An American in Sweden My name is Jennifer Evans and I’m a professional translator, currently living in beautiful Tranås, Sweden. I grew up in Saginaw, Michigan and attended high school and college in Sacramento, California.
 |
 |
Go to: Visit: Read about:
|
Easter hags
Interestingly, the Swedish Easter is the nearest equivalent to the
American Halloween. It’s a strange meld of the Christian Easter and
the pagan rites of the vernal equinox. In the pre-Christian European cultures, the equinoxes (in spring and fall, the days when the daylight
and nighttime hours are equal) and the solstices (in summer and winter,
when the difference is greatest between the number of daytime and nighttime
hours) were significant supernatural days of the year and had their own
special festivals. In Celtic tradition, the autumnal equinox, Samhain, was a
harvest festival for everyone, living or dead. When the Romans tried to
take over the British isles, they were horrified by the idea of the dead walking,
and created All
Hallows Day, or day of the dead, the day preceded by All Hallows Eve, Halloween.
The idea was that the dead walked on the eve of the fall equinox, and the
remembrance day was intended to appease them (a tragic mangling of the original
concept!). If you had to be out
on All Hallows Eve, you were supposed to dress as something scary, though
whether that was to fit in with the ghosts or to scare the wandering souls into keeping
their distance is anyone’s guess. And if spooks showed up on your doorstep, you gave
them what they wanted to make them go away.
|
|
In Scandinavian mythology, the vernal equinox is when the witches of the earth had their annual coven. To protect themselves from the roaming witches, people built bonfires and lit firecrackers to scare them away. If an old hag came to your door begging for food or money, it was best to give it to her in case she was a witch who might cast a spell on you. As with Halloween, as people grew less superstitious, the idea of dressing as a witch and knocking on doors looking for handouts became a childish prank and later a childhood tradition. Since the Christian church created the holiday of Easter to replace the pagan rites of spring, the tradition of dressing in rags and begging for treats came to be called “Easter hags.” Usually, the kids come by on the Thursday before Easter, Maundy Thursday. |
A few years ago, I ran into our four-year old neighbor in the hallway and asked her if she was going to be an Easter hag. She looked at me with big, solemn eyes and said, “No, I’m going to be a pwincess.” This is particularly funny, because unlike Halloween, you just can’t be anything but a witch at Easter.
 |
The Swedish postal service was once a model of customer service. They had efficient letter carriers, guaranteed next-day delivery of mail that was sent before 6 p.m., (weekdays at least), pleasant post offices with lots of stationery, office supplies, and even nice music CDs for sale, so you always had things to look at while you waited, and most interestingly—for an American at least—the Swedish postal service also had simple bank services. You could have a savings account with them and use that to pay your bills. Most companies also have Postal Giro accounts (as they’re called), and all you had to do was tear off the payment stubs on your bills and take them to the post office. The money was conveniently transferred from your Postal Giro account to the recipients, all at once. This was in the days before Internet banking, of course. |
In the 90s, the Swedish postal service jumped on the Internet bandwagon. They created a very efficient Internet bank for Postal Giro accounts and began making huge plans for Internet portals and e-mail service. I have to admit, they were very forward-thinking, and quite successful with their Internet endeavors. The only thing was, they were overstretching themselves financially. So they started making cutbacks.
The first thing to go was the efficient mail delivery. See, the letter carriers were so efficient because they knew that once they’d made all their deliveries, they could knock off for the day. So of course they delivered everything as fast as possible so they could have the afternoon off. Early in the 90s, the post office decided that just wouldn’t do. It wasn’t fair to the rest of the staff if the mail carriers finished work and went home early. From now on, if they get done early, they have to go back to the post office and sort mail for the rest of the day. Suddenly, we started getting our mail much later in the day.
Next up were the rural letter carriers. Obviously, people who lived out in the wilderness just couldn’t expect door-to-door mail delivery! That was far too much of a strain on our poor postal workers. Countryfolk would just have to go to their nearest grocery store and pick up their mail there.
Then they started closing down post offices. The little ones, located in residential areas where elderly people could reach them easily on foot. Simply a waste of resources. The remaining ones no longer had the pleasant little stationery and consumer products, because then they didn’t have to employ purchasers for them. And the Postal Giro was a real headache, too, so they sold it to one of the nation’s major banks.
By the late 90s, the post office realized that what it really wanted to do was to stop having to deal with all those pesky letters and post cards. They’d already given up on their dreams of being a big e-mail provider. And people were really starting to complain. The Swedish postal service was getting rid of every service that made them a post office! So what exactly did they want to work with? Their answer: business mail. That’s where the big money was. Big, juicy computer shipments and overnight express mail, business to business.
So in the early 2000s, they closed down most of the remaining post offices in Sweden. Instead, they farmed out all those annoying tasks like selling stamps and mailing packages from irritating little mortals—to places like grocery stores and gas stations. Who were only too happy to take on the extra work, so evidently they’re getting paid a healthy sum for it. Unfortunately, a lot of them never bothered to hire more personnel or get them proper training in all the postal regulations, so it always feels kind of hit-or-miss when you go to mail something to family in another country. I had one guy who didn’t know what “Switzerland” was—he was looking in his books under Africa, thinking I meant Swaziland!
Clearly, this is a case of deregulation gone awry. In its eagerness to streamline its organization, the Swedish postal system has apparently completely lost sight of just what a national postal service is and does.
Red houses
The first thing you notice when you travel in Sweden is that the countryside
is dotted with little red houses. The Swedish idyll is a little red
cabin in the woods by a lake. And why red, you might ask?
In the 17th century, red paint was a symbol of wealth. In cities, wooden houses were painted red when the king came to visit. In the countryside as well, wealthy people painted their houses red. The color quite simply stands out in the landscape, shouts “Notice me! I’m rich!” Red paint became a true status symbol. One day around 1700, people working at the Falun copper mine discovered that they could make a very inexpensive red paint from the waste products of copper production. Suddenly the status symbol was affordable to everyone. And the genuine irony of the whole story is that Falun red paint was not only cheaper, but also made the wood more weather-resistant, so it was also better than the red paint the original aristocracy had used!
Reflectors
In Uppsala—which, I might point out, is still southern Sweden, well
below the polar circle—the sun rises at about 9:00 a.m. in December and
sets at about 2:30 p.m. You get up in the dark every morning, leave
for work in the early morning grey, and come home from work in complete
darkness.
| You remember when you were in second grade and a police officer came
in and talked about traffic safety and how you should wear reflectors when
you’re out after dark, which was really stupid, because how many seven-year-olds
are out after dark? Well, here, even kids coming home from school
are out after dark. The pharmacies make a bundle on reflectors every
year—they come in all shapes and sizes, as elastic armbands, in cute little
animal shapes that hang on a string from your jacket, or in convenient
little clips that you can slide onto your jacket pocket, tote bag or whatever.
The clips even come in all kinds of colors to match any outfit.
This may all seem weird to an outsider, but I can tell you, when you drive a car on winter afternoons here, you learn to appreciate the pedestrians who actually do wear reflectors. Nothing is scarier than suddenly discovering a pedestrian in a black or dark blue coat a yard from the end of your hood—and that is when they become visible if they aren’t wearing any light colors. I’ve become a huge fan of reflectors since I got my Swedish driver’s license. Reflector collars on dogs and cats are also a must. |
|
Regulations
Swedes are known for regulating everything. Basically, if anything
is remotely dangerous for anyone, it’s forbidden. To such an extent
that you can’t buy aspirin in the grocery store, just in case somebody
is stupid enough to think it’s sugar cubes or something. You can’t get
antihistamines without a prescription. Why? Because they can
make you drowsy, and people might try to drive cars under their influence.
And there’s no such thing as rubbing alcohol here. Why? Because
the occasional alcoholic will try to drink the stuff, so they deprive the
rest of us from being able to disinfect things properly.
From time to time, I get petty and gripe about these minor inconveniences, but on the whole I think it’s a better system than the American one, where you can sue someone for selling drain cleaner without a specific admonition on the bottle not to drink it.
One funny law is that it’s illegal to leave your keys in a parked car. Not just a stupid thing to do, mind you. It’s not enough that your car might be stolen; you might also have to pay a fine for leaving the tempting keys in it—contributing to someone’s delinquency.
 |
In the northern countries, the traditional triangle sign to warn drivers that wild animals might wander out on the roads depicts a moose rather than a deer. The Swedish moose signs have become a popular tourist attraction. Rumor has it that German tourists come here in the summers and steal the signs from the road, smuggle them home and make end tables of them. To combat this, Sweden has begun manufacturing extra moose signs and selling them at the tourist bureaus. Left: My brother Greg gets a moose sign for Christmas. |
| Here is another favorite sign: | 
|
The ten o’clock scream
As everyone knows, the student life is very stressful. In the 70s, a psychologist at the university
of Lund in the south of Sweden prescribed primal scream therapy for
university students. Every evening at nine p.m., the Lund students
were instructed to lean out of their dormitory windows and just scream
away all their frustrations. LU attendees soon abandoned the embarrassing
activity, but up north in Uppsala, primal scream therapy found fertile
ground. For some 20 years, thousands of students have honored the
tradition, though for some reason an hour later than the original Lund
prescription. Every night at ten o’clock, the screams of dozens of
frustrated (and inebriated) students echo off the brick walls of the ten
dorm buildings in the Flogsta student residences. Quite fascinating.
The Vasa ship
Once upon a time, every king who was anyone had an armada to call his
own. The British had one, the Spanish had one, the Portuguese had
one, and the king of Sweden was bound and determined that he was going
to have the best one of them all.
Now the most important part of an armada is its flagship. And the Swedish king wanted his flagship to be something really spectacular. He sat up all night drawing up his design. The ship would be really tall and stately. In fact, to make it look even taller, it would also be really skinny. And it would have a lot more guns than any other flagship, 64 cannons. The whole outside of the ship would be covered with intricate carvings and gold leaf, and it would be truly splendid.
Pleased with his creation, the king went to his shipmaster the next day and said, “This is the ship I want you to build.” He slapped down his drawing on the workbench. The shipmaster snorted. “That thing’ll never float! It’s nowhere near wide enough. We’d never get enough ballast in it to keep it from tipping over!”
The king was furious. He fired the shipmaster, grabbed a young apprentice off the production floor and said, “You there! Lad! I’ll put all these men under you if you’ll just tell me you can build this ship.” The apprentice, having seen what just happened to his boss, gulped and said, “Uh, sure, I can build that.”
“Well, go to it, shipmaster,” said the king. “I’ll expect it done in two years.”
Well, the shipbuilders set to work, and they did manage to finish the ship within two years. It was truly spectacular, tall and stately and covered with fantastically intricate carvings, just as the king wanted. Even better, now that he saw it in real life. He named it Vasa, after the legendary monarch who united the warring tribes of Sweden past.
In the spring, as the ice broke up in the harbor, the king of Sweden invited a few of his royal cronies to visit and see the unveiling of his brand-new flagship. The kings stood on the balcony of the castle with wine goblets in hand as the ships slowly left dock and sailed out of the harbor toward the open bay. Their highnesses raised their glasses in tribute and the foreign kings congratulated the Swedish monarch on his creation. As the flagship left the harbor, the wind and waves picked up a bit. Now the flagship turned slowly, rounding a cape in the archipelago of Stockholm. The spring breeze struck the ship broadside, and the vessel in all its majestic top-heavy glory listed heavily, sinking rapidly into the icy water.
The king was mortified. His original shipmaster had been right all along; such a tall ship required far more ballast than the Vasa’s narrow hull allowed. But of course, he couldn’t admit that in front of the other kings. In a rage, he turned on the young lad who had served as shipmaster for the Vasa. “What happened?” he bellowed.
The young man thought fast. “It must have been the sailors, sir. I’ll bet they forgot to lash down the cannons, and when the ship turned, all the cannons rolled over to one side, capsizing the ship with their great weight.” This seemed like as good an excuse as any, since it saved face for both the king and the shipyards. All the crewmen were drowned, so no one could contradict the claim. So this excuse was written in the history books and the page was quickly turned.
And so it remained, until the 1950s, when scuba divers located the wreckage of the Vasa in the Stockholm archipelago. The first thing scientists discovered was that all the cannons were indeed firmly lashed into place. In the 60s, the ship was raised from its watery grave and extensive renovation began. Today, the Vasa has its own unique museum—built up around the ship instead of the ship being taken apart to fit into a building. The vessel is completely restored and a real treat to look at. A definite must-see if you’re ever in Stockholm. True story (with some dramatic license on my part)!
Violence in Sweden—a foreigner’s perspective
When I first came to Sweden as an exchange student in 1990, a friend
and I sat down with a newspaper and a dictionary on one of our first days
here and tried to decipher the front-page story. After an hour, we
gave up and went to the lobby of the hotel where we were staying and asked
the girl at the front desk what the article was about. Yes, the front
page story was about taxi drivers who steal other taxi drivers’ fares.
We couldn’t believe it. No murders, no violent acts, just taxi drivers
who monitored each other’s calls and got there first!
Naturally, Swedish newspapers do have their share of violent acts to report on as well. This was just one issue of a newspaper during the summer lull. But it sure tickled us.
Sadly, this has changed a great deal in the past ten or fifteen years. A failed government policy to “mainstream” the mentally ill has led to a dramatic increase in homelessness and, more recently, random acts of violence. In 2003, for example, four separate tragedies occurred as a result of mentally ill people who didn’t get the care they needed. First there was a guy who positioned himself outside a subway exit in Stockholm, whacking passersby with an iron bar. I think he thought he was fighting off demons or something. Then there was the guy who drove a car into a crowd of people on a pedestrian street. He claimed the car was being remote-controlled by someone else. In September, Sweden had its own 9/11 tragedy, when Foreign Minister Anna Lindh died after a viscious knife attack in a department store the day before. The assailant claimed that “the voices” had told him to do it, but this time the court refused to listen—that’s sort of becoming the most popular defense in courts these days. The same day she died, a patient walked out of a psychiatric outpatient clinic where he was being cared for, having just been informed of the Lindh murder, walked to a nearby preschool and repeatedly stabbed a little girl to death. Evidently he was inspired by the news he’d just heard.
I have a feeling that things are going to change soon in terms of psychiatric care in Sweden. Apparently it takes the murder of a political figure to make the powers that be sit up and take notice.
On the lighter side, here’s an article from Expressen on January 16, 1993:
With drawn bayonette, a man rushed into a restaurant
in central Stockholm yesterday evening.
One person was injured—the
man himself. A guest
struck him over the head with a beer stein.
“It was just as well,” the
police comment.
The world’s fastest constitutional change
Once, in the spirit of true social consciousness, Swedish lawmakers
decided that the evidence in all public trials—everything called “The People
vs. ...”—should be available to the general public. It seemed reasonable.
If we’re all suing somebody, we should have access to all information pertaining
to the trial. It was a constitutional right up until 1993, when the
police cracked a huge child pornography case. As the trial started,
some sicko realized that this was a public case and therefore, he had a
right to get copies of the evidence! The county courthouse was suddenly
inundated with requests for copies of the child pornography. The
distraught courthouse officials didn’t know what to do. The law demanded
that they provide those copies.
This is the good part: I will always have a warm spot in my heart for one of our evening newspapers—largely nothing but a scandal sheet—for what they did during this case. They published every single one of those sicko letters requesting copies of the evidence. One was so pathetic that they didn’t just publish the text—they printed a photocopy of the letter. Written in pencil, with lots of misspellings, from a man claiming to be “studying the phenomenon” of child pornography. In fact, the man was in prison serving a 20-year sentence for that very crime. The prison was even given as his return address! Astrid Lindgren, the beloved author of Pippi Longstocking and dozens of other children’s books, was also given a full-page article, where she wished that the perpetrators would burn in hell.
Largely thanks to the efforts of this newspaper, the Swedish government pushed through the world’s fastest constitutional change; the whole process was completed within two months. Now that’s what I call a public service!
