Category: Culture

10 Swedish ways to describe this summer 

Posted on by Neil Shipley's watching the Swedes

  
So far, this is one of the rainiest and coldest Swedish summers on record. Scanning Facebook and other media, I’ve come up with the top 10 Swedish ways to describe this usually happy season: 

1) Pissväder ( pissy weather)

2) Sommar-ångest (Summer anxiety)

3) Höstlikt (similar to autumn)

4) Sommar?? (Is this really summer??)

5) Trött på detta (sick of this)

6) Äntligen sol! (Finally – sun!)

7) Vafaan!? (What the hell!?)

8) Regn, regn, regn (rain, rain, rain)

9) Sjuktkallt (extremely cold)

10) Semesterbubbel (holiday bubbly)

Swedish Dads

Posted on by Neil Shipley's watching the Swedes

60 days or lose them. That’s the deal in Sweden when it comes to dads taking out parental leave. 

Sweden has one of the world’s most generous parental leave systems in the world – 480 days per child, with a paid allowance from the state. These days can be divided between the parents however they like, apart from 60 days that must be taken by the father (presuming heterosexual partners).  If he doesn’t do this, the days are simply lost. 
This is an effort by the government to promote gender equality around child nurturing – and a more equal sharing of child benefit and leave. 

Photographer Johan Bävman found this so interesting that he has documented various fathers during their paternity leave. The exhibition called ‘Swedish Dads’ has raised interest around the world as it challenges traditional stereotypes about gender roles in the family. Johan himself says that he wants to show pictures of role models so that more dads take the opportunity to be home with their newborns.   

Photo: Johan Bävman

It’s no surprise that this initiative comes out of Sweden. According to one piece of cultural research, Sweden is extreme when compared to other countries in the area of gender overlap (men doing historically ‘traditionally female’ things and women doing historically ‘traditionally male’ things). This system and also this photo series seem to just reinforce the findings in this research. 

Can it be that Swedish men are the best dads in the world? Or is it just that the system allows them the freedom and approval to develop their relationships early on with their children? 

To see the pictures go to http://www.johanbavman.se

Ullared – Mecca in Swedish

Posted on by Neil Shipley's watching the Swedes

  
Deep in the woods of rural Sweden lies what can only be described as a Swedish Mecca. To this location, people travel from all over the country. The journey might take several hours, but it’s well worth it for them. 

The place is a village called Ullared. And in Ullared is a massive low-price shopping centre called Gekås. 

Surrounding the airline hanger that is Gekås are a variety of outlet stores, restaurants, a camp site, a hotel – all making the journey more attractive to the pilgrimaging bargain hunter. When I went to Ullared this week for the first time, I felt like I experienced another level of Swedish culture. 

The car park itself was my first surprise, rows upon rows of vehicles that would put any Disneyland to shame. After parking the car, you walk towards the shopping centre like a trail of lemmings. On the way, you pick up a trolley large enough to house a small family. Each trolley is colour-coded and numbered so that it’s easy to locate should you step away from it inside the building. We walked straight  into the store, but I’ve heard that it’s not unusual to wait a long time in a queue – sometimes due to the sheer volume of people, they adopt a one-out, one-in policy. Once inside, you are overwhelmed by the giganticness of the place, the thousands of customers, they yellow and blue blinding interior and the aisle upon aisle upon aisle of bargains. But the initial shock abates quickly. Within 10 seconds, I had purchased a frying pan and was trying to persuade a friend that they should buy individual hamburger thermometers. 

All in all, I ended up with towels, sheets, underwear, freezer bags and a variety of other things. I left the place feeling satisfied with a job well done, even though I am an amateur when compared to many of the other shoppers there. Some seriously disturbed people even spend a week there, camping at the camp site and shopping every day. 

It is hard to explain how legendary Ullared is in Sweden. Everyone has an opinion about it, it seems. At Gekås they turn over multibillions per annum. Employees and regular customers have become TV celebrities thanks to a reality show that follows life in this shopping Mecca and is broadcasted weekly on national television.  At the local museum in Varberg, there is even a small exhibition about Ullared, which reflects its place in popular culture. It was there I learned that the average customer is a single mother of three, aged 42, who visits Ullared twice a year and spends 3600 sek each time. 

So if you ever visit Sweden, and want to experience something outside of the usual red cottages, forests, lakes and beautiful cities, take a trip to Ullared. You never know what you might find there. 

Sweden’s ‘best coast’

Posted on by Neil Shipley's watching the Swedes

The town of Gothenburg is located on Sweden’s west coast, or the ‘best coast’ as the locals competitively call it in an attempted poke at Stockholm which is on the east coast. Spending a day here, it’s easy to feel the constant presence of the sea. Many of the streets have sea-related or harbour-related names and on the menus around town are a plethora of fish and seafood specialities: hand-peeled shrimp, freshly caught cod and classic fish gratin amongst them. At the top of the main restaurant stretch, known as Avenyn, is a statue. This statue is the grand figure of Poseidon, created by Swedish sculpter Carl Milles. There Poseidon stands in all his naked glory, willy dangling, fish in one hand, guarding the city of the sea. 

The city is currently packed with thousands of tourists, mostly in football gear. This week sees the annual event of the Gothia cup, a football competition for youths that attracts teams from all over the world. 

Gothenburg strikes me as a proud place. Proud of its unique position, proud of its role as Sweden’s second city and, not least, proud of its strong nautical heritage.  

  

Prawn pig out – a Swedish concept

Posted on by Neil Shipley's watching the Swedes

  
This week I had what can only be described as a very Swedish experience. With friends, I participated in a ‘shrimp cruise’, also referred to as a ‘prawn pig out’. 

It works like this. You board a boat and, as it chugs around the archipelago, you eat as many shrimps as you can stomach. The menu consists of shrimps, aioli, bread. You wash this down with wine, cocktails and beer. Then there’s cheese and coffee. As you peel and pick away, the gastronomical treat is accompanied by a live band playing very loud music of a varied nature – rock, pop, country, Eurovision. I guess it’s to appeal to a wider audience. 

On this particular prawn pig out, there were about 50 passengers. And they were as eclectic as the music. Young couples, middle-aged couples, former party girls, pensioners and a gang of work colleagues from what seemed to be a construction company. Despite our differences, we all had one thing in common – a love for all-you-can-eat shrimps. 

I can’t exactly describe this experience as classy. But it was actually fun. And very very Swedish. 

Top 12 Swedish Summer Songs

Posted on by Neil Shipley's watching the Swedes

  Yesterday I wrote about Thomas Ledin’s ‘Sommaren är kort’ and it got me thinking about other Swedish summer songs. So here’s my top twelve. And, as I hate Thomas Ledin’s song, it doesn’t even make the list. 

12: ‘Sommarnatt’ (Summer night) by Snowstorm. A song in which the singer ‘cruises along through the darkness in his giant machine.’ Classic uncomplicated Swedish lyrics. 

11: ‘Sommarsången’ (Summer song) by Siv Malmkvist. With lyrics like ‘and I want to sing that butterflies are good’, it just has to make the list. 

10: ‘Ta mig till havet’ (Take me to the sea) by Peter Lindblad. ‘The sand is moist, and the woman is young, crazy of longing am I’. Swedish summer sin at its best. 

9: ‘Sommar, sommar, sommar’ by Sten Carlberg is a little ditty that is synonymous with Sweden’s popular radio program ‘Summer on P1’. Summer is about ‘sun and blue skies’ but it slowly dissipates like a dream. 

8: ‘Midsommarnatt’ ( Midsummer’s Night) by Eddy Meduza. Dance band summer to which we ‘dance the whole night long’. 

7. ‘Sol, Vind och Vatten’ (Sun, wind and water) by Ted Gärdestad. An elementary song about tanned legs, high mountains and harbouring secret romantic longing. 

6: ‘Magaluf’ by Orup transports us to the tacky Spanish coast and sings of parties, alcohol and seagulls laughing until they are hoarse. 

5: ‘Our last summer’ by Abba. No list of Swedish music is complete without one of theirs. This one takes us to Paris and romantic walks along the Seine with boring banker Harry. 

4. ‘Så skimrande var aldrig havet’ by Evert Taube, sung by Lill Lindfors. (The sea was never this glistening). A fantastic romantic song by folk legend Taube about summer’s, and maybe life’s, first kiss. ‘The sea was never this glistening, nor the beach this liberating. The fields, the meadows and the trees were never this beautiful, nor did the flowers smell so sweet’. 

3: ‘Sommar’ by Kayo. A jazzy mellow song about the loss of summer with the loss of love – ‘there’ll never be a summer, there’ll never be sunshine, or jetties or mosquitoes – not without you.’ 

2: ‘Sommarkort’ (Summer picture) by Cornelis Vreejsvik. My favorite Cornelis song which captures summer in a melodious song – ‘let’s take a picture of children in the summertime as they dance – a moment on Earth’. 

1. ‘Summer sun’ by Koop. Rhythmic and cool, this song transports you to beach parties drinking rose wine and feeling the light breeze of summer – ‘Midsummer sun your love’s divine, never before have I met your kind.’

Baby we’re burning – Swedes, songs and Satanists

Posted on by Neil Shipley's watching the Swedes

valbiorg

This weekend, the 30th April, in Sweden is Valborgsmässoafton. Yes, another one of those long indecipherable Swedish words.

This one translates as Walpurgis Eve, and is a day enshrined in tradition not only in Sweden but in other European countries such as Germany, Holland, the Czech Republic, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia and Finland. Rather Baltic in other words.

The name ‘Valborg’ is from an English Saint but, despite that, this isn’t really a religious celebration. It’s more to do with the welcoming of spring, and feels rather pagan actually. In the evening on Valborgsmässafton, Swedes gather around huge bonfires and listen to songs. These songs are in the form of traditional choir music designed especially for this occasion to shake off  the nasty dark winter and celebrate the burgeoning buds of the lighter season.

And like many traditions in Sweden, this one also has a rural origin. These bonfires are part of a Swedish tradition dating back to the early 18th century. On this day, farm animals were let out to graze and bonfires lit to scare away predators and other evil beings. This is rather ironic as Walpurgis Eve is also an important holiday in Satanism at it marks the founding of the Church of Satan.

But religion aside. On Walpurgis eve, I am watching the Swedes watching the flames, listening to music and looking forward to the spring and summer months ahead.

We survived another winter, and summer is coming!

Sweden’s Pink Thursday – washing and witches

Posted on by Neil Shipley's watching the Swedes

jesus feet

Today, the Thursday before Easter is called Skärtorsdag in Swedish. As the word ‘skär’ translates as a shocking pink colour, many people joke that today is ‘pink Thursday’. But the word ‘skär’ in this case relates to something else – something far more biblical.

The word ‘skär’ is an early Nordic word meaning clean and pure. And here, we see a parallel to the English word for ‘Skärtorsdag’. In English, today is called ‘Maundy Thursday’ and it relates to the religious rite known as ‘the maundy’ which involved the ritualistic cleaning of feet. According to Christian belief, today was the day that Jesus performed this act until the recipients had clean and pure feet. It also is the day of the infamous Last Supper.

However, in Sweden today, ‘Skärtrorsdag’ is not celebrated in any great religious fashion but in a pagan manner. A old pagan belief in Sweden was that on this day witches would mount their broomsticks to fly away to the legendary mountain known as Blåkulla. At Blåkulla it was believed that the devil held his earthly court. There the witches celebrated their sabbath and danced with the devil.

In modern day Sweden, we see this reflected in the many children who dress up as witches. These kids paint Easter cards and walk around the neighbourhood knocking on doors to wish everybody a happy Easter. In exchange, they hope to receive Easter sweets.

påskkkärring

The sound of the city

Posted on by Neil Shipley's watching the Swedes

 

Often when we travel, we return with stories of food, climate, people. But one of the things that strikes me when I’m abroad is sound. Each city, each place, seems to have its own sound identity. I love sitting in the evenings looking out over cityscapes and drinking in the melodies of the night. In Stockholm, there is the hum of boats or of water lapping gently against shores, wind blowing through trees. In Bangkok it’s the sound of the tuk-tuks and the tinkle of chimes. In Delhi it’s the distant voices from temples and markets and all night traffic. In New York, it’s the hum of traffic and people, the buzzing of neon lights and the scream of emergency vehicles. Here in Nairobi, where I am today, it’s the sound of traffic interspersed with drum beats and wailing music.  Distant voices carrying through the night full of woeful stories. 

As I sit and listen, I experience another layer of the city, another layer of the culture. With full respect to food and climate, it’s the sound of the city that rules the night.