Okay, maybe I should have taken a better picture but I did the best I could with what I had.
There aren't many pimped out pedestrian signs that I haven't seen in my 'hood, but a while back I stumbled upon this one. If only the photo were better maybe we could easily read the speech bubble. Oh well. All the better to bring back signlations. What should this speech bubble say?
And we're off. Well, still off and on our way. 16 hours by train into the arctic circle. The sky is finally a little lighter and everything outside is white.
It still feels very surreal walking around the snow-covered city with a grey backdrop.
After weeks of snowfall and well below freezing temperatures, the city is blanketed in bright snow. This morning's walk felt like I was walking through a black and white photo, or maybe sepia-toned with the chocolate-colored tree trunks.
It may be between -10 and -20, but it is pretty lovely.
Meanwhile, the weather widgets on my mac and iPhone are having issues. For the past couple of weeks they don't seem to be properly updating the forecasts based on current temperatures. I figured that for the first couple of days this was just because of an unusual cold front that was expected to come and go. But this has been going on for a while now. Anyone else notice this?
The good thing is that they've at least updated their predicted minimum temperature for today, so that it is identical to the actual observed temperature. Better than last week's repeated -20 with the minimum for the day set to -8. That was almost insulting.
Our second new year's eve celebration as Stockholmies has come and gone. One thing that won't be changing in 2010 is our discovery of great street signs.
Beautiful day.
These are photos of the campus where I work. The first is part of our building, and the second is walking around the Hospital campus.
Here's what it looked like yesterday from my office window:
Swedish is not an easy language to learn. And no, it's not because I am American and speak nothing but English all day long...I actually do know other languages. Living in Sweden and not speaking the language makes me feel like an idiot. I'm a relatively smart person and can get out of a pickle pretty easily, but in Sweden I feel trapped inside a body that can neither make the necessary phonemes nor employ the standard Swedish musicality and tone to my speech. No matter what, I feel like a walking imbecile some days.
This became more evident just the other day when I saw a sign on the local cafe's door and snapped a picture to ask my coworkers about it. This time last year we were still settling into the newness of living in Sweden, intimidated by everything, and barely understanding questions akin to "how are you?" So now with a little more confidence (though, remember, still a walking imbecile some days) I take in the things around me, gathering pictures and notes to ask friends and coworkers.
Dave and I learned the hard way that Swedish has a lot of compound words. And, I recently learned that one way to tell if someone is new-ish to Swedish is by their use of (or more accurately, lack of) compound words. Looking things up in the dictionary is complicated because of this, and until you have some basic vocabulary it is hard to know where to parse the compound words into smaller units. The dictionary is almost useless sometimes. A great example from wikipedia is nagellackborttagningsmedel which means nail polish remover but really is more like nail polish away taking stuff (1).
Walking around town I realized that a little knowledge can in fact be a dangerous thing. Dave and I stood across from a business which said sjukgymnast. Is this sjuk + gymnast or sju + k + gymnast? Gymnast can be inferred from the similar English word, but we had sick (sjuk) and seven (sju) and k (which, I didn't know what it would be but I wasn't going to judge). Open to all possibilities. Sick gymnast or seven k gymnasts? I opted that it meant physical therapy, but it took a few minutes to convince myself.
Which takes me back to last week. I took this picture thinking to myself: Sunday soup...what's that? And why is it only served in December? Is it a special Christmas-time thing that we missed last year? I will definitely have to ask about it.
Good thing I waited a few minutes and figured out that those were just the Sunday hours for the month of December (Söndags=Sunday's + öppet=open). But now I do want some sort of imaginary Sunday soup (which might be something like Söndagsoppa).
Last year I made the terrible mistake of not taking advantage of the light room we have in the health promotion center here at the Karolinska. I heard about it one year ago, thought that it was a fantastic idea, and then just sat on my sad, sorry little vitamin-D deprived, sunshine craving behind.
The light therapy room is pretty great. I couldn't go last week because deadlines loomed over me and essentially trapped me in my seat. But, with a three hour lecture that I had to give this morning behind me, it was time to visit the light room and see what this therapy was all about. The basic idea with light therapy is to expose you to light that you are missing out on by the lack of sunshine. It helps with seasonal affective disorder and just the general blahs of winter in Scandinavia.
Elizabeth and I went for a quick trip and it was just what I needed to relax and rejuvenate. The room is entirely white and you have white blankets to cover yourself so that you see only white. Being in one of those moods this morning, I dressed in head to toe black...so I used two blankets so as not to ruin Elizabeth's clean, bright view.
A couple photos of us relaxing over lunch
