A name you can trust

I don't know if Swedish lawyers set the curve when it comes to character. To be completely honest, I don't even know if Sweden has lawyers. (Apparently, I had better learn how to use Google, because whoever's adding the links to this post clearly has it in for me.) I do know, however, that Sweden--Göteborg, to be exact--has some likely candidates for the "World's Most Unlikely Name for a Law Firm" contest.

Does anyone else smell desperation?

Of course, you could always name your firm something a bit less... righteous.

No. I don't believe you. There's absolutely no way that's a real law firm.

OK, I admit it. This window does not belong to a real law firm. But it is a real window--overlooking Harvard Square, no less. And it is a real firm--just not a law firm. In fact, it just so happens to belong to two of the U.S.'s most beloved radio personalities. Scout's honor.

Identity crisis

While in general the Göteborgeois are warmer and more demonstrative than their Stockholmian cousins, H and I did find some evidence of an incipient identity crisis in our favorite Swedish city.

For reasons which appear obvious upon reflection, the Swedes evince no fear of tornadoes.

I'm not sure who shops here. I'm not sure who's supposed to shop here. I'm not even sure that this place really is a shop. All I know is that when urban hipsters ape rural rednecks, someone needs to call the fashion police, and damn quick, too.

Which way did he go?

Not that Göteborg is that big or anything, but we were wandering through the university grounds rather aimlessly, when we came upon a sign.

Overheard in the dean's office: "Now that the new sign is set up, campus maps will no longer be necessary."

Needless to say, we were impressed with the... exhaustiveness of the information provided. But we were also somewhat at a loss as to how to use our new resource. I mean, many of the little arrows point at buildings in the vicinity, but seem to indicate a distance beyond the building immediately visible. And while one of the arrows indicates the left side of a street which gives onto the intersection where the sign is located, another arrow indicates the right side. Or maybe it's just trying to say that "education" (pedagogen) is over that way. It's all a bit... confused.

I think it's over there, on the left. No, no. Your other left.

Why the Swedes are bad at basketball

The Swedes have a reputation for being among the tallest people in the world, but it hasn't done much for their men's Olympic basketball performance. (They last qualified in 1980--and even then, they didn't do so well). While the basketball woes of Swedish men certainly stem from the confluence of a variety of factors, I believe I've discovered evidence in Göteborg which reveals the fundamental defect in the Swedish basketball training program.

Beach volleyball, yes. Beach basketball, not so much.

Ever try to dribble a basketball on sand? Me neither. Pretty much explains it, I think.

Who's Bad?

It's a great thing speaking a language which uses an alphabet used by some 42 other distinct languages. Lots of room for unexpected, and often entertaining, mixups.

Wait a minute. Which door should you use if you've been good?

One thousand Rhode Islands

And here we thought that the State of Rhode Island was being euphemistic--quaint, even--in calling itself an island. But it turns out that the whole island thing is true (sort of). In any case, H and I discovered that the thousand islands (of salad dressing fame) and Rhode Island have a little competition going on that most of us in North America have been blissfully unaware of...

Poor, poor, confused Swedes. Providence is a place--not something that happens to your salad.

Incidentally, that is indeed the real recipe for Swedish Rhodeisland dressing. The guy behind the counter at the cafe where we saw this pot was positively adamant that I write down the ingredients. Not that they're weird or anything--the ingredients, I mean.

In any case, I did my best to doll up the recipe card a bit, but let's face it, my recipe cards have nothing on the real deal. (You absolutely must click that link. When H and I first found that site we laughed so hard our abs hurt for two days. Humor as workout.) Weight Watchers has evidently evidently been the reigning champion of bizzaro diet plans for decades, though North Beach is definitely giving them a run for their money.

Time-travel updates

J has been writing a lot of pre-dated material recently, since we want this blog to serve not only as an entertaining update for our readers, but as a record of our adventures for ourselves. We therefore attempt to date our posts not according to when we write them, but according to when the subject matter happened. For much of our material, of course, it doesn't much matter, but for some it does.

So you don't miss a single exciting word, we've prepared a little summary of the pre-dated material that J's been working on. Organized in chronological order:

(1) During January, J attended the wedding of a college roommate in Long Beach, CA. There, he amused himself photographing the real bearded Santas who had gathered for a convention.

(2) You may remember that upon his arrival, J bestowed upon Sweden a prestigious award for the Most Apt Method for Dispensing Soap--a method perhaps better known as "soap dispenser as teat." We now have a photo of this breakthrough Swedish soap delivery system.

(3) During the first weekend in February, H & J went on an overnight Swedish booze cruise. Surreal? If you have to ask, you obviously haven't read about what happened to us.

(4) On Valentine's Day, H & J attended a dinner at the Stockholm Stadshuset (City Hall), hosted by the Mayor of Stockholm. We learned more than we expected about the state of the art in Swedish livestock management.

(You can still subscribe to our more or less weekly email update; just look at the sidebar to the right!)

Friday ritual found

J and I like doing something together on Friday. In Boston, we found our "Gateway to the Weekend" at Baptiste Yoga, and in Montréal we started celebrating Shabbat together. While we now both treasure our Shabbat dinners together, we also found that we missed getting out and about together on Fridays. Enter Carla and her café:

The first bite of the blueberry pie is free, but trust me, you'll come back for more...

We found Carla's Café (Surbrunnsgatan 37) on our way home from paying February's rent, and have been back every week since. The chalkboard outside tells you what's on tap for the day, and the meal is always followed by coffee and, for J and me, a nice long chat. We're not quite sure what the key to our affection is, the tasty fare (chicken breast with avocado pesto and sundried tomato on a bed of couscous salad is one of our current faves) or the warm atmosphere that Carla has created.

We also like the fact that Carla lets us behind the counter if we ask really nicely.

We'll be visiting Gothenburg this Friday, but we'll be with Carla in spirit, since she's made some restaurant recommendations for us. But maybe we'll need to break with tradition and visit Carla earlier in the week...

What do you get...

When you cross a lovely Swedish church steeple...

A house of God upon Earth...

...with a lovely New England barn? (There will be a quiz.)

A house for critters, creatures, and John Deeres.

Drum roll, please...

What should we call it? A starn or a beeple? I like beeple, myself.

What are those little fins for? Is it a rocket-powered beeple?

To get the ball rolling on having beeple enrolled in the OED, I'll be the first one to use it in a sentence: "We were all having a grand old time at Sven's hoedown when a few cows set up a great ruckus over by the beeple. We thought that the rapture was at hand until we found out that it was just that the cows had gotten into a patch of milkweed and had gas." Now you try.

The Music Genome Project

Say--like me--that you like laid-back funk-, soul-, and jazz-inspired electronic groove music with smooth vocals and layered rhythm arrangements. Something like, oh I don't know, Release 1.0 by Doctor Jazz's Universal Remedy. Or perhaps The Brand New Heavies' All About the Funk. Well and good, but how can I find other music that's similar to the music I already know I like? While one answer would be to ask advice of someone who knows a lot about music (hat tip to AM for this link), there's also the web 2.0 answer. Enter the Music Genome Project:

Together we set out to capture the essence of music at the most fundamental level. We ended up assembling literally hundreds of musical attributes or "genes" into a very large Music Genome. Taken together these genes capture the unique and magical musical identity of a song - everything from melody, harmony and rhythm, to instrumentation, orchestration, arrangement, lyrics, and of course the rich world of singing and vocal harmony. It's not about what a band looks like, or what genre they supposedly belong to, or about who buys their records - it's about what each individual song sounds like.

Based upon this work, the project leaders have set up the site, Pandora. Enter the name of an artist, or even a single song title, and listen to a stream of titles which have a similar genetic constitution, musically speaking. Check it out. The worldwide web and the whole wide world have in common--apart from boasting the initials WWW--at least the fact that they contain a lot worth discovering.

Oh, and I think I should mention how I happened upon Pandora. I'm trying out StumbleUpon, which lets internauts become daring explorers, silent observers, or both. Official glossy-pamphlet literature:

What is StumbleUpon?
StumbleUpon helps you discover and share great websites. As you click [the Stumble! icon], we deliver high-quality pages matched to your personal preferences. These pages have been explicitly recommended by your friends or one of 1,902,465 other websurfers with interests similar to you. Rating these sites you like automatically shares them with like-minded people – and helps you discover great sites your friends recommend.

How Does it Work?
StumbleUpon uses [up/down] ratings to form collaborative opinions on website quality. When you stumble, you will only see pages which friends and like-minded stumblers have recommended. This helps you discover great content you probably wouldn't find using a search engine.

Good travels!

C-S-what?

J has asked me on several occasions to post about my experience studying here in Stockholm, but I haven't found much blog-worthy in my studies. However, today at the end of my class, two students stood up and asked the class to complete a survey for their course on Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR). I wondered if they had heard of Survey Monkey, but having been in their shoes in the past, I diligently put down my head and answered the somewhat inane questions.

I was interrupted from checking off the little boxes by a fellow exchange student who is studying at a prestigious American MBA program: "What's CSR policy?" I paused for a second, wondering if he was looking for an example or if he didn't know what CSR was, so I responded, "Corporate Social Responsibility policy." He accepted the answer and turned back to his survey.

I chose the MBA program at McGill because I believed the program embraced the perspectives of students, like myself, who have interests which lie outside the mainstream of business thought and practice. Three semesters into a North American MBA program, though, one begins to wonder whether anything matters except accounting, finance, or one's facility with PowerPoint, and so I finished the McGill portion of my studies last December uncertain as to McGill's commitment to CSR. But this bald question, "What is CSR policy?" affirmed my initial intuition about McGill. Depending on the circumstances, I find myself arguing both for and against corporate activities executed under the banner of social responsibility, but one way or another, at least I know and my fellow McGillians know what CSR is and where to go for further support.

Is there a hands-down winner in North American B-schools?

She who asks, gets

Sergei Prokofiev's (1891-1953) Romeo and Juliet (1936) delighted us at the Kungliga Baletten (Swedish Royal Ballet) last night, but my personal favorite moment of the evening came during the first intermission. J wanted to visit the "Golden Salon" on the mezzanine, a reception area that drips with gilding, but we walked down the exterior stairway which brought us directly to the main level. On the main level, we got to appreciate the beauty of the slide we had seen during our first visit to the Operahuset, still lonely and separated from the masses by velvet ropes. After all of the joy of the first act (we left Juliet and her Romeo blushing with their new-found love), I was feeling friendly, and approached the man who was selling programs to inquire about the wonderful slide.

When asked why the slide existed, he said that it was well-used during the children's performances they have at the Operahuset, like a Pippi Longstocking performance they present regularly. I further inquired how or when one might have the opportunity to go down the slide (presuming that he would tell me, "It's just for little people, big girl."), and he said that I might ask the mustachioed man across the lobby to see if I might be able to have my turn that very evening.

The mustachioed man was amused by our love of slides, and even offered to take both of our photos on the way down.

Synthetic fabrics move more quickly and make their wearers decidedly less photogenic on steel slides.

Now that I was blushing even more fiercely than Juliet, J asked to take my photo with Ralle, the man who won my (platonic) affection at the Operahuset.

H with her new friend Ralle. Maybe he'll let J's mom use the slide when she visits in April?

Our fika with the Swedes

My mother--who has friends absolutely everywhere--recently arranged for H & I to meet with some or her Swedish friends. Well, actually, they're the son and daughter-in-law of her friend's friend, so the relationship was rather more tenuous than one might hope for a first meeting. Still, when you're abroad in a strange land, even the tenuous connections count for something.

We rode one of the metro lines to the very end, got picked up by AB, and drove a few minutes to reach their charming house in the suburbs. Friends of mine will know that I'm not really a fan of the suburbs, and I don't want it to sound like I'm just saying nice things about their home because they feed me coffee and cake. I've nothing against the suburbs per se; it's just that they're not for me. But I can still appreciate what they have to offer.

[Photo of suburbs as seen from the car--forthcoming.]

Too, Swedish suburbs are different. Not only are the houses quite a bit smaller than we've come to expect from North American suburbs, the groupings of houses are organized differently, with much smaller streets and smaller yards. We even heard talk of a "common area"--words anathema to most North American suburbanites.

[Photo of common area--forthcoming.]

We had a wonderful fika with AB & GM, both of whom were funny, warm, and well-traveled. They had even met in Montréal! GM, as it turns out, is Montréalaise. It is indeed a small and curious world.

We also learned that a "traditional" fika requires that you accompany your coffee with seven (count 'em, seven) different kinds of cake. Upon hearing this, H immediately asked where one could go in order to experience the seven-cake splendor of traditional fika. When AB responded, "My mother's house," H seemed a bit crestfallen. I've promised to try to find H a properly traditional café, and if I succeed you can count on hearing about it here.

Dishwashing station at a café which serves "traditional" fika.

While AB works for Ericsson, GM is an artist. I personally think that her use of light is unusually good (she did confess to indulging in photography at one point in her life), but you can judge for yourself.

All in all, we had a wonderful afternoon, and it was pleasant to have an opportunity to converse with real Swedes. While we both appreciate university life, it's sometimes challenging to meet locals. We were most grateful for this chance, and we look forward to our next visit.

We love them all. Yes, we do.

It's a truism that travel--especially world travel--throws into rather stark relief the fact that one of a culture's most important tasks is to equip each of its members with a constellation of deeply held and yet ultimately contingent prejudices.

There's no accounting for taste. At least, not for that taste.

Yes, it's true. The Aussies--and the Swedes, too--just do things differently. All kinds of things. Quite differently. And they don't seem to think anything of it.

Probably the best place to find telling cultural differences is on television, where all the weirdest assumptions and most scatterbrained entertainment ideas go to die. The only thing that makes any kind of TV programming seem normal is that we're used to it. Take one look at TV programming produced under the auspices of a different scheme of presuppositions and you'll see what I mean. As an example, just stop for a moment and really think about the presuppositions which must underlie this TV spot from Japan.

I don't know about you, but this spot lies way off the track my thoughts usually travel.

After TV, though, the next best place to find cultural cleavages (all puns intended) is in advertising. Which things people want--and often more interestingly, how advertisers try to get people to want them--reveals a great deal about a culture's underlying presuppositions about human nature and the way the world works. It also sometimes startles the unsuspecting visitor.

OK, you've got my attention, but I still don't know what you want me to buy.

Dinner with the ghost of Alfred

Alfred Nobel, that is. As a semi-official representative of... well, I think we have give credit to Canada in this case, H got invited to a dinner party at the Stockholm Stadshuset (City Hall). It took a bit of finagling, but H did manage to procure a ticket for me as well.

I haven't yet figured out how to Photoshop out all of these annoying streetlights.

Although the building serves as the mayoral seat for Stockholm, its global claim to fame is the fact that it hosts the annual Nobel Banquet, during which the year's Nobel Prizes are awarded, excepting only the Nobel Peace Prize, which is awarded in Oslo, Norway. "Why is the Peace Prize different from all the other prizes?" you ask. Well:

The Nobel Peace Prize Award Ceremony takes place in the Oslo City Hall, Norway. Why in Oslo, when all the other Nobel Prizes are awarded in Stockholm, Sweden? You will find the answer in the will of Alfred Nobel, in which he stated that the Nobel Peace Prize is to be awarded by a Committee of five persons elected by the Norwegian Storting or parliament.

So there you have it. Succinct as only the Scandinavians can be.

Although we had been warned about how important it was to have a ticket, there were no uniformed guards, no ushers, no ticket-takers or ticket-checkers of any kind. There was only the administrator from H's program, but the only reason she even knew we were there was because we found her. Anyone could have crashed this party, and I don't doubt that many attendees did. All "official" exchange students (I'm fairly certain that I'm "unofficial") in the city of Stockholm were invited.

The planners had us there by 17:30 "sharp" (the word sharp was actually printed on our invitations), and once they had us there--several hundred people between the ages of 17 and 35 or so--they corralled us behind a colonnade and made us watch them as they finished laying out the buffet. Several hundred hungry young people, and they don't have food, drink, or entertainment of any kind ready for us. The planners evidently examined livestock facilities and behavior in order to derive their fundamental organizing principles.

Moo?

They finish setting out the buffet, all the while looking nervously at the ravening masses behind the barricade. I think some of those poor servers must have thought that we were eying them as if they were dinner. But then, to add stupidity to the mild insult of not even serving us drinks when we arrive (we're guests, remember), they simply drop the rope holding back the deluge, and we hungry hundreds stampede toward the food. I'm sure, strictly in order to impress upon us their vast and utter wisdom, they then prevent us from touching the food. Yes, they permit us into the famed Blue Room (it's actually beautiful red brick, but that's another story), where a veritable veritable smörgåsbord awaits us, only to hold us back with cattle prods and salad tongs. I wouldn't be surprised to later find out that several servers had lost fingers that evening. But the crowning idiocy of the evening--it must be a doozy, eh?--is that they then, at that moment, tried to deliver speeches.

Who knows what they said? Who could hear anything over the onerous rumble of 500 young stomachs? At least no one said anything untoward to the Mayor of Stockholm, who seemed like a generous, affable man.

We were finally allowed to drink, to feast, to make merry. And I finally got to take some photos of the voluminous room with its eerie depths and iconic brickwork.

Well over 20 meters tall...

And we visited the Gold Room as well, famous for its gilded walls and resonant mosaics.

Masonic, alchemical, and mythological references abound.

And I even got a chance to dream a little. I even think that a little Nobel Laureate brain-power must have soaked in, because I've definitely been feeling smarter than usual.

Who's the bald guy who keeps hogging the microphone?

Get the Truffle Warren by email

Dear Careful Readers,

You may have noticed--if you've been regular visitors--that our blog has taken on a life of its own and has therefore started to evolve. One change to which I'd like to draw your attention is the addition of a weekly mailing list sign-up, located over on the right-hand sidebar. If you enter your email address, you'll get a weekly (more or less) update of the Truffle Warren... a weekly update as in no more than once every seven days, and nothing but the stubs (approximately the first 750 characters) of all our latest posts.

H jumps for joy upon hearing about our first subscriber.

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Léche-vitrines

Both J and I love learning about a city by walking around, getting a bit lost, and window shopping. While J particularly liked the wall-eyed boy, I was enchanted by these:

That's right, careful readers, these aren't just any office chairs...

Chairs such as these are the reason that I like the French phrase for window shopping, léche-vitrines, which literally translates to licking the windows. These chairs made it clear that they deserved, indeed they demanded, a double take...

The editors have no idea if any snakes or crocodiles were harmed in the manufacture of these chairs.

I'm sure there is nothing like a snake-skin office chair to let your colleagues know that you can be venomous when you so choose. Personally, I think the red crocodile skin might be a bit too fabulous for this ergonomically correct chair. In fact, these chairs are so fabulous that I began to think about what they would really like to be doing right now. (Don't click on the previous link unless you are over 18 years of age and have an excellent sense of humour. And if you do click, watch the movie.)

I had no idea that Swedish design could be so sassy, and I'm positively charmed!

Who you lookin' at?

So I'm strolling down one of Stockholm's wonderful retail strips, when what should I see in the window, but this:

What? Do you think this hair does itself?

I don't know if earnest, nearsighted, slightly wall-eyed boys who have access to too many hair-styling products are a protected class in Sweden, but evidently they ought to be.

The layered city

Montréal boasts the largest underground complex in the world, which extends the life of the city deep into the domain of the Canadian winter. When the mercury drops to -35 C, it's still possible to ice-skate indoors, walk along miles of shop-lined thoroughfares, and eat at dozens of restaurants--all without braving the wind-chill.

But the underground city also thickens the physical complexity of the city in an unconventional way. Everyone who knows cities understands the importance of multi-story buildings in providing for additional density. The underground city, however, is more like a street than a skyscraper--it's more for moving about and socializing than for sleeping or working.

The great urbanist Jane Jacobs, in her 1961 magnum opus, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, suggests a distinction between the space in a city occupied by buildings (which I call "blocked space") and the space through which inhabitants may pass freely (which I call "thru-space"). Skyscrapers densify blocked space, but the underground city effectively thickens and enriches Montréal's actively used thru-space. Streets, in Jacobs's analysis, are more important to the life of a city than buildings (I really do encourage reading the whole book--it's one of the best I've ever read), and so making a city's thru-space richer and more complex greatly enhances the quality of life in a city.

Stockholm, without resorting to Montréal's tunnels or Minneapolis' skyways, creatively thickens its thru-space using at least three strategies I've seen:

(1) Bi-level plazas,

We let the buses think they can fly. They may be smug, but at least they're quiet.

(2) Multi-level transport,

Damn! How fast is the subway in Stockholm?

(3) Mysterious bridges. (I believe that the bridges, which often seem to emerge from and lead to nowhere, actually gentle the sometimes precipitous slopes of Stockholm's hills.)

Both bridges lead somewhere. Scout's honor.

Wookin' pa nub

When J lamented this morning (well, actually afternoon, but a hall party and ensuing fire alarm kept us up late) that not many people are reading, enjoying, and therefore commenting on our blog, I mentioned that he might want to change the permission for commenting so that everyone can comment. We now have a democratic commenting system where anyone who wants to get upon their soap-box may do so. Please, go forth and comment!