Sweden plans to spend 500 million crowns (that’s 69 million dollars) on a project that will put one of its distinctive little red cottages on the surface of the Moon:

The state agency SSC has carried out a technical study showing that it is indeed possible to put a little red cottage on the moon.

“If we manage to do this Sweden will be the third country to occupy the moon”, said SSC’s Fredrik von Schéele…

He explains how the last few years have seen a new race to the moon… putting a house on the moon would strengthen the impression of Sweden as a hi-tech country.

“Everybody sees the moon, so the house should be a symbol for mankind, as well as a sort of all-seeing eye looking over us,” said Genberg.

The giant eye, of course, will be used to monitor the public for evidence of tax evasion.

[link]

Most people know the IKEA, blonde-wood-and-beige-upholstery Scandinavian style, but every time I go to Sweden I’m struck by all the neon signs hanging above every shop. Every decently-sized city I’ve been to has a ton, and they’re all very stylized with a sort of art-deco, 1930’s elegance. I decided on this most recent trip that I should start taking snapshots. There’s a few more right now on my flickr.

Unfortunately whenever I come back from a vacation I’m always shocked by how little I photographed and I always feel like I should have more. I guess all shutterbugs feel that way, though.

So I’m back from Sweden! Not a bad little trip. I hung out with my sister and stepbrother, ate lots of my stepfather’s delicious cooking, drank wine, snapps and whiskey in copious amounts, and got lots of great Christmas booty including a beautiful molybdenum steel chef’s knife.

On the way home yesterday I sat next to a middle-aged man who struck up a conversation this way: “An American? But you are drinking wine!” I laughed and started talking to him, and at first it was interesting; he was a former submarine sailor with the Swedish navy and had traveled pretty much the whole world. After a while, though, I picked up a whiff of extreme right-wing bullshit coming off the guy.

I run into these people on transatlantic flights all the time: the Disenchanted Swedes. They always seem to think that as an American, I must be deeply in love with the Capitalist system, and that I should expect them to apologize abjectly for everything that Sweden does differently. (In fact, I love my country, but I think we could do a lot of things better.) This guy spent a lot of time lecturing me on immigrants and welfare abuse in Sweden; something that made me profoundly uncomfortable since there were many foreign-born Swedes sitting all around us on the plane. Although I made my bleeding-heart tendancies pretty obvious by pointing out things like: the corporate-dominated economy has destroyed all but the top-tier of American cities, leaving most of small town America jobless and depressed while small town in Sweden are busy and thriving, and: the American educational system is so underfunded that most Americans can’t locate Canada on a map, let alone Sweden, whereas most Swedes speak two foreign languages, the guy didn’t seem to notice that I didn’t agree with him that Sweden sucks. In fact, I don’t think he was listening to me at all.

Here’s where the hilarity ensued, though: they guy actually told me that New York was an example of “a clean city, with no litter or homeless people.” I literally laughed out loud. Is there some other city called “New York” that I don’t know about?

Things they have in Sweden that we should have in the USA:

• Economy cars with heated seats.
• Reserved seats in movie theaters.
• Konditori; little bakery coffee shops that are sort of like Swedish diners.
• Real snapps that isn’t peach or peppermint (ugh) flavored.
• Duka, a sort of boutiquey (but cheap) kitchen store where everything is really stylish and cute and where 80% of my family’s Christmas shopping took place.

My flu-slash-cold, or whatever it is, is slowly getting better. Each morning I feel theees much better (holding up fingers to indicate about the width of a human hair.) I guess I’m kinda lucky in that I can’t remember the last time I had a real full-blown flu like this.

Yesterday I went to the Vårdcentral (a/k/a neighborhood health cinic) for a rapid strep test (result: negative.) I kind of expected an adventure there, but in truth it wasn’t significantly different from an American health clinic. Except, of course, that the whole thing, including doctor’s visit and lab work, was only about $60. And that’s the price without insurance.

The receptionist who checked me in was very sweet, and pretended to speak English for my benefit. I didn’t realize to what extent she was pretending until I saw what she made of my address, though: “512 Est fiftstret apartmend 16.” That would also explain why she stonily refused to answer a couple of my questions.

I’ve noticed this same dynamic with my stepdad: the first couple years as I got to know him, I would sometimes think that he was offended by something I said, or that he thought a comment I made was dumb, because he’d occasionally sit in complete silence after something I said. But, it turns out that this is just how he reacts when he doesn’t understand something: he’ll never, ever turn to you and say, “what?” Funny.

My Swedish must be getting better, because people don’t instantly switch into English anymore. In fact, a couple people have kept on speaking Swedish to me even after they found out I was American, which is pretty cool. I am starting to actually understand people; for a long time I could talk but I couldn’t understand a word that was said to me. Then, I got to the point where I could pick out enough key words to maybe guess at what people were saying. This time I can actually understand complete sentences, as long as there are no strange or long words in them. One word I don’t know and my mojo is totally thrown off; the whole sentance sounds like gibberish.

My stepbrother Carl is here with his girlfriend Ariel, so we are having an early Christmas today with them, and then my sister and her fiancee are coming up in a couple days for “real” christmas. Carl and Ariel are vegetarians, so my stepfather is cooking a totally veg Christmas dinner for them tonight. This morning he was leafing through the cookbok, saying things like, “what is a Christmas dinner without meat? I all my life I have never heard of such a thing.” It’s nice though that he’s actually catering to them instead of just making them fend for themselves.

My first night in Sweden, my parents took me to a traditional Christmas dinner, a Julbord, at a big old house in the country. The cool thing about a Julbord is that you don’t have to wait until the day of Christmas to have one, and you can eat one more than once during December.

Basically, it’s a big buffet dinner (a smörgåsbord, sorta) where the objective is to try as many different things as possible. This involves taking very, very tiny portions of many things and savoring each one carefully. The Swedes go crazy over stuff like pickled herring (very tasty) and lutfisk (scary, intimidating.) And yes, real genuine Swedish meatballs made an appearance.

The house itself was a huge shambling old mansion in the country with a sort of Adams-family-meets-royal-family motif to it. Everywhere you looked, there were taxidermied animals, strange anonymous old portraits, and ornate Victorian furniture. If there was an overarching theme to the evening, it would have been “MEAT,” from the stuffed animals to the dusty hunting scenes on the walls, to the thinly-sliced reindeer steaks and 100 different kinds of paté at the buffet table. This was definitely no place for vegetarians.

Unfortunately, what I thought was a little cold back in NYC has now erupted into a full-blown flu, with a mild fever and a nasty hacking cough and a sore throat and the whole nine. I’m especially pissed off because I actually got a flu shot this year but I guess I was unlucky enough to pick up some weirdo strain of the flu that the shot doesn’t cover.

At least this is only the beginning of my two weeks here, so maybe I’ll get better in time to enjoy Christmas proper.