nothing worth sharing. Basically it was an old part of the original palace that they preserved to make into a museum which has information about some of the old inhabitants, how they defended themselves, clothes they wore, where they cooked and got water etc. etc.

After coming up from Tre Kronor, I was headed to the entrance to the Royal Apartments when some music caught my ear. It turned out to be the Swedish Military Band playing for the Changing of the Guards!

I then continued on to the Royal Apartments which were some of the Guest Apartments where I think they still have some guests stay, some old apartments that were used by some previous royal family, and some more official rooms that are just used for business or as a showcase kind of thing.

THEN I went to the Nobel Museum. Generally speaking they have a bunch of exhibits highlighting the process of nominating and determining the Nobel winners for the year and some of the reasons and accomplishments that led to individuals receiving their Nobel prizes. There is an entire huge section dedicated to the Nobel Prize of Literature and information about some of the writers who have won this prize. Difficult to post much about the content of the museum, but overall very very interesting.

Then last for my scholarly activities for the day, I went to the Medieval museum. I believe they were trying to get permitting to build a new building in front of the Royal Palace and the Parliamentary building, but when they started to do some excavating and testing etc. to make sure there was nothing in the ground, it turned out they found some pieces of an old city wall and some other remnants from the 14 and 1500’s. So, they made a museum! Some of it was showcasing their finds, including the wall, but much of it was talking and teaching about what life was like in Stockholm back then.

After that, it was almost 5pm so most of the museums and such were closing- I switched to tourist wanderer mode. I met up with one of my Jacobs folks for coffee, and we walked the shops a bit. We then went back to the hotel and met the whole gang for dinner. We went to a place called Salt where I had Reindeer for dinner!! It was super delicious- tasted like steak.

I then met up with two of the younger folks from site, and we bar hopped around Stockholm until about 2 or 230. All of the bars had swedish names so I really don’t remember their names, but I did catch this gem at one of them.

Then SUNDAY, after recovering from my small hangover, I went down to grab breakfast and caught a cab to the Vasa Museum. On the way to the museum, I caught another glimpse of the Military band, but this time in the middle of the street on their way to the Palace!

So the Vasa Museum is a museum dedicated to the preservation of the largest shipwreck recovery ever. In 1961 they recovered a huge wooden warship which had sunk in 1628 right off the coast of Stockholm. The combination of the low salinity in the water and the mud and silt which had buried a good portion of the ship kept it in incredible condition. The ship is 95% original and a constant effort by the preservation group to keep it from deteriorating. In the last 15-20 years they actually had to develop new methods of preservation because this large ship had presented new issues which had never been faced before in shipwreck salvaging. Honestly, the science and engineering which went into the original recovery and the perpetual preservation was incredible to me. They also found many human bones, enough to piece together at least half a dozen people who died when the ship sank. The unfortunately humorous part of the whole thing is that the ship sank almost immediately after taking sail due to inadequate design. The king had apparently been pushing to complete construction very quickly, and the designer did not make the bottom wide enough or deep enough to allow the top-heavy ship to withstand strong winds at sea. Clients never change, eh?

We topped the weekend off with a reservation at the Ice Bar!! So many of you may have heard of the Ice Hotel; There may be more than one now, but I think the original is in northern Sweden. The Ice Hotel has now spurred the Ice Bar. It ended up being kind of gimmicky because… you’re in the middle of a city where it’s maybe in the 40’s or 50’s outside, and you walk into a building that is artificially refrigerated to be in the 20’s to allow the decor, the bar, and the cups to be made of ice. That said, it was still really cool haha. Pun intended.

We then met a few other works folks for dinner at a pub and called that a weekend! Back to work today, and starting to feel like I’m getting a grasp on the scope of the project and how I’ll be able to contribute, so… all good stuff!

No. I have not eaten any Swedish Fish candies while here.

See you soon!!