84 Days Down, 6 to Go...

My last full weekend in Stockholm is over. I've visited every tourist attraction trip advisor has suggested, tried every Swedish food I could find (yes, even lutefisk), and I've even nearly finished my co-op project in spite of the fact that it was initially intended to take 6 months instead of 3. I think it's most significant that I've gotten to the point where I can spend a whole day lazing around my apartment cooking and reading, leaving only to get groceries, and not feel like I'm wasting time that should be spent exploring. It feels, well, normal.
I sort of expected this to be like an extended vacation, where I have to constantly be doing something and planning the next adventure. And I have, to some extent, done that, but I've also been content to just settle in to Stockholm life. Wake up, eat my filmjolk with muesli and lingon, bike to work, spend my day working alongside people from all over the world, break for fika, finish at a reasonable time, bike home in the dark, and then just relax or run errands or maybe go explore for a bit. It's not the same as life in Boston or Chicago, but it feels just as easy and comfortable even after barely 3 months. It's almost anticlimactic. I thought there would be homesickness and jet lag and culture shock, but it's just life as usual after no time at all.
This next week I will be systematically dismantling my life here. Sell the bike, finish my food, give back my keys, say my goodbyes, eat at my favorite bakery one last time. And this time next week, I'll be back in Chicago, jet-lagged out of my mind and binge-eating deep dish pizza. I am a weird mix of ready for everything I missed about home to be within reach again (have I mentioned that Stockholm doesn't have any good Mexican food? It's a travesty), but also dreading leaving a place in which I have so happily and comfortably settled.

Christmas cookies

Christmas season is nearly in full bloom here (lights everywhere, Christmas markets popping up around town, delicious Christmas treats appearing in bakery windows). As in the U.S., Christmas cookies are extremely popular. Here, they have pepparkakor, which are gingersnaps similar to those Anna's Swedish gingersnaps that you can find in many stores in the U.S. A chilly, rainy evening like this one is perfect for baking, so I decided to try my hand at them. You can find a version that uses American ingredients and measurements here. I also tried making risgrynsgröt, a wonderful, cinnamony rice pudding. Recipe here. I added raisins, as many do, but they are very much optional.

"There's no such thing as bad weather, only bad clothing"

So I know my last blog post was just me moping about the weather, but I take it all back. It's been snowing since Sunday and it is glorious! It even set a new record: the most snow on any November day since the measurements started in the early 1900s.

The only drawback has been that biking is now a serious hazard to my health (not that I haven't tried...), but it's okay because the slower pace means I can better appreciate how lovely snow-covered Stockholm is.

Because my hands are usually too cold for my touch screen to recognize as human, I haven't taken so many pictures of the snow. But, I will leave you with the few that I have.

Winter

I've heard a lot about the cold, dark Stockholm winters, but I never really believed that it could be much different than Chicago and Boston. Well, it's only early November, but I'm already a little horrified by how cold and dark it is. The cold, everyone is quick to assure me, is unseasonably severe and early (not like the unusually balmy weather back in the two places I call home... insult to injury, I call it). The dark, however, is normal.
Today, the sun rose at 7:20 AM and set at 3:42 pm, just 8 hours, 45 minutes of light. By December 21st, the shortest day of the year, it will be a whopping 6 hours, 4 minutes. The damp cold, wind, rain, snow, etc. aren't so different from a normal winter in Chicago or Boston, but the darkness is something else entirely. Long before I leave work every day, I sit in the lab and watch the sun go down. By 5 o'clock, it feels like the middle of the night, like I should have been home hours ago, even though the department is still as lively and crowded as ever. And while I've spent many evenings exploring Stockholm by bike, the darkness now isn't exactly conducive to sightseeing.
The Swedes take it in stride, even embrace it as a reason to spend the evening curled up with a book and a cup of tea, surrounded by candles and house plants. I, like many non-Swedes, waver between absolute horror and dread of the looming darkness, and a curious appreciation for the increased warmth and coziness in buildings and between people.
Though not especially religious, Sweden does the Christmas season well. Cheerful lights have already been strung through the streets of Stockholm, adorable tomte have been popping up everywhere, and Christmas treats have been added to the already extensive selection of pastries in each bakery. I've made a reservation for the Michelin-starred Operakallären's julbord (a splurge I'm still questioning, but the beautiful, historical setting and reputation as being the best meal you'll ever have is rather alluring), which is certainly good motivation to make it through the next few excessively dark weeks.
So I'm a little undecided about this long, dark winter. Some days are so gray and dreary that I feel like no amount of coffee will ever wake me up. Others, I think maybe I could learn to be a bit more like the Swedes: make the most of those rare sunny days, but also the prohibitively cold and dark ones, by relying on other people or maybe just a good book - not sunshine - for warmth.

Pretending to be a Tour Guide

My mother is visiting (hi, Mom!), which means that now I get to act like I know all about Stockholm, even though I still haven't been to the Vasa Museum or seen the changing of the guard at the palace. Today we did a very uninformative walking tour of the city, led by me, full of useful facts like "this is the grocery store with the best candy bins" and "this place has the best hot chocolate and the mug is practically a bowl - but you still need a kanelbulle, obviously" and "this store has a ton of poorly-supervised samples of fancy licorice" (see a theme?). We earned our food, though. Stockholm isn't huge, but a walk from the north side of the city - where I live - to the south side of the city is a few miles in each direction.

Well, my mom just stuck her nail file into my junky-but-still-functioning little adapter in hopes that it would somehow fix it (???), but now it just sparks when I plug it into the wall. Which is to say, I need to conserve my battery until I can get a new adapter after work tomorrow. More stories and pictures soon to come, though!

Excuses from a Procrastinator

It is graduate school application season and, as a somewhat extreme procrastinator, I have managed to put off a painful amount of my upcoming fellowship application until the couple of days before it is due. This, coupled with a supposedly non-stressful presentation at work tomorrow, means that this week's blog post is mostly just an excuse for the lack of an actual blog post. Once my application is submitted, I'll return to normal human functioning.

Tourist-ing in Uppsala

I've spent a couple weekends in Uppsala, but this was the first that I did actual Tripadvisor-reccommended sightseeing. Uppsala is Sweden's fourth largest city, though it feels much more like a large town than an actual city. It does have everything you could want from a city - plenty of great food options (I recommend Churchill Arms for anyone who visits, though it's not exactly Swedish), the "standard" options for shopping (all of the popular Swedish brands are here, plus a few decent thrift stores and boutiques), interesting museums and landmarks to visit, fantastic (if a bit expensive) public transportation if you don't feel like walking, and an overall very cute setting for a weekend trip.

The Fyris River runs through Uppsala, which makes for some very charming walking paths.

The public transportation may be good, but by far the best way to get around in Uppsala (and Stockholm) is biking. Bike paths are ubiquitous and there are plenty of places to park your bike. Be warned, though: a bike that is not securely chained may be tossed into the river by unruly college students on Saturday nights.

The biggest problem with Uppsala, and Stockholm, too, is that anything even remotely touristy, from museums to the islands of the Stockholm archipelago, becomes much harder to visit in the off-season. Almost everywhere has more limited hours, and a surprising amount of attractions just close altogether once September rolls around. Still, there was plenty to do and I had a nice weekend just sightseeing at some of the more popular attractions here.

A short ride away from town is Gamla Uppsala, a mind-blowing old settlement that was once an important economic and political center and, according to some myths, the residence of Odin. Today, it is mostly just for sightseeing. The most obvious is attraction is three large burial mounds, which have generated some controversy as far as who, exactly, is buried there, though the consensus now seems to be that it's some sort of royalty.

The mounds are basically just some relatively tall hills on an otherwise flat landscape, so the main attraction here is the view.

That smidgen of blue is the first hint of non-cloud-covered sky that I've seen in more than a week. Fall in Sweden is quite gray, to say the least.

The town center can be seen in the distance, marked by the towering spires of the Uppsala Cathedral and the large, pink castle.

There is also a centuries-old church, surrounded by a mix of old and quite new gravestones. The interior is fairly plain, but certainly worth a look.

There is also a museum, a visit to which might have bolstered my ability to narrate the history in any sort of detail, but it was close to closing and rather expensive, so I cannot offer much insight into that attraction. One final note on Gamla Uppsala is that the restaurant near the museum is absolutely worth a visit for lunch. The lunch specials, which are quite good, come with as much coffee and fresh, warm bread as you want, and may actually qualify as reasonably-priced, a first for my visit to Sweden (I may be a little bitter about to exorbitant price of eating out... One of very few gripes I have about the country).

After Gamla Uppsala, we headed back to town to see the castle and the nearby botanical gardens. We didn't actually go in the castle, as it was closed, and many parts of the gardens were closed for the season or under construction, but it was quite nice to just walk around and enjoy the autumn colors - fall in Sweden may be just as good as it is in New England.

That is indeed a pink church.

The view Uppsala Cathedral from the hill on which the castle sits.

Turns out, the best views of the castle itself are from a little farther away. Still, going up close is a great way to fully appreciate the pink-ness.

Cannons pointing directly at the cathedral. A feud? Symbolism? Ill-planned decorating? Not a castle employee in sight on an off-season Sunday afternoon, so I'll have to find out another day.

The path from the castle to the botanical gardens.

A perk of sightseeing during the off-season is that there are fewer people around to scoff when the American college kids start sliding down the railings.

I'm starting to think that the warm colored buildings all over Sweden may be a way of counteracting the depressing, gray sky that sets in around late September.

Those are indeed cats on the sign. No real cats in sight, though.