Ron's Big Life Update - May 2002

"Sweden is the most Americanized country in the world. The U.S. is a close second." - a co-worker from ADC Sweden

"Stockholm is just like Manhattan, without the constant sense of fear" - me

"Munkar till alla!" (Donuts for everyone!)

Hej!

Well, Sweden was a blast. Along with two co-workers from Minneapolis, I spent five days in Stockholm and a day in Reykjavik, Iceland. We stayed at the house of an American ADC-er and his wife. They're there for a year, and they put up ADC folks at the house when they visit. It saves money for the company, and it gives the rookie travelers like me a little less to worry about.

Sweden is an awful lot like Minnesota. Most of the people live in a big city about a third of the way up (Stockholm/Minneapolis), and the population thins out the farther north you go.

For someone who has never traveled overseas, I can't imagine a better introduction to Europe than through Sweden. They say everyone from age 10 to 70 speaks English; these are the ages at which they've been taught English in schools, and I had no trouble communicating with anyone at all. I only got stumped once at an ATM, and had to ask the woman behind me what the text on the screen meant (Oh...it wants the amount I want to withdraw. Got it.)

All the people spoke English, but just about everything in writing was in Swedish, including road signs, sale signs in the store windows, and everything in the train and bus systems. I can now recognize a word here and there, but I still can't pronounce anything in Swedish. To my untrained ear, the language sounds a lot like German. Completely unintelligible to me.

We were impressed at the English skills of everyone we ran into at ADC Sweden. We had about four full days of meetings and tours, including some very technical discussions, and there wasn't a single concept that we couldn't communicate in English. Occasionally, they'd talk amongst themselves in Swedish for a few sentences (probably to clarify things; I doubt that they just didn't want us to know what they were talking about), then seamlessly switch right back into English for us. Remarkable linguistic dexterity! Afterwards, they told me that they still think in Swedish and have to translate into English on the fly, and that unless Americans are around, they hardly ever speak English.

Getting around in Stockholm is amazingly simple. Car traffic in the city is strongly discouraged, from the high prices for parking to the teeny narrow streets, and the city has amply compensated by setting up the most impressive public transportation system I've run across. To get downtown from the suburban house we stayed at, we walked about 5 minutes to a bus stop, took the bus to the suburb's train station, and took the train to a central station downtown. You pay when you get on the bus or train, and you get to ride anywhere you want on the system for an hour. Transfers are free, and train/bus transfers are free. Our American host took us on the system once, reminded us that we always want bus #527 to get back to the house, showed us the landmark we need to hit the DING button on the bus (I still had trouble with the actual street names), and turned us loose on Stockholm. A painless way to get from here to there.

Unlike in a lot of cities, the trains and buses are clean, and are used by everyday people in the city. The locals told me that I wouldn't have any trouble just wandering around in downtown, and I indeed felt pretty safe at all times. Even coming back to the house late, there were single girls on the trains and buses, and it looked like nobody would give them a hard time. Quite a refreshing change from the U.S.

Downtown Stockholm looked a lot like parts of Manhattan - a solid block of buildings, 3 or 4-stories tall, stores and businesses on the ground floor, apartments or offices above, and the streets laid out in a grid. It all felt very familiar, even though Stockholm celebrates its 750th birthday this year. (Yes, Stockholm was founded in 1252.)

Stockholm is OLD. I got the impression that a lot of the buildings were built with longevity in mind - even some of the suburban residential houses, which had ceramic tile roofs. (I toyed with the idea for about one second when we got a new roof on our house four years ago.) We ate lunch one day in a castle from the 1700's. The streets in Old Town are paved with cobblestones that must go WAY back, and Old Town does indeed mean Old Town.

And despite being old, the city looked sparklingly clean and (for lack of a better word) well-oiled. Public restrooms in bars and restaurants were pretty tidy, and I even got to use my first pay-toilet in the train station - 50 cents well-spent! I didn't see any homeless people at all, and practically no litter in the streets (I counted one pop can, total.) Very impressive.

I think overall, there was a fundamental difference in thinking between the Swedes and the Americans. We Americans like to have our Stuff - the house, the car, the backyard, the office at work with a door. While I'm sure that Swedes like Stuff too, I noticed a much greater feeling of community while I was there. People rode public transportation instead of driving. I noticed that a lot of them lived in apartments in high-rise buildings, rather than owned houses. (Many more apartment complexes than in the US.) In the Swedish ADC offices, many of them worked at desks adjacent to one another, instead of little individual cubes like we have in Dilbert-land. There was less of "my" space in the offices, and much more of "our" space. People congregated to a common area for well-attended coffee breaks, and they used office mugs which they kept in a little office cabinet, and washed daily in a little office dishwasher. It beat drinking coffee out of a styrofoam cup, and people were pretty good about rounding up their mugs and making sure they found their way back to the sink. (The building receptionist was responsible for running the mugs and glasses through the dishwasher. It was part of her job responsibilities, like sorting the mail.)

I'm sure a lot of that philosophy is tied to the economy in Sweden. The income tax is really high, but health care is essentially free. (A doctor's visit costs about $20, regardless of what you're seeing the doctor for. Same for prescriptions.) Schools are free to Swedish citizens, including college, where you even get a small stipend from the state! Apparently, the ability to take classes is a right of the people, and there is no "flunking out"; if you fail the same class 18 times and pass it on the 19th try, you continue along in your education from that point with no real penalties. I'm sure that many Americans might be put off by some of the socialist leanings, but I found Sweden to be a refreshing change from the cutthroat American Capitalism. (To over-generalize and put things in my naive terms: The Swedes seem to have a respect the infrastructure and the System. Americans seem to use the System only to benefit Me; to heck with you-all.)

The food was surprisingly good. I was told to expect fish, and they indeed had fish, but it was tasty (not my usual fish stix.) Lots of red meat animals as well, including reindeer (I still doubt that reindeer even exist. Just like Santa Claus.) Chicken is less common. Plenty of fruits and vegetables, and tasty veggies at that. We commented on how good their tomatoes were, where Minnesota tomatoes aren't so hot in the winter. Unfortunately, there was lots of McDonald's restaurants all over Stockholm. In downtown, you walk down the street, and there's usually one McDonald's in eyeshot at all times. And usually a Burger King across the street trying to keep up. There is a Swedish chain that competes with McDonald's, with a similar menu. We ate at one of them as a snack one day, and the food from the Swedish chain wasn't bad.

Swedish women are unbelievably attractive - I can see why everyone joked about the Swedish bikini team. I probably would never have survived adolescence if I was surrounded by such beauty at all times. God bless.

People drive smaller cars over there, which you probably already knew. Mostly European cars, like Volkswagens, Audis, BMWs, Mercedes, and Volvos. There were a few American cars, and very few Japanese cars. Hardly any Hondas! Plus a bunch of manufacturers I've never heard of (Opal? Who is Opal?). Plus, the models were all different; Ford apparently makes a teeny tiny little mini-car called a "Ka", about 2/3 the size of a VW Beetle. Tough to describe, but I'd love to own something that cute. Gas is expensive - about $4 a gallon.

I didn't get much of a chance to listen to the radio over there. All I had access to was a little clock radio in my room in the house, so I got about 10 minutes a day. The FM band had the same smattering of formats as the US - classic rock, top 40, lite rock, etc. The top 40 music over there has caught the same infection as American pop music, so it wasn't very accessible to my snooty ears. The classic rock station was pretty cool in small doses. They played familiar American and British rock from eons ago, all squashed together: ZZ Top, Sweet, The Clash, Blue Oyster Cult, and mercifully small amounts of Fleetwood Mac and the Eagles, only the zany male host and his female sidekick were speaking Swedish.

We had the tastiest pastries in Sweden. They're called semlor [I think], and they said they're only available between Christmas and Easter. (Kinda like how you can only find candy canes around Christmas.) Start with a little bread/cake roll, cut off the top 1/2-inch, add a 1/2-inch of whipped cream to the exposed part, then re-attach the top. Mmmm. Oh, and somehow, add a sweet almond filling inside, like the filling in a jelly donut. Mega-mmmm...

On the way back to the U.S., we spent a day in Iceland. Iceland was baffling. The landscape between the airport and the city looked a bit like the southwest desert - mostly flat, a small hill here and there, and mountains in the background - only the ground was covered with black, jagged volcanic rocks. We stayed one night in Reykjavik, and learned that nightlife starts pretty late out there. We walked to a local restaurant for some excellent seafood, then hit an Irish bar and left just as the place was filling up, at about midnight!

There's a lot of volcanic activity in Iceland, and the entire city of Reykjavik is heated geothermally, by pumping naturally hot water out of the ground. Cool! No pollution at all! Ever cooler is that next to the power plant, they artificially created a giant hot spring that you can bathe in: The "Blue Lagoon" was very cool, and we figured that there was an 80-degree difference between the water temperature and the air temperature. Yep - baffling.

Fortunately, I didn't have jet lag in either direction, which is pretty weird considering that Minneapolis and Stockholm are seven time zones apart. (Midnight out there = 5 PM at home, 7 AM out there = midnight at home the night before) They told me that the key to avoiding jet lag was to try and stay awake until the proper local bedtime. On the way out there, we made it until 8:30, and it was like staying up all night and going to sleep at 1:30 in the afternoon the next day. But it worked.

Unfortunately for the music world, I didn't get a chance to visit any record stores in Stockholm. The closest I got was 30 seconds in a mall store, which carried a boatload of CDs that I'd already heard of. Fooey. As a consolation, I did find a few pop compilation CDs in the Iceland airport, with a total of about 15 songs in Icelandic that were local hits there in the '70s and '80s. I can't pronounce any of them.

Oh, and we saw three moose. (Mooses? Meese? Mice?) We were driving through one of the small peninsula neighborhoods southeast of the city, and we spotted three mooses about 20 feet off the side of the road, just grazing and doing what mooses do. They grazed for a little while, then lumbered across the road to the other side. They're HUGE, but not the most graceful creatures. Our American ADC-er wasn't with us at the time, and was pretty annoyed to learn we'd seen meese; he's been there almost a year and hasn't seen one yet. We saw three deer, too, but that wasn't nearly as impressive as the meeses.

So now I've been overseas, and that pretty much dominated my little existence in February. While I was out of the house, Margaret took up the linoleum on the kitchen floor and refinished the bare wood underneath. It looks very nice, but I was less than thrilled about the seven weeks during which I couldn't walk in the kitchen.

Sweden observes daylight savings time just like us, but they start a week earlier than us (or is it later? I forget.)

The first half of winter was way warmer than average, and we got spoiled. After mid-February, it's been way colder than average, and we've had one of the snowiest Aprils on record. In fact the April weather has done this, all in the space of two weeks: snow, 91 degrees, snow, snow again. And so far, May is cold and rainy, with highs in the high 40's. Ah, Minnesota...

I did a bit of clothes shopping, and in April, we celebrated New Pants Week. It doesn't sound like a big deal, but consider that I buy clothes less often than I buy a house. The novelty is starting to wear off, but it's going to be hard to top New Pants Week for action-packed excitement.

My (extremely short) brother, Kenny, was out here last weekend. Minneapolis was a stop between Saskatchewan and Boston, and Kenny got to hang out with us for the whole weekend. And what a weekend it was:

Friday - Kenny flew in. Margaret made enchiladas for dinner, and for dessert, we rounded up our friend Kris and drove out to...the new Krispy Kreme donut shop, which opened only about a week ago. This may not sound like a big deal, but Minneapolis has practically no Dunkin' Donuts shops. (And there's a great story behind that, only I've forgotten too many details to retell it. If anyone has the urge to research why there aren't any Dunkin' Donuts in the Twin Cities, I'll gladly reproduce the story in my next letter.)

So, we drove up at 9:30 PM on a Friday, and there was a traffic cop directing the cars into the drive-thru. What a zoo! We parked across the street and got on line. It was a half-hour wait, and Kris, Kenny and I eventually got a total of 6 dozen donuts. Good eatin's! They were gone by the end of the weekend.

Saturday - A co-worker threw a party just over the border in Wisconsin. Serious meat activity: barbecued ribs, deep-fried turkey, and piles of crawfish. Margaret took a crawfish home as a pet, and now he's named Claude. Good eatin's! (No, we're not going to eat Claude.)

Sunday - We threw our now-annual Cinco De Mayo party, and I think it was a smashing success. The theme was low-end food, and included five different varieties of microwave burritos, plus a boatload of Little Debbie snack cakes for dessert. Kenny's birthday was right after the party, so he got what amounted to a Little Debbie birthday cake. Good eatin's! Unfortunately, there were a LOT of leftovers, and it looks like I'll be eating these things until next year.

Crap From The Past got a major upgrade to the website (crapfromthepast.com) It now has an archive of every CFTP show I've ever done (except for about 40 shows in 1996, which should be up by the end of the year.) Ten years worth of shows, and over 450 HOURS of streaming RealAudio, available on demand anytime. Good eatin's!

Otherwise, I'm (remarkably) still employed. I think ADC is trying to sell off its photonics division, since we're not making any money, and our forecasts show that we won't be making any money until around 2005. Oy vey! The 45-minute commute has made me cranky and irritable, and I am no fun to be around when I get out of the car at the beginning of the work day, and right after I get home. Oh well, something's gotta give soon, and any change will be welcome.

So Happy Mother's Day to all, and may all of you have a great New Pants Week!

Ron & Margaret