Punsch

In Sweden, as well as in Denmark, one can buy a cake - made of mix of crushed cookies, butter, cocoa, and liqueur - shaped like a small rod. In Denmark these are either coated with green marzipan or simply dipped in chocolate. The latter is probably the more sensible with regard to the Danish name: Træstammer = 'logs'. Until very recently we only saw the green variety in Sweden. They are sold under the name punschrullar = 'punsch-rolls', but for questionable reasons they are better known as dammsugare = 'vacuum cleaners'.

On the occasion of the many parties of the season (the National day, the wedding of the princess-heir, the many graduation parties ... or even midsummer!?) an alternate version in yellow and screeching blue is also available.


It might just be those of us who grew up with the green ones that find the blue-and-yellow ones to look significantly more poisonous - or.. ?

Together

Many of you may have noticed that Sweden - and especially Stockholm - has been quite focused on the royal wedding lately. Ikea decided to contribute with their own celebration of the couple: under the name Together (allow us here to point out that for those of us remembering the 2000 Lukas Moodyson movie this might not give the very best associations regarding the future happiness of the princess) they put up a pavilion - an Ikea-tent-castle if you prefer - close to the royal castle in the old town.


Ikea had thought of most details: there were a set of golden skis in the garage, a gallery of ancestors in the hallways, fitness equipment in the bedroom and of course the dining hall had been decked up for a grand dinner. They even had the menu figured out...

("I want meatballs from [the world's largest Ikea]")

...as well as prince-preparation-exercises for Daniel...


...and of course a bed worthy of a real princess.

Lidingö

Our new home on Lidingö ('Liding'-island)

The main reason nothing much has happened on this page for the past month is that we've been busy moving - well, the moving itself took less than 4 hours. But then we also had to clean the old apartment, and everything needed sorting out in the new apartment - add to this a trip to Ikea (complete with the mandatory serving of ridiculously cheap meatballs)... it all takes time.


On top of that we've spent some time getting to know our new area. Lidingö boasts being the 'island of health'. This could in part be due to it being the richest municipality in the Stockholm area, but it is certainly helped along by the large green areas with many an inviting path for walking, running and biking.


Although it thus seems a bit more like the countryside, it is in fact only marginally farther away from central Stockholm than it is from Solna. However, every trip into town must go via the Lidingö bridge.

Vappu

The purpose of our most recent trip to Finland was to experience Vappu in Helsinki. Vappu is the Finnish version of Walpurgis Night, but it is celebrated rather differently in Finland. One thing to be noted is that Vappu is about student traditions - many people found their student hats and donned them. Not just young people with relatively new hats like in the picture, but a lot of older generations had also dug old their old student hats for the occasion.


The many different overalls in characteristic colours were also hard to miss - connoisseurs will be able to deduce people's line of study by the colour of their overalls.


The attitude was generally one of fun, dressing up, and drinking sparkly - and apparently lots of balloons were also required.


One of the main details of Vappu in Helsinki is when the Havis Amanda statue (seen as a symbol of Helsinki) is fitted with a student hat in a complicated ceremony involving multiple crane trucks.


After proper dressing with the student hat, the crowds responded by waving vigorously with their own student hats.

Bothnian archipelagos

It was bound to happen sooner or later - so we took advantage of one of the long weekends of the springtime for going to Finland by boat. The crossing took about 11 hours, but we succeeded in sleeping for most of the trip..

The last light of the day over the Stockholm archipelago

Sunrise over the archipelago (far) outside of Turku

Spring trip to Germany

By pure luck we managed to plan a trip to Germany for exactly the last weekend before the European air traffic was interrupted due to volcanic ash.


To be more exact we went to Mülheim an der Ruhr where John (an old study and house mate from California) is currently doing a post-doc at Max-Planck-Institut für Kohlenforschung - before John and Tiffany go back to California.

John & Tiffany

Since Mülheim is not a particularly big city we were expecting to visit either Essen, Düsseldorf or Köln (= Cologne), but in fact we ended up spending the whole weekend in and about Mülheim. Therefore we also had time to visit Mülheim's Camera Obscura in the Broich neighbourhood (on 'the other side' of the river Ruhr).

Camera Obscura is Latin for 'dark room', but most people can probably figure out that in the long run you cannot run a business that consists of charging people for letting them into a darkened chamber. In principle you just need a large, smooth, white screen inside the room and a pinhole in the wall. Light from the outside enters through the pinhole and you can (when the room is dark) see a picture of the world outside (upside-down) on the white screen. The tower in Mülheim is more sophisticated than that - the pinhole is located in movable part of the of the tower on top of the dome (so you can watch all directions from the tower) and is furthermore equipped with optical lenses making it possible to focus on different distances. Now that we have tried it, we are sorry we didn't visit the one in Edinburgh.

Since John had been complaining about the lack of soft corn tacos in Germany we decided to bring him a bag of corn flour. This was a sufficiently strange item for it to require scrutiny and questioning when we passed airport security - but since corn flour is not in the least bit wet we were allowed to bring it in. Thus we spent our Saturday evening making a stack of soft corn tacos.

Easter excursion - part 2

The high age of the university in Uppsala hints to the city's importance for the Christian church in Sweden, and it doesn't come a big surprise that Uppsala also boasts the largest cathedral in all of Scandinavia.


Inside the cathedral we finally at long last got to meet the king whose name we've been coming across over and over again here in Sweden: Gustav Vasa.


But Uppsala cathedral isn't just a place with a long history - it is also a place where new ideas are welcomed.

The collectomat

Easter excursion - part 1

The guy depicted here on the left is the first your eyes land upon when exiting the train station in Uppsala - and that was where we chose to go on a day trip during Easter.

Uppsala is perhaps most widely known for its university which is the oldest university in all of Scandinavia. The city did bear signs of a healthy population of students. For example, we were far from the only young people not with Swedish as native language to sit down by the banks of the Fyris river on this sunny (but relatively cool) afternoon to enjoy a refreshment.

Swedish Easter

Already last summer we were wondering about the differences between Danish and Swedish traditions: In Sweden there is a bonfire for Walpurgis Night instead of for midsummer - and this quite without burning witches. This year we have concluded that this is in part because the Swedish witches are sent off to Blocksberg already around Easter. However, this isn't symbolised by burning witches. Rather little witches appear equally prominently as eggs and chickens in the Swedish Easter decorations - and supposedly kids are also dressed up as witches to go around trick-or-treating (although this last bit we haven't seen for ourselves). This latter tradition would seem to be closely linked to another great and very visible Swedish Easter tradition: Easter Candy!


Around Easter all major supermarket chains dump the price of pick-and-mix candy from the already cheap Swedish level to about 30 SEK/kg (yep, that's 30 Swedish kroner pr. kilogram - less than $2 for a lb of candy). This of course also means that in Sweden an Easter egg is most commonly not a large chocolate egg but instead a large cardboard egg filled with pick-and-mix candy. The 'Caramel King' also argues that the traditional brush of twigs should be decorated with Easter candy - but most of those we have seen have been decorated with coloured feathers. Both feathers and witches make it all quite reminiscent of Danish Shrovetide celebrations - another example of a mix-up in the pagan Nordic spring traditions.


Just to add to the confusion we decided that in our little home witches, feathers and egg hunting should be replaced by an omelette in Easter colours and a home-baked 'hen'.

Easter weather

After an long winter it was nice to see these this past Saturday

After enjoying an Easter holiday with lots of sunshine and temperatures approaching 10 degrees (C) it was a bit of a shock to wake up to this sight on Easter Monday:

View from our living room this morning

Now we just have to hope all the flowers make it through anyway..

This is the first time since New Year that we see these two with flowers on