STOCKHOLM SYNECDOCHE

How much can you learn about a country from three days in its capital city? Not a whole lot, I believe, though I hear that cruise ship passengers who spend three hours on shore are able to deduce timeless truths about all manner of cultures. That didn't stop me, of course, from issuing a running stream of "in Denmark they _____, do they do _____ in Sweden?" questions to my patient American and British hosts. In that sense, I suppose, I did learn something, but mostly that for expats from any other part of the world, working and living in Scandinavia is basically heaven on earth, even if we might sometimes secretely wonder whether the parties are better in hell.

My friend Michel is the director of a museum on the tiny island of Skeppsholmen in Stockholm. If you take the pedestrian ferry from the mainland on a foggy February day you'll come close to the amusement park Tivoli Gardens, a place that looks straight out of Pinocchio's nightmares. 

Docked along the shore are great big sailboats with mighty wooden masts stained golden orange. You can still fish in this water, Michel tells me. When the weather starts to warm he'll pass recreational fisherman hanging their rods off the pedestrian bridge he takes into work every morning.

We spent most of the first day at the enormous, open-air, 'living-history' museum Skansen. Covering 75 acres of yet another island, Djurgården, Skansen offers the experience of living in 'pre-industrial' Sweden, with a hodgepodge of homes, shops, churches, farmhouses, and a full-replica of a 19th century town. George Saunders would be in heaven. Although it was clearly off-season most of the shops were still open and staffed. The baker was doing a brisk business in cinnamon rolls, making this whole street smell delicious (and I don't even like cinnamon rolls).

The cobbler and blacksmith were closed, but the glassblower across the way was up and running.

Nearby we found a potter, a pharmacy and a general mercantile lit only by candlelight. As our eyes adjusted to take in the barrels of bulk foods, ribbon, snowshoes, tools, and copies of Aftonbladet newspapers from the 1870s, the nice man behind the counter with the period clothes and matching mustache told us about the kind of life his character would have had. As he showed us how the scale worked and what kind of spices he carried I took in all the details of the shop. There was something strange about it I couldn't quite put my finger on. Then I took out my phone to check something and the contrast of the digital with the textural made it suddenly clear. 

From teepees to tenements, all of the 150 or so buildings at Skansen are originals, many transported great distances and reassembled on site. In China the ideal is to knock down crumbling old historic buildings and replace them with shiny new replicas. To Americans this looks like a grotesque Disneyfication, to Chinese it seems like a vast improvement. This version was practically authenticity obsession -- concern not merely with getting the look exactly right, but with using materials with legitimate historical resonance.

Most of Skansen's mock residences were closed for the season, but I was thrilled to get a tour of this 1930s era upper middle class home. The wife of the family informed us they were preparing for a ski trip, hence the picnic makings and the suitcase full of woolens, and regretted that we had come too late to share the pot of hot chocolate she had just cooked up on the stove.

We also missed out on sampling cheese made in the mossy yurts of the Sami herders. Sadly no one was home.

 

I was desperate to figure out what this marvelous structure (also visible behind the yurt) was. Shelter for biblical-level flash floods? A really awesome fort where the Sami kids could avoid being trampled by the reindeer? I was disappointed when I found a sign explaining that such structures are used to store firewood. If I were an Ent I would totally hit on this thing.   

 

The reindeer looked bored, but their antlers were gorgeous.

 

An onion-domed belltower behind a fence made solely of artfully intertwined branches. 

Hobbit hole, northern-hemisphere style.

Michel and Damon explore an early settlement.

I don't know how long we spent wondering around, but we were famished when we came across a handful of open grills presided over by a portly pink-cheeked gentleman I can only assume was supposed to be the affable drunken mayor. Whoever he was he was DEEP in character.

 

I don't need to make any authoritative statements about Swedish life and culture to make observations about how Skansen sought to portray Swedish life and culture. While it's often strange to see history flattened and synchronic, it's even more so when that history is inhabited. But if I was expecting to feel hit over the head with Swedishness I was disappointed. I thought it was refreshing how free of national sentiment the place was. In the area devoted to the Sami herders, for instance, there was no attempt to link them to the national narrative, just an effort to represent their particular way of life. This wasn't China representing its 56 ethnic minorities as having "always been part of the middle kingdom." Instead the message of the place was a rather neutral and straightforward "here are some of the dwellings and places of commerce and recreation you might find in parts of the territory that is now known as Sweden."

I think the most interesting part of the place was not how Swedish history was portrayed, but how it was consumed, and yes, I know you knew I'd say that.

 

The next day we took a day trip to Sigtuna, the oldest town in Sweden, its thousand years of history flattened out and filled in with specialty kitchen stores, boutiques and handicraft emporiums, and at least one shop specializing in tanned fish skins (salmon wallets, perch cuffs, trout hats, etc.).   

That's not to say the place wasn't charming. Best of all, on the main drag, just to the right of the fisherman-chic gentleman below, I finally found what I had been looking for since the moment I arrived.

A CARDAMOM BUN!!!!! (thanks for the tip Carrie)

 

It was worth the wait. Screw cinnamon rolls, this baby had lovely big chunks of fragrant cardamom in all its braided crevices. I found another the next day, and ate it on the way to the airport while enjoying my last views of evergreens for a good long while. 

Speaking of which, I now understand Poulsbo. If I was a Swedish emigrant arriving in the Pacific Northwest I would have taken one look at the Puget Sound and started unpacking. Just look at this:

  

Ditto on this scene: this is basically the park in Kirkland where I used to take my brother to feed stale bread to the mallards.

 

After some fairly unambitious hiking in and around the woods outside town the boys and I sought out a cosy place and a warm beverage. This tearoom was packed with families, couples, and a table of briefly-shirtless bicyclists chowing down on baked goods. 

The tea was perfect. Well done Sweden.

On the way home I demanded we stop in a supermarket so I could evaluate the national diet, marvel at exotic snack foods and see if it was true that efficiency-oriented Swedes put every food they could in a tube. I didn't find any more tube-food than I'm used to in Denmark and was especially disappointed not to see the reindeer-meat-in-a-tube Michel promised me. I still believe it's out there. 

I passed on the supermarket cheeseburger but did pick up a poppy & marzipan yogurt for breakfast (it was eh). But I did eat well during my stay. Damon made a British-food-best-of one night, featuring cottage pie and raspberry crumble, and homemade bi bim bap on the other.

Thoughtful hosts that they were, Michel and Damon also made sure to have a cat, Mogwai, that closely resembles Zelda. Take note aspiring hosts-of-me!

On my last day we headed into the center of the city for some classic tourist views. I liked this lion.

And these art nouveau style doors

And lo, a flea market!

I spent a very happy hour there, but left with only a 1950s glass measuring cup that reminded me of my great-grandmother's house. 

Stockholm had various degrees of fogginess and cloud cover the whole time I was there, but only occasional rain.

It was still a very elegant city, though I'm sure spring is spectacular.

We crossed a bridge here to Slotsholmen, the center of Swedish government and single destination of most cruise ship passengers. You can see Christiansborg palace on the right here, where the Swedish royal family resides, under the watch of the Swedish Guard. I was delighted by their tall hats with what looked like white horse tails issuing from the top and squealed with post-feminist (jk!) delight when I saw a lady Guard.

  

It really was so pretty.

 Cafe and adjacent chocolateria. Yes please.

 Bakery featuring awesome pretzels.

More cobblestone streets to get lost in. There are only a dozen or so 'approved' paint colors in Sweden, all warm shades of yellow, orange, and green. I imagine it helps in getting through the long winter. 

At a church on Slotsholmen we admired this very well-preserved 1489 statue of St. George and the Dragon, carved entirely from wood. You can't see it clearly here but the dragon also sports impressive elk antlers (not sure why -- maybe the artist just had some elk antlers he'd been meaning to use?).

According to the accompanying placard, the statue was commissioned by Sten Sture the Elder, a powerful figure who had helped defend Stockholm from Danish invaders. Also according to the placard:

In St. George it may be that Sten Sture saw himself as the knight who conquered the Danish "dragon", thereby saving the princess (Stockholm) from ruin.

Princess my ass! Stockholm is a lovely place, but given the choice I'll take the dragon any day. And so, dreaming of my next Scandinavian excursion, I went home.

(Sky above clouds -- you know I can never resist)

I'M GETTING A REPUTATION AROUND HERE

I brought scones to my morning class yesterday as prizes for an exam prep (sugar is in hot demand among students at 10am). When I arrived at my afternoon class, a second plate of scones in hand, someone had written this on the chalkboard. I looked at the board, the students looked at the scones, and laughs were had by all.

And then they attacked the scones like hungry wolves and left me for dead.

HOW LIVING IN DENMARK IS LIKE LIVING IN CHINA

When I arrived here five months ago, it was not as a tourist, but as a migrant. A tourist has the luxury of operating in a bubble, protected by hotels or guidebooks, rarely expected to know how much bus fare is, or how to find the post office, or where the grocery store is hiding the goddamn chocolate chips. A migrant looks around with different eyes, trying to figure out how things work, trying to adjust to how things feel, constantly reminding herself ‘this is my life now.’

I remember thinking then that I should write things down because any anthropologist worth their salt knows that new sights, sounds, and other various phenomena become normalized by your brain at lightning speed and what is first strange quickly becomes commonplace (of course this is not true for everything – I still find Danish door locks totally weird). I am obviously not worth my salt, because I was so busy manically nesting and wading through bureaucracy in those first few days that I didn’t write down a thing.

I definitely like the climate here, and the bike lanes, and the concern for human well being I see reflected in national policy, but some of the things that make me happiest are those that remind me of my life in China. I love that I can roll home on my bicycle in the wee hours feeling perfectly safe, that I can be confident that no one is carrying a gun, that my laundry room is full of drying racks, that it wouldn’t occur to someone here to sue another for not warning them against doing something stupid. The similarities are not many and they’re definitely not obvious, but I see them every day. I know Chinese people living in Denmark and Danish people who’ve been to China, and they don’t seem to share my feelings, but then they didn’t grow up in the United States. The fact is, America is a global anomaly in many ways, both good and bad, and by comparison much of the rest of the world has much in common.

Home is a word with so many overlapping meanings and ideas crammed into it that I wish I could carve up its territory and divide it among other words. I’d like to call America my homeland and ideally not have it sound like I’m imagining myself at Ellis Island. Are you still allowed to have a homeland when you can fly back there in a day? I think so. I know America, in a sense it’s still really all I know. I know myself as a citizen of a young nation, I know to admire ambition and innovation, I know how to recognize a ‘bad part of town’. I know the presence of police, and that they’re there to protect you, except when they’re not. I know the logic of grocery store organization, the limits of acceptable behavior at a baseball game, and to expect a happy ending. Back in the homeland my mind can turn off while my body crosses streets and calculates the acceptable distance to establish between a stranger and myself. I feel at ease there (except for the guns), but also a little listless. Obviously I wouldn’t have the life I do if I didn’t like the heightening of the senses that comes with newness and unfamiliarity.

Seattle is my hometown, obviously, because it made me, with all its liberalism and passive aggression and lurid topography. But I need another word: homelets? homebergs? homettes? For me home is present-tense, the place where I feather my nest, but most of the places I’ve lived are still fragments of home, places where I’ve spent some time, put down some shallow roots. I’ve left a little part of myself in all those places (they’re where I keep my horcruxes, after all), and when I go back to visit I’m greeted with the ghosts of former selves – a not unpleasant feeling.  Maybe those places are just time machines – whether they’re dorms where you lived in college, the house where your ex-boyfriend used to live, or far-flung foreign cities. We carry places and people with us, but there is no doubt that the spaces themselves preserve some of our feelings and memories – it’s one reason it’s almost painful to be in parts of Seattle that have been so transformed over the last decade. 

Hmmm, this did not take the direction I had intended. But I’ll leave it like this, and try to lighten up the mood with a handful of silly observations.  

How Denmark is like China

Litigation is rare

I almost wiped out on a patch of ice in my courtyard tonight. The florist must have watered his plants there today and left a little pool. "I didn't know that was there -- someone could slip on that and die!" I thought with a panic. Then I realized that to be warned that water turns to ice would be even more infantilizing than reading the signs like "Do not jump over railing" and labels like "Warning: coffee hot" designed to deflect lawsuits in the US. I concluded that I enjoy being treated like an adult.  

The legal drinking age is 18

In both China and Denmark kids can legally drink right around the time they actually start drinking! Mind blowing. It certainly helps that most of them aren’t driving cars.

Few non-nationals enjoy the national spirit

My supermarket has more than a dozen different varieties of licorice schnapps and another dozen varieties of shooters combining licorice and pomegranate, licorice and pepper, and so on. Unless you’re someone who loathes licorice, you’d probably take any of these over the everclear with a floral bouquet that is baijiu, but I still get sentimental about that terrible stuff.      

Racial homogeneity

It sometimes feels as if there is even less diversity here than in China, but obviously in China I lived in a ginormous city and here I live in a tiny town so that skews things. I do think Americans tend to forget that despite all the ongoing problems with racism and anti-immigrant sentiment, we are a thoroughly multi-cultural society, and that is a rarity in this world.

People wear fur!

From a materialist point of view it’s just animal skin, and I’ve seen plenty of that made into apparel, but I’ve been enculturated to imagine only bloodthirsty Cruella DeVilles would wear brand new fur. In China I often saw fur scarves and vests and trimmings, here it is more common to see substantial fur coats, whether on young fashionistas in Copenhagen or on tiny little old ladies here in Odense. This national linkage is economic as well, as a series of creepy posters at the CPH airport constantly remind me

A blanket for every body

As far as I’m concerned this is the most brilliant idea America has never considered. Here’s how it works: you have a bed that two people sleep in and each one has their own blanket. This does not preclude snuggling, but it most certainly cuts down on sleep-disturbance-fueled resentments. Brilliant! This probably says something about American ideals of love and partnership but I’m too lazy to think about that. Here's a traditional kang bed from a hotel in China I once stayed in featuring a neat pile of blankets and pillows.

Automobile logic does not dominate

You might contest this if you’ve ever been stuck in a Beijing traffic jam, but that’s precisely the point: most of the world’s cities weren’t made for cars. Both China and Denmark heavily tax automobile purchases and licenses, though in China this is contradicted by heavy investments in the car industry. This also means…

People walk to get places

I bike much more than I walk here, the opposite of China, but in neither place have I ever felt like a hobo trying to get somewhere public transit won’t take me. One illustration of this I enjoy: use google street view most places in the states and you see mostly cars, use it here and you almost always see people.

This is a pedestrial street so it's technically cheating but you get the idea.

The streets are safe, even for women

I love strolling around a sleepy city. One of the hardest things to get used to after coming back to the states from my longest stretch in China was that I could no longer step out my front door at any hour. When I came home late I was on hyper-alert on that block-long walk from the bus stop to my front door. I’ve never experienced street harassment in either China or Denmark either. Once more I suspect there is a bigger story here about gender relations and power, but it well exceeds my point, which is merely that the feeling that as a woman you are a target is not universal (though it persists in far too many places).

Conservation is standard practice

Companies and local governments in the US like to loudly praise themselves when they step up their conservation efforts, and I’m sure that’s for the best, but ways to save energy and water are built into the structure of life in many places, simply because it makes sense. In China, Denmark, and lots of other places, refrigerators are small, toilets all have two different flushes, dryers are few while clotheslines and racks are many, and the lights are never on in stairwells and hallways unless someone is in them (in China lights are almost always noise activated, here there are switches near most doors that turn the lights for a minute or so).

Funny English signs

Although the Danes’ English is exceptional I still find things to amuse myself with. These salons are my two favorite local examples

"Fancy Hair makes people"? In the sense that consumer choices are constitutive
 of our conceptions of individualized selves I cannot disagree with that.

Of course the Chinese are way ahead in this arena. I dug back in the archives for some classics

And if you still doubt the similarities I see in these two homelettes have a looksee here. Apparently naming your restaurant “Mr. Pizza” is practically a cultural universal

THE LIFE OF ZELDA

She may look fantastic on a bear-skin rug and prefer her food and drink served in cut glass, but Zelda was not to the manor born. Two years ago she was delivered to me at the mansion on Beacon in a heart-printed harness by a man who found her leaving the Tacoma Mall through the automatic glass doors. Which makes perfect sense. Zelda is a creature of elegant bearing and high standards, but she’s also a disgusting animal with no sense of the right time and place for public grooming and a preference for barfing on bedding. 

These are both the same cat

It's easy to imagine her strolling disdainfully out of a mall she regarded as beneath her and happily taking advantage of the first sucker that smelled like central heating. Zelda adapted rapidly to mansion life, particularly the part where she had half a dozen beds containing warm bodies to choose from each night. I worried before I moved here that after the polyamory of mansion life I would not be enough person for her.

I worried too that uprooting her so suddenly then putting her in a small, dark bag for 20+ hours for the journey here would be too much trauma. Was it was right to risk the mental health of an innocent animal? Did cats have nightmares? Would she ever forgive me? Luckily, whatever brainspace exists in those tiny skulls, not much of it is devoted to long-term memory. A few days of rest and a thorough sniffing of her surroundings and Zelda was just as imperious as ever

Zelda seems very happy here, even more so then she was in the mansion. She’s more mellow and affectionate and still just neurotic enough to be amusing. The square footage of her domain has shrunk, but she now has access to far superior views, and I believe she has found her life's purpose in monitoring the life of the neighborhood.  

From one side of the apartment she can look out on a relatively bustling street, from the other our building’s courtyard and bike hut. The windowsills are broad and I’ve covered their cold tile with wooly fabric so she stays cozy.

Street-facing window

Courtyard-facing window

Bike hut with pretty bike

Zelda belongs to the school of thought that everything she can see is within her jurisdiction and her responsibility to monitor. It's not easy to keep track of all the goings-on outside of either window, and I sometimes find her galloping anxiously across the apartment from one to the other to investigate a new sound. I didn’t realize until I arrived here that my apartment was on the first floor, not the second, and was a little disconcerted the first time I made eye contact with someone standing up inside a bus from within my living room. 

Don't worry mom, I have blinds

But for a cat it doesn’t get any better. One night I noticed Zelda was pressed against the window, purring loudly, and when I came over to investigate found that she had locked eyes with an attractive man at the bus stop. I wonder if he’s ever come back. Does half the neighborhood have a private relationship with my cat? I kind of hope so.

From the other window she flirts with the florist. When it was warmer outside I would take her out on her leash while I hung my laundry on the clothesline and the florist would come over to pet her and make the Danish “meow” sound. He stores his sidewalk display on shelves along the courtyard entry overnight and when she hears wheels rolling on concrete in the morning and evening she scurries over to observe.

It’s not all neighborhood watch. Everyday there is much sleeping to be done, and it must be done in many different places. On the windowsills, on the couch,

in the fruit basket,

 

camouflaged in the closet,

or when she's feeling traditional, on one of my two beds. 

When I work from home, which I do about once a week, she takes full advantage of any horizontality, and I squeal at the cuteness and hold my book up higher to protect myself.

And when I leave in the morning, rolling my bike out of the hut to the gate, I usually see her snake-green eyes and black silhouette in the window, and I wave goodbye.

So in conclusion, yes, you should bring your cat to Denmark. But only if she's awesome.