My personal favorites are the “secondary cocktail area” and “power assisted water bottle stowage.” But where do the barf bags go?

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?

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.

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.