The Globe is Sweden’s largest entertainment venue and the world’s largest hemispherical building. Basically, it looks like a giant golf ball and besides hosting concerts and sports events, it also represents the sun in a huge replica of the solar system, built in the scale of 1:20 million. That last part I didn’t even know about until looking the Globe up on Wikipedia, and neither did anyone I mentioned it to, so it might not be well known. Chances are you can impress some Swedish people by dropping that little fact into a casual conversation.
A man in Hudiksvall, a small town in the northern part of Sweden, took a job working with adults with special needs and had some interesting ideas about what they could do. The story of how they formed a theatre company, became famous all over Sweden, traveled to New York, performed on Broadway and got their own TV-show, is out of this world.
The group has handled their stardom with grace. I had the opportunity to hang out with them when they visited a K-7 school and I doubt Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt would have gotten a better welcome. The kids treated them like rock stars and they did their best to sign autographs for everybody.
A family friend worked with them in the beginning and told me about how they were invited to go on the Swedish equivalent to Good Morning America. Toralf, one of the cast members who is well known for hitting on almost every single woman he meets, and his handler were going to be on. While they are sitting in their chairs waiting for their turn, Toralf suddenly spots the gorgeous young weather anchor and he gets super excited. He starts tugging at the arm of his handler and says, “I want to ask her a question, I need to ask her a question”.
Oh no, thinks the handler, he is going to say something super inappropriate and we will not be able to go on the air. So he tries to calm Toralf down and says, “OK, OK, you can ask her a question later but not now. Just sit down and wait”. But Toralf will not give up and keeps repeating that he needs to ask her a question. When she is done with her segments he shouts at her and she walks over. “Hey you, hey you, I have a question for you!” says Toralf. She looks at him.
The handler hides his face in his hands and hopes for the best. “How many lingonberries are there in the world?”, asks Toralf. That
later became the name of a movie based on the Glada Hudik theater group.
Swedes love fad diets. Just like the rest of the Western world, we are getting fatter by the second and loving it. Therefore, we are trying to find ways to both have and eat our cakes, thank you very much. Only I’m pretty sure GI - low glycemic indexed foods – doesn’t allow cake.
The basic theory is to swap all those fast carbs like white rice, pasta and potatoes, and substitute them with stuff that is slower. Somehow. Ah, this is not a diet book, I just know that all magazines (and even some fast food restaurants) have caught on to this trend and seem determined to keep it alive. So go ahead, try it. Who knows, maybe THIS will truly be the diet that saves us from eating our civilization to death.
People always ask us if we intend to have children here, or go back to Sweden. I tell them about the föräldraförsäkring and they just go “ahh.... So in Sweden then, I guess?”
Basically it gives all new parents (the mom or the dad) the chance to stay home for a year and some months after giving birth, getting paid to make sure their infant grows up to be a good little socialist (just kidding!). Currently, two months are “individual”, meaning that if either the mom or the dad doesn’t want to stay home at all those days are lost. It is a pretty remarkable deal compared to what parents get in the rest of the world, I realized after moving abroad. One day I was riding the bus in Minneapolis, talking to a very pregnant bus driver and she told me she only had two weeks of vacation, so she was going to keep on driving right up to the second her water broke. Stories like that are hard for Swedish women to comprehend.
The big political showdown right now is whether more days should be individualized or not. The dads are still not taking out nearly as much as fifty percent of the time, leading to women being absent from the work force for a longer then their male counterparts. That in turn means that they are left behind when it comes to raises and other salary increases. The left-wing parties are generally positive towards a more individualized föräldraförsäkring, whereas the right wing/liberals want the families to decide for themselves who stays home.
A 1998 movie about growing up gay in a small town (Åmål), the story focuses on two teenage girls who fall in love and what they have to do in order to be together. It was highly influential and most people can still quote extensively from it.
If you want to know what it was like to grow up as a teenager in a small town in Sweden where there is nothing to do but drink and play around with a moped, I would recommend it. Shit, even if you have no interest in that what so ever, watch it for the great soundtrack, implied female masturbation and late 1990’s fashion (hint: plaid shirts). Right now it seems as though the entire movie is on YouTube, with English subtitles.
This type of small cottage is named after the 1970’s minister Birgit Friggebod, who made it legal to build an additional building, no more than 10 square meters, on your land without having to get any kind of permit. Today that has been increased to 15 square meters.
This lead to an explosion in different friggebod-designs and many play around with it, trying out ways to use the small space as efficiently as possible. Some use it as a guest room; others build one for their children to play in. They can be a smaller copy of the main house, or pimped out with über-modern green architecture. It should come as no surprise to you that there are ready-to-be-assembled kits for those who lack the sufficient skills to design and build one from scratch. After all, this is the land of IKEA.
He is Sweden’s prime minister. There are plenty of books and Wikipedia entries explaining this man and his background, so please consult those for an accurate description of his politics.
In this clip you can hear an excerpt from his radio special on P1 Sommar (see “Sommar i P1”) where he tries to order a trip using the SJ automatic phone system.
Fredrik Lindström is something as rare as a popular, intelligent man that is universally liked. You would be hard pressed to find someone who had anything against him. His career started on a radio show where he made prank calls on air, usually with a hint of intellectualism (see “Hassan”). In one example he called a bus company’s lost and found department, asking if they had found an irregular verb that he left behind on the bus. Instead of “merely” becoming a comedian, however, he went to university, got his degree in linguistics and is currently on leave from a PHD-position at Uppsala University. He has since then written several books about the Swedish language, produced and starred in different TV-shows dedicated to the same topic. He has made caring about language somewhat hip. Right now he works as a host for one of Sweden’s most popular game shows (see “På Spåret). With his combination of humor, intelligence and humility he has become hugely popular amongst several different audiences - those who pretend to be intellectual, those who actually are and those enjoy being everything but.
