i morgonen

It's 7 in the morning and I have already done many important things since waking up at 4:30, including drafting a fantasy basketball team, spraying my Loeffler Randall boots with water protection spray, and discovering the most amazing website with old pictures of Stockholm, called Stockholmskällan.

Here is a picture of the intersection a few hundred feet from my apartment in Kungsholmen, from 1896:



Put in a few more buildings and give all the women skinny jeans and boots, and I'd say it looks pretty much the same.

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Vurma doesn't open until 10 so in the meantime I'm drinking earl gray tea, watching the Swedish news (the leading stories today seem to be about "Argentina's Hillary Clinton" and," of course, football), and hoping it starts to get a bit brighter out.

After writing about my med school applications here last week, I went home that night and found an interview invitation from the University of Iowa - quite a good school, but, uh, not at the top of my list. Still, it's exciting to have my first interview scheduled, and maybe writing about it here was good luck and I'll hear from Michigan or UCSF today? Later today I need to call and make a reservation at the Heartland Inn in Coralville, near Iowa City, where there is some super discount for people interviewing at the med school. Which, by the way, is called the Carver College of Medicine. Roy A. and Lucille J., I think? That's sort of hard to beat, given my surgical ambitions. Plus, for Jake, their business school is called the Tippie School of Business. Pretty awesome.

Anyway, while I don't exactly dream of becoming a Hawkeye, people who know me well know my long-standing semi-inexplicable obsession with the state of Iowa. A big old farmhouse that we can renovate, with lots of animals running around in it doesn't sound half bad. And maybe I could do what I always wanted, and get an MFA at the Iowa Writer's Workshop also. Although I forgot, Jake already has that degree covered, and if we are going to make any progressing in obtaining all the degrees in the world between the two of us, I should start considering a PhD - or perhaps an M.Div or a DSW?! Oh, and the point of mentioning Coralville is that Jake and I stayed at some motel in Coralville a few years ago on a cross-country drive, and it was high summer and the number of bugs and moths swarming around the fluorescent lights outside of the rooms was astounding, like a horror movie. It was so extreme that it was funny, we had to pull our things close to us, then open the door and rush inside and slam it as quickly as possible.

I'm going to Latvia on Saturday, for two nights. I found a cheap flight (not as cheap as some of the 1 kronor flights on Ryanair, but still pretty sweet) and a good rate at a beautiful hotel that is in an old mansion which is, apparently, "one of the most rare pergola example in historic architecture of the city." The building also " cherishes history of Pfab nobility and Benjamin wealth in its memories." Riga sounds beautiful, and Latvia is the homeland of one of my most favorite basketball players, Andris Biedrins, of "don't bleest me, biedrins" fame, not to mention my best friend from high school, Sonia. Riga had been on my list of one of the million places I want to go to, and incidentally the New York Times had one of their 36 hours in... articles about Riga last week.

And, finally, how is it that I have almost zero memory of half the books we read in Lit Hum and CC? It's like I'm a retiree who has decided to revisit the old classics in my golden years. At the top of my list are Democracy in America, and Leviathan. Maybe I should bring those to the Sturebadet to read on the elliptical instead of the US Weekly's that I force Jake to ship to me in Sweden?

This is the error message I just got from Firefox when trying to go to the (correct) SAS airlines website:

Firefox has detected that the server is redirecting the request for this address in a way that will never complete.

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WOW! That is really, deeply intense.

oh what a wonderful way to spend your life, not needing anything, just walk around and sing (suburban kids with biblical names)

+ The Swedes just get it. They have echeveria, my most favorite succulent plants of all time, everywhere - tiny ones and big ones sold at the flower stores, in office windows that you can see from the street, etc. I didn't really discover echeveria until I moved to California since it is obviously not a New York type of species, but despite their prevalence in California when I started telling people that I want to have them at the wedding (along with a more lush type of flower, like white freesia) they acted like that was a little bit weird. But even though Sweden is probably an even less hospitable climate for succulents than New York, they get it! Gorgeous, elegant echeveria everywhere. One point for Stockholm.



+ I hate this phrase, but it truly fits here: the elephant in the room that is my life is the fact that I am in the process of applying to medical schools. In fact, 17 out of 22 secondary applications are complete and the remaining ones are schools I am really lackadaisical about (although I am going to finish them up by tomorrow at the latest). The ones I care most about have been in for weeks. People who submitted applications a bit earlier than me are starting to hear about interviews, and I am peeled to my email. I have writtens tens and tens of essays, and it has been a grueling process. I met a girl who recently graduated from medical school at the Karolinska Institute here in Stockholm, and the way it works in Sweden is that a percentage of students get in based simply on having top grades - no essays, no interviews, nothing - and if you don't have top grades there are some options for being admitted by going through a more elaborate process with interviews and things. I think both systems probably have their merits, and I certainly appreciate the fact that many US med schools make an honest effort to admit interesting, well-rounded people, not just those with 43S's, but the process has just been mind-numbing. And in a day or two, once the last ones are in, I will get to sit back and wait. I have literally no idea how many interviews I'll be offered. Will it be 5 or 15? Will Michigan and UCSF break my heart? In the end, am I actually going to have a choice between schools? Will I get into 1, or 3, or 8? The applications have been weighing over me and creating a constant underlying cloud of guilt and panic for the past however many months, basically it took over the former role of the MCAT, but aside from sporadic whimsical conversations with Jake (UCSF over Michigan? Harvard over UCLA? Madison over UC-San Diego? Columbia over NYU? and countless other permutations and combinations) and the hours when I am hunched over the keyboard writing yet another variation on the same topic, and especially since I am so far away in Sweden, I basically ignore the entire thing. When I submit secondaries, it's like throwing them into a black hole. But things are going to start happening. This is deeply exciting and tremendously unsettling. I'm prepared for some rejection, but I'm not sure how much I'll be able to take before starting to feel disheartened. Conversely, I feel like one positive response from one of my top choices will be enough to satisfy me. I sort of side-stepped the whole rejection/acceptance roller coaster during the college admissions process since I got in early to Columbia, and it feels weird to be waiting for judgments and pronouncements from 22 schools. Anyway, that's it for now since this is boring, it just occurred to me that it's a little strange that my coping mechanism appears to be ignoring everything (I guess it's healthier than obsessing).

+ When I was writing about echeveria I tried to look up the word for flower shop (blomsteraffär) in Swedish, and I came up with all sorts of good things. I already knew blomma (flower) and blommor (blossom), but I did not know:

Blomsterprakt ("floral splendour, profusion of flowers")
Blomsterspråk (literally language of flowers, but "flowery language")
Blomsterströ (to strew with flowers)
Blomsterur (flower clock. what is a flower clock?!)
Blomstervän (flower lover)
And, finally, blomsterflicka, or flower girl. It is a cool enough word to make me want to have a flower girl at the wedding even though I don't have any relatives or friends with kids who are the right age to be en blomsterflicka and will be able to "blomsterströ" the aisle at the bröllop (wedding). Nice pigeon Swedish, huh?

The magic of chronic disease prevention

+ I am obsessed with hemnet.se, where you can see the listings for all (or most of) the apartments and houses for sale in Sweden. When you're looking at apartments in Stockholm, they make the listings look remarkably homogenous - white, bright, light, airy, modern seem to be the golden standard. Despite the fact that real estate prices are at an all-time high in Sweden because of low interest rates and all sorts of political factors I don't understand, it is not actually that expensive to buy a nice apartment in Stockholm, especially compared to the ludicrous prices in New York and the Bay Area. Someday I am going to own either an apartment in Stockholm or, preferably, a big old farmhouse nearby. There was a NYT article a few weeks ago about a non-Swedish family who bought this big gorgeous house a few miles outside of Stockholm. I liked them. Also our neighbors in Berkeley who we idolize apparently have a friend (American) who lives on a farm south of Stockholm. Very exciting news to me.

+ Whenever I get sad, I just remind myself that the NBA season starts in less than two weeks. It would be difficult to adequately convey the amount of joy and rapture this brings to my heart. Plus, basketball is not respected as it should be. I am looking forward to many evenings of 1 am Knicks and Pistons games, and, most of all, many mornings of 4:30 am Warriors games, thanks to the glorious NBA League Pass internet feed.

Incidentally, there are some Swedish basketball leagues, but they appear to be a bit lackluster. It might be funny to go to one of the games. There is one Stockholm team called the Stockholmspolisen. Ok. The other one is called "08 Stockholm Human Rights." What kind of city names their professional men's basketball team "Human Rights"??? Stockholm. Incredible. The other Swedish team names aren't nearly as exciting: Solna Vikings, Norrköping Dolphins, Sundsvall Dragons. Jake discovered the Helsingborg Basket Pearls in a different league. There's also the Visby Ladies.

+ Sunrise and sunset times for the next few weeks:

Today: sunrise 7:42, sunset 5:22.
Saturday: sunrise 7:54, sunset 5:09.
And then, daylight savings!
Sunday: sunrise 6:56, sunset 4:06.
A month from today, sunrise will be at 7:58, and sunset will be at 3:10.

+ In a meeting recently someone made a joke about "postage stamps, photocopies, and lipoproteins." It was actually really funny, to the extent that jokes about grant applications and lipoproteins can be funny. There have been many more that I can't believe I didn't write down. One good line from the Helsinki conference was when the audience was rhetorically invited to a research center in Finland to "learn more about the magic of chronic disease prevention."

+ I'm starting to piece together names and approximate dates of the Swedish side of my family, and I've started looking through some of the Ellis Island immigration records. Steffen Olsen, Lillian Carlsson, Amanda Carlsson, Oskar Carlsson, Karin and George Wallstrom (who would visit my mom and her family on the Olsen farm in New Jersey but still lived in Sweden, so I guess if I can track down their grandchildren here those would be my mom's second cousins?)...

+ There was an interesting presentation at CHESS today by a British psychiatrist who does some collaboration with Ilona, about the association between school grades and functional psychotic disorders (schizophrenia and bipolar). The general theme, like most of the work here, is trying to examine whether there are social factors that contribute to higher risk, not just purely biomedical or neurodevelopmental. On a powerpoint slide showing a lifecourse view of psychosis development, he used an incredible picture of our wonderful president with a bizarre expression to demonstrate the final outcome of psychosis. It was pretty funny.

Rosendals Trädgård 2

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I bought the English version of the cookbook from the garden cafe there, which is also my new favorite place to eat in Stockholm. It is all fresh from the garden and organic and seasonal, and this cookbook is hands down the most beautiful cookbook I have ever seen. The author, Monika Ahlberg, asked various people to contribute text for the cookbook, and here is what Ingmar Bergman wrote:

"Färö 11.5.94 - Dear Monika! You rang and asked me to write something about wild strawberries. It will be both a short and a sad story. I have been allergic to wild strawberries all my life. Five wild strawberries are all right. But if I sin and eat seven, then I am afflicted by small, fiery red, madly itching rashes round my wrists and ankles. Sometimes - very rarely - I really indulge. In the woods behind my house there is a field. It is reddened with wild strawberries several times during the summer, big heavy fragrant wild forest-strawberries, it's like a miracle and I indulge without a thought for the consequences, which promptly make themselves known. Yes, it is terrible and typically Bergman-like but I console myself; the smell of freshly picked wild strawberries is like special music, it gives me a concrete conception of paradise, infinity - perfection. I don't really know how I can put this, it sounds far too grand, but I can't find any other words so it will have to be like this."

Rosendals Trädgård

Rosendals Trädgård on Djurgården is my new favorite place in all of Stockholm. Some of these pictures make it look dreary but it's not at all, it was just a very gray, fall day.

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Very white berries at Skansen.

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This is the type of photograph I could take all day in Sweden. These colors. I can't believe it. I must look crazy taking pictures of walls and corners of doorways and windows.

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I am in love with this strange hanging wreath mobile thing at my favorite little store in Stockholm, Vass, on Sveavägen. I want to buy everything they have, and judging by the candlesticks and votive holders and glass ornaments I have bought, I'm geting close. Sadly the wreath thing was not for sale, but it's very simple so I bought the little glass ornaments and I'm going to attempt to make my own.

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Jake always takes pictures of me when I'm laughing.

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Jake took this picture. He likes the green building.

a culinary tour of stockholm

I am missing Jake. He left early this morning, and it was strange and sad to go back to being by myself today.

We ate at some damn good restaurants this week:

+ Kungsholmen, on Norr Mälarstrand, which is the street on the water on the south side of Kungsholmen, a few blocks from my apartment now. We went for Alice's birthday on Wednesday night, and it was delicious. It's part of the F12 restaurant group, and I'm dying to go to F12 and Grill and Restaurangen. I had a strange cocktail called Pumpkin Punch that was very pretty and didn't taste like pumpkin at all, and a really good french onion soup (but not as good as the one at Sturehof, which I noticed leaving Sturebadet today now has a little Michelin sign displayed in the door - well done), and a small Caesar salad, and this chocolate banana cake with yogurt ice cream. The restaurant is big and pretty and right on the water, and they were so nice to us even though we were in a huge and slightly disorganized group with lots of Alice's colleagues. I can't wait to go back.

+ Sturehof, of course. We went on Jake's first night. We drank Skåne and Jake had the five different kinds of herring. We got the 3 assiettes for dessert so Jake could try cloudberries, which are pale yellow, strangely bitter, barely sweet, and weirdly crunchy. But each time I have them I like them more.

+ Bakfickan ("hip pocket") - the one at the Opera, more casual than Opera Källaren. I had been there twice before, once for lunch and once for dinner, but this time I was totally blown away. We had a veritable Swedish feast. Jake had cauliflower soup with salmon hash on toast, and the meatballs (with mashed potatoes, lingonberries, and cucumbers), and I had as much of his cauliflower soup as I could steal and the rimmad lax. For dessert, we had what may be the most bizarre dessert I have ever tasted. I'm in the process of polling Swedes about this dish and so far it doesn't appear to be particularly well-known. It was called Oscar II:s tårta (cake) and the English translation simple said "butter and meringue cake." I guess I didn't think too hard about what that meant, but I envisioned some sort of pound cake or something. It turned out to be literally alternating layers of butter and white meringue. Not like some sort of sweet whipped special butter, but BUTTER. Layers of butter. And meringue. It tasted quite good, except when you simply had a mouthful of butter. There must have been almost a full stick of butter in that one slice of cake. I can't find anything about it in English online, but I'm finding Swedish recipes and descriptions of it. Incidentally, at the Royal Palace the other day among the scepters and crowns and orbs, there was one of Oscar II:s (I don't entirely understand the use of the colon in Swedish - it doesn't just replace the apostrophe in the preceding example, you also see it in things like "S:t Eriks sjukhus") royal capes and it looks like he was really bloody fat. No wonder.

+ Primo Ciao Ciao, an Italian restaurant a few blocks from my on Kungsholmen. We actually ate here twice. It is so, so good.

+ La Dame Noir, also on Kungsholmen. We went here for lunch. As is common, they had a pre-set "dagens meny" or menu of the day for lunch, with three choices. It's a really pretty, sleek place, and the food was delicious and didn't cost a million kronor.

+ Nox. Well, we only intended to drink here, not eat, because we had had dinner at Ilona's earlier in the evening, but after two glasses of wine and a cocktail each, we were hungry and all of my most fervant beliefs and morals went out the window as is wont to happen a few times a year and we ordered the most spectacular dish ever: "Grillad portvinsmarinerad ryggbiff med chevrepotatiskaka och timjanbearnaise," i.e. the most delicious port wine marinated beef with this chevre potato cake and bearnaise sauce. It was unbelievable.

+ Lunch at the Östermalms Saluhall yesterday - Jake had lax pudding which was swimming in butter and seemed a little intense, and I broadened my horizons to try the gravad lax instead of the rimmad lax. By the time I leave Sweden you will probably be able to use me as a thermometer given the amount of mercury-laden fish I am eating. I'm sure my future children will agree that eating lots of cured salmon is more important than potential birth defects...?

+ We had many breakfasts and snacks at Vurma, the cafe downstairs. Jake's favorite was the kardemumma-bullar, and I discovered the very simple but yummy sockerkringlor (a sugar pastry). We also tried a "Vurma Volt" which is a little canister-shaped pastry with marzipan, dark chocolate, and a really strong rum-soaked interior. A little intense.

Speaking of Vurma, I got the apartment on Bergsunds Strand in Södermalm and I will move in December 23! There is another Vurma two blocks away from the new apartment. It's like a miracle. There are only three of them in Stockholm - the one on Kungsholmen, the one on Södermalm, and one in Vasastan. And the one on Bergsunds Strand is even bigger and roomier. I am so excited that I get to move from one Vurma to another - and that I won't be homeless in Sweden. You really can see the water from every room, and I will be able to see all the light and dark and snow and sun all winter and spring along.

I ain't gonna work on Maggie's farm no more

+ I just spent the last fifteen minutes sitting in a McDonald's in a little indoor shopping center off one of the main streets in Helsinki, eating french fries with some strange hot chili sauce while the best hits of Bob Dylan played. It was pretty funny. It's a rare day when I find McDonald's comforting. The walk to the reception was nice, along big pretty boulevard-like streets with lots of people out and bistros and two Marimekkos, and City Hall is right by the water. The reception was in a huge gorgeous room that looked like a St. Petersburg ballroom, with an elaborately detailed pastel ceiling and lots of gold. I stayed for probably twenty minutes. I had some olives and a glass of white wine and stood like a dead weight next to I. and D. while they were talking to some woman about setting up a meeting and basically ignoring me the entire time after slightly nodding hello. If I cared more maybe I would have just bloody introduced myself to some random person, but there were literally hundreds of people and I just couldn't muster up the energy. Some days I feel punchier than others. It certainly would have been nice if the only people I know made at least a vague effort but they are a) Swedish and b) scientists and while I'm sure there are Swedish scientists who are good at being socially inclusive, it's not the most promising combination. So I left and ate french fries.

+ Finnish is a cool language. According to wikipedia it's a member of the Finno-Ugric language family. I notice some of the cross-over with Swedish, but the words are really, really long and there are so many double vowels and double consonants. Here are some of the menu options at McDonald's here:

Tuplajättijuustohampurilainen
Rouheciabatta salaattileipä
and, my favorite, Chili McFeast

and the scientists/ know the way it is

+ It is, now, supposed to rain and snow tonight and tomorrow in Helsinki.

+ I'm sitting in my hotel room drinking a bottle of coke, eating a chocolate bar from the minibar, and watching stupid footage about celebrity divorce settlements on CNN. Slightly depressing. In ten minutes I'm going to walk to city hall for the conference reception that's being hosted there. I really don't want to go and I don't feel like being social but I'm going to suck it up and go anyway. There are basically three CHESS professors here who I know and they are so nice, but I'm basically on my own. One of them is the director of CHESS who is a huge deal and he gave the 2nd plenary address this evening at the conference since he is quite renowned and is a commissioner for the World Health Organization's Commission on Social Determinants of Health. He is incredibly sweet, and very nice to me, but he is like a public health rock star. I feel like I have temporarily exhausted my energy for having the same conversation with people over and over and over and over again about who I am and where I'm from and what I do. I also feel self-conscious since I don't have a major public health background and I don't have a really focused area of interest so sometimes I feel like I have nothing to add. But whatever. At least I'm good at coming up with questions. And now I'm going to put on my scarf and my hat and my mittens and my pea coat and go out into the dark Finnish night!

I'm in Helsinki, where the temperature right now is approximately freezing. Hello, winter. Sadly, the snow forecast seems to have been downgraded to mostly rain and sleet. In the taxi from the airport this morning, Ilona said that there had been snow forecast for Stockholm also, but that seems to have turned into rain as well.

Tonight I had a strange dinner by myself at the restaurant in my hotel. The restaurant is basically a tapas place, and I had an interesting, and not terrible, Finnish take on a vegetarian Spanish tortilla. I'm exhausted now and am sprawled out on my bed with CNN on in the background. I woke up before six to get my flight, and I still managed to miss both the 6:50 and 7:05 Arlanda Express trains. I got to Rådhuset just as the train was pulling away, and then when I got my Arlanda Express ticket the 7:05 had just left. For some reason the ticket machine wouldn't take my AmEx card even though it said it takes them, and I asked the guy standing behind me in line if I was doing something wrong because I felt like I was going crazy, the machine literally wouldn't take the card in. He was a young-middle-age-ish businessman and he said no, I was doing it right so it was probably random and I should just try another card. I was obviously trying to hurry because there were people in line behind me and because I thought maybe I could still catch the 7:05 train, and he said to me "Well, if you were really that stressed out about making the 7:05 train, you should have woken up earlier." I thought that was such a bizarre thing to say. I think I responded with something like "I guess that's true." And I guess it is true? But what a totally weird thing to say! He wasn't hostile, but he certainly wasn't warm, he just said it very straight-forwardly.

Helsinki seems interesting so far, although all I've really done is have a latte in the airport, take a taxi to the hotel, walk to the conference at Finlandia Hall, walk back, and have weird Finnish tapas. It seems like an interesting mix between Scandinavia and Russia. A little bit of Stockholm, a little bit of St. Petersburg, a little bit of Finnish style. The parts I have seen so far definitely do not have the small, cozy feel of Stockholm - the buildings and streets are bigger, and much more gray. Finlandia Hall is quite pretty and is situated nicely on the water, and the walk there from my hotel takes like five minutes and you pass lots of very large statues of various men I've never heard of as well as the Parliament building which is like, half Low Library at Columbia (i.e. classical, columns, etc.) and half drab mammoth Soviet monstrosity.

The first day of the conference was interesting. The main conference (the 15th European Conference on Public Health) starts tomorrow afternoon, and today and tomorrow morning are a pre-conference called the 18th Nordic conference in social medicine and public health: The future of the Nordic welfare model. Pretty self-explanatory. It was a good crash course for me on comparative policies and problems in Sweden, Norway, Finland, Denmark, and Iceland. I'm too tired to write about it in depth right now, but let me just say that it does not cease to amaze me how healthy and wealthy and just really bloody well-run the Nordic countries are (not that they don't have their own problems), and Sweden seems to be the absolute international pinnacle in many measures. Quite interesting to be an American. Especially at the Nordic conference today where I believe I was the only American, and you wouldn't even know it since my badge says Sweden. There was definitely more than one snarky - but always sadly true - aside made about the US starting with disclaimers like "I think it's safe to say this in present company..."

Jag talar lite svenska; eller, Jag förstår inte

The title of this entry is "I speak a little Swedish; or, I don't understand." Those are the dual themes of me speaking Swedish here so far. I'm not pleased with how my language skills are progressing. It's hard, since practically everyone speaks perfect English, but I refuse to be an awful American who relies on English. I started my Swedish class the week before last and it's really fun, but Amanda had already taught me a lot of what we've done so far, and while it's wonderful that I can tell the time perfectly, that's not exactly a conversation I have during the day with Swedes. Similarly, while I can maybe order something or ask a basic question, it's pretty much a guarantee that I won't understand the response in Swedish, which makes me not want to ask in Swedish in the first place. That's where phrases like jag förstår inte, förlåt (sorry), tack, and på engelska come in.

On the positive side, I'm definitely getting much better at cold pronunciations, and I can almost say the bizarre "sj-" sound. The word for 7, for example, is "sju," and it sounds like a very strange cross between "whew" and "phew" and "hew." I am a pro at pronouncing most of the names of the T-bana stops since there's the automated woman's voice saying the names very slowly and deliberately before every stop. I'm comfortable with numbers now, so at least when they bring an order out at Vurma I know if it's mine or not. And, as I guess is usually the case, I can tell that my listening/understanding ability is progressing much faster than my speaking ability. It's always a tiny trimuph when I can pick out words other than "och" (and) and "jag" (I).

Watching TV is quite helpful, especially American shows with Swedish subtitles. Listening to Swedish indie bands is definitely not helpful since most of them sing in English, the universal language of indie/pop lyrics? But they do have super cute accents...

Aside from subway stations and other transportation phrases like whatever it is the woman says about watching the platform "när du stiger av" (when you get off), I'm also getting good at phrases on the computer since Reidar kept all the language settings in Swedish as part of his tough love strategy. Ones like "logga ut" and "mina dokument" are pretty self-explanatory, and then there's ones like "öppna i nytt fönster" (open in a new window), "spara nu" (save now), and "lösenord" (password), so at least I'll end up fluent in computer Swedish if nothing else. Reidar installed an awesome Swedish-English dictionary/thesaurus on my CHESS computer - it's a million times more helpful than my dictionary, and it gives me useful phrases like "jag förstår ingenting (av det hela)," or "I am completely at sea (at a loss)." Now there's one I can use.

Oh! And now, it also answered my earlier question about what you call someone from Stockholm - it's "Stockholmare."

in the time of the edison girls, i was listening to every word

+ This morning I spent two and a half hours at this hair salon called Deevi in Södermalm. Kristin, a friend of Fred's from when Saturday Looks Good To Me was on tour in Sweden one time, recommended it and it turned out to be fabulous. Despite a lovely summer in the California sun (or, rather, in biochemistry lecture) my natural hair color seemed to be getting progressively darker but now, after Helene's very thorough job, I am very, very blonde again! Also my hair had been growing like a weed and I was too lazy to get it cut but now it is much better. Usually when hair stylists, even my beloved Yuki, use any sort of product in my hair whatsoever at the end of a haircut I end up looking insane because my hair is so fine and just doesn't take well to having stuff in it. But Helene was awesome and used a straightening iron after she blow-dryed it to flip the ends up a little bit and it was like Farrah Fawcett but totally awesome. After three hours it's now pretty much poker-straight again, but it was fun while it lasted. The term "poker-straight" comes from a metal poker used for the fireplace, not cards, right? This story doesn't have much to do with cultural excursions in Sweden or health equity studies or anything, except now I look super Swedish, not just Swedish. Someone stopped and asked me for directions as I was walking back to the T-bana after leaving Deevi, but I was totally useless.

+ There are a lot of cute dogs in Stockholm, including lots of sweet pit bulls, which makes me happy to see. I don't remember if I already wrote about this here but you can take dogs on the subways and buses here (mostly, although there are some restrictions about which cars they can be in and at what times), and a few weeks ago I saw a big smiling bearded collie on the T-bana and it made me so happy. I've also seen this crazy obese bulldog being walked in the neighborhood around CHESS twice now, and it's so fat I know it's unhealthy but it's pretty funny.

+ They do everything by bloody bank transfers here. That's probably mostly false, but there are so many invoices and bills that get mailed to you and it's incredibly annoying and time-consuming. I am still waiting for the mailing from Trygghansa, the insurance company, for my renter's insurance, after calling twice and discovering the second time that they had the wrong address, and since the letter still hasn't come I bet he got it wrong the second time too. And this afternoon I went to a Handelsbanken branch to do the bank transfer for the EUPHA conference I'm going to in Helsinki on Wednesday, and it took forever and it's going to arrive late and now I have to email the people in Helsinki and the whole thing was just awful. I know bank transfers are generally fairly simple but all of my stuff seems to end up being incredibly complicated. The guy who helped me was very sweet, though, and asked for my phone number at the end "just in case" even though I already got confirmation for the transfer. I thought that was pretty funny. Anyway, Jake will be here next week to beat him up. I'm sure it was my Farrah Fawcett waves and complete bewilderment at nearly every detail relating to my Handelsbanken account & the transfer that made me seem so charming....

+ I feel like a total Fulbright fraud because I've barely been doing any work at CHESS. Just writing about it makes me feel bad. I have some excuses - writing literally tens of essays for my med school secondaries, moving to my new apartment, trying to do fun things in Stockholm so that I don't feel totally lonely and disconnected - but I feel lazy and awful and it's really hard because I have to take the initiative completely if I'm going to have actual roles in projects. Basically I have to sit down and write some emails and figure some stuff out and I don't think it will be that hard once I make the effort, but I just feel terribly lazy and useless right now.

From one of the terraces at the Moderna Museet.

I also bought that little paper flower garland thing at the museum store...

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Pictures from Skeppsholmen on the way to the Moderna Museet

and i was heading up north, to a place that i know, eating well, sleeping well

+ I had a really nice afternoon with Alice today, starting with coffee and pastries (kanel lyx, a regular cinnamon roll, for me, and a sort of interestingly spiced variation on a cinnamon roll for Alice, called kardemumma something, so obviously there's cardamom in there but I don't know what else) at Vurma, the cozy little cafe half a block away from my apartment. Then we went to Skeppsholmen to the Moderna Museet, which is just a beautiful, fabulous museum. We saw a show of paintings by a Swedish "concrete-abstract" painter named Olle Baertling who I guess did most of his well-known work in the 50s and 60s. They weren't my favorite paintings ever but they were quite striking, and there was a short video about him and his work that made it a lot more interesting. The work is mostly triangles of bright colors separated by black lines that appear straight, but apparently the lines are actually curved and this has something to do with the colors receding? There were interesting quotes in the video from Donald Judd and other American minimalists/conceptualists - I guess Donald Judd liked Baertling quite a bit - so getting some of the context was helpful. Apparently Baertling firmly believed in art being separate from "the compromises made in society" and believed that artists should focus on a real sense of inner spirituality - which makes him sound awfully Modernist but it seemed more nuanced than the way I'm describing it.

There was also a show of photographs by a Swedish photographer, Lars Tunbjörk, and I liked some of them a lot although overall a lot of the images had quite a dark feeling. His work reminded me of a strange cross between, like, Stephen Shore, Larry Clark, Jeff Wall, and Philip-Lorca DiCorcia (or "PL" as my Columbia photography professor called him...). It was the sort of hyper-real color photographs that I love, with a lot of bright colors, overexposure, and eerie night lighting, and the subjects ranged from snow to houses to seedy people, all in Sweden.

It was fun to see their regular collection too, they have some pretty Hiroshi Sugimoto seascapes, and a four part Uta Barth photo series that I actually thought was really boring even though she is one of my all-time favorites, and Matisse's "Apollon" as well as a pretty Moroccan landscape painting of his. In the description of the Moroccan one it described Matisse's goal for art to be "enjoyable, happy, and harmonious," which seems like a good goal to me.

Also, there was this little room with these ornate chandeliers covered in pretty-colored mesh/gauze type fabric, and sadly there was no image of them in the exhibition brochures or postcard or anything, but they were just gorgeous. They're by a Swedish artist named David Svensson and if you look at the "Illuminators" under the "Works" section of his website you can sort of get the idea but they're not nearly as nice as the ones at the museum.

And, of course, I bought lots of pretty things at the museum store, including these cute cards:





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It's a bit hard to see but the cake says "meringue."

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+ Now I really have to work on my Yale secondary because I've gotten nothing done today. At least I submitted my Brown one last night, and the UCSD and UCI ones the night before. I don't have much time now though because I'm having dinner with this guy named Catalin who I met at the party I went to with Tracey on Friday. He's Romanian and just moved to Stockholm to work at Ericsson (I think that literally half of the people I've met in Sweden work either for Ericsson or for Sony Ericsson, which apparently function as quite different companies), but he spent the last seven years living in Amsterdam and then in Geneva where he got his PhD in computer science and worked at CERN, the huge amazing insane particle physics accelerator that spans the border between France and Switzerland. The fact that I now know someone who worked at CERN makes me very happy, even though he's not actually a physicist or anything. Anyway, I was happy to have a "science friend" to talk to at this party and tonight we're going to check out this Italian restaurant near Odenplan.

+ Finally, while I know this wasn't intended for public viewing, Jake made this video for me of the new barn that the Oakland Animal Shelter just bought. He's there as I write this helping with the clean-up so that they can start moving some animals in there. I don't know what the story is with this barn but it's right by Fairyland on Lake Merritt, hence the footage at the beginning to set the scene, and to me Fairyland seems like possibly the creepiest place in the entire world. But, the point of this is that there are MINIATURE GOATS there, and I have told half the people who read this blog about the miniature goats so now you can actually watch minutes and minutes of them walking around and eating and being cute. I guess they found the goats wandering around Oakland and brought them into the shelter, and now they're living at the barn which is a much better place for them than the regular shelter. It would be difficult to describe how we came up with this without sounding completely nuts, but Jake and I have a running joke about how our cat Benji (a girl) wants one of the goats to be her boyfriend, and we just found out that that goat (the one who Megan holds up in the video) is PREGNANT with BABY MINIATURE GOATS. This is too much for me to handle. Without further ado, here is the video .

Bergsunds Strand

I think I might have found a place to live for the rest of the year! It would be difficult to overstate what a relief it will be if this works out. I only moved into this place a few days ago but have already been panicking about finding a decent place from January - June, since Jenny is coming back to Stockholm on January 1. The new place is on a street called Bergsunds Strand, right on the water, in Södermalm, which is by far the coolest neighborhood in Stockholm. It's really close to the Hornstull T-bana stop, it's a two-bedroom which will be fabulous for the slew of visitors I have planned, it has a balcony and views that look out onto the water from every freaking room, and while it's more expensive than I would like, it's ridiculously cheap compared to New York or California prices. The woman who's renting it is a freelance journalist going to India for five months, and the dates are exactly perfect - December 23 until May 25, which means I can come home three weeks before the wedding. I'm going to meet with her this week but I'm going to the conference in Helsinki from Wednesday-Sunday and I just hope that doesn't mess any of this up, I am so desperate to get this apartment and be done with it. Off to sleep now to dream about my new balcony in Södermalm.

This represents some of my major food consumption in Sweden. Yoggi is like a light yogurt drink, ballerina cookies are addictive, ramlösa is flavored sparkling water (my favorite flavor is the lingon och lime), and the delicatoboll is the packaged version of my most favorite chokladbollar.

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A view of my living room.

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My teeny tiny kitchen that looks like a closet.

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My bed, and the view from the bedroom window. There's a beautiful yellow apartment building right across the street. I took this at like six-thirty in the morning yesterday, when I played my first ever trans-continental LMI poker game thanks to Jake filming my cards and the action while his video camera was hooked up to Skype. I lost, but it was hilarious. I was lying in bed watching the sun rise drinking earl gray tea while they were there in Berkeley drinking beer and playing cards.

This is the park that's literally a minute away from my office at CHESS. It's incredible. Technically the part that starts right outside my office is called Bellevuesparken and it's on a lake called Brunnsviken, but it turns into this huge park called Hagaparken that is so gorgeous and that has Gustav III's pavilion and the copper tents although I haven't walked up far enough to see them yet. The day I took these pictures it was really starting to feel like fall, and people were out working on their boats and getting them ready for the winter. I was sitting on a bench watching these ducks listening to the Sea and Cake feeling half happy and half homesick.

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This is the little snaps sampler pack they sell at System Bolaget. It is truly awesome.

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I bought this "five years daybook," or "5 års dagbok" at DesignTorget. It doesn't have the dates associated with days of the week, so the idea is that you can use it in different years. The pictures aren't great but it is so elegant, with its tiny weather icons and it has the traditional alamanac thing of which names are supposed to be used for babies born on that day (dagens namn).

Historial Dictionary of Stockholm

Jake bought me this book called the Historical Dictionary of Stockholm, by Dennis Gould. Now that I'm living here and learning the city better, it's really amazing to read some of the entries.

Kungsholmen ("the king's island"), the neighborhood where I live, is one of many islands that makes up the city. According to the book, in the middle ages Kungsholmen was used as grazing land for animals, and at the end of the 1600s it was named in honor of the king, Karl XI. At one point it had been named Munkläget for the Franciscan monks who owned it before Gustav Vasa incorporated it, and it was also called Liderne which apparently comes from the old Swedish word for hillside. Seems fitting as I have to walk up a big bloody hill to get to my apartment. In the 17th century it was home to lots of craftsmen, and in the 18th century the Royal Hospital was here, and then in the 19th century there was a lot of heavy industry and it was a very poor part of the city - the book says that it was a place where "underpaid workers, such as blacksmiths, pewter pot makers, and Italian workers specializing in glass-blowing sweated at tedious industrial jobs." On October 31, 1878, there was a huge fire that lit up the whole Stockholm skyline at a steam mill called Eldkvarn located where Stadshuset, the city hall, is now, which is like five blocks away from me. It seems like this little island has had a pretty interesting history.

There is also a mysterious entry in the city chronology section that says "On September 27 (1981), the first trial since World War II of the city's defenses against a possible coup d'etat took place, with about 1,500 people and a number of tanks participating" but despite my formidable googling skills I can't seem to find anything else about this anywhere.