Seasons change with the scenery

November 4, 2009

There are some things that never ceases to amaze / surprise / baffle despite all the years here, and one of them is the first snow of the season. Every year, even though we're already freezing in our clothes for weeks and complaining about how the radiators don't seem to compensate for the cold, there it comes, a messenger of colder days to come. "What? Snow! Already?"

Another thing is (and I really can't get over telling people this), how my body clock gets confused a few days after we move to winter time (which is actually "normal time"). After lunch, I do something for a few hours until it begins to be pitch dark out. I always think, "Better wrap this up in time for dinner!" or "Oh, I should prepare for bed soon!" and I always get a shock when the clock actually just reads 4 PM.

Today, when I looked out the window, it also surprised me how the trees, in a matter of a few weeks, already lost all their leaves. They were all thick and red when I was writing my blog posts on hiking; now it's a completely different landscape out there. I can see through the trees! I can even see through people's hedges!

(Yes, it's snowing in the second picture)

In the spring, I'll get surprised again when leaves and flowers start sprouting out of nowhere (but that's literally months and months from now!). Interesting though how the change of seasons – or rather, the change in scenery – makes the passage of time so tangible in a way. You can hear, feel and see passage of time, which otherwise remains invisible and abstract.

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November 6, 2009

This weekend, I turn 26 – another marker for time other than the seasons, I guess you could say. There are some things I'll also need getting used to: From then on, I'll no longer become eligible for youth discounts in the national train system. Four years more and I'll hit my 30's! My passport, with those visa stickers from all these years, looks like one of those interactive programs where you can change people's hairstyles and eyebrows. I can also judge that I begin to look, slowly but distinctly, older! Well, it's another ring in the tree of life for me. And, as a quote from Marcus' grandfather goes, "growing older is better than the alternative."

Oh, I bought myself an early birthday present, which I admittedly partly bought mostly to battle boredom in the train, even if I've been meaning to buy it since I've heard about it: Haruki Murakami's memoir, where he talks about running. I'm glad I bought it. It was funny, and at the same time that I felt I could relate to some things he described (through training for races), I enjoyed reading about the out-of-my-league experiences of a more superior, more disciplined runner (and he started marathons at 33! It's not too late!). Besides, I generally love reading about stories of self-inflicted marathon-, ultramarathon- and triathlon pain in Runner's World and similar magazines. This one was written in a similar style: the tempo, the asphalt, the pain and the mind's constant effort to keep the body going are just so immediate in the way they describe their runs.

Well, Murakami also talked about some analogies between writing novels and running, but since I'm not really a writer, I'll leave the artists to judge how he describes the pains of the writing process. However, he did also touch on growing old. Like the seasons, training for the yearly marathons were his measure for time passing, but eventually, as time did pass, he found it ever harder to beat his older results no matter how hard he trained. Like the rest of us, he's also getting older (come to think of it, it's easy to immortalize sports heroes, but they get older too). I dunno, I think the reviews at the back cover didn't give justice to that ageing perspective in the book. In fact, I think that's the real drama in it that makes it this an impacting memoir: this flesh-and-blood althlete who has a talent and love for running (which he even met relatively late in life), despite his worsening race times and ageing body, continues to run because he finds it better than the alternative. It's something of a smaller tragedy, but in it there's also something very inspiring.

microwave lunch

Fiskgratäng = White fish pieces in shrimp-dill sauce, in a bed of baked mashed potatoes = Salvation for the lazy and hungry.

See Tags: Food

Nature near you

It may not seem like it when the thermometer reads 8 degrees C outside at noon, but autumn is a really good time to be out. Provided that it doesn't pour down rain, it's a perfect time for biking or hiking. The air is clean (pollen- and mosquito-free!), it has a little chill – but the sun might show up to share a little warmth and even light the autumn trees bronze! It's a beautiful season, and it's a pity to spend much of this precious golden time indoors, especially since the days are getting shorter and there wouldn't be much to see out in the darkness in a few months' time.

One thing that I absolutely love about being in Sweden is the ability to move around in nature in a place near you live. "Tame" nature or "wilder" nature, just pick a place and a bus to take you there, and in less than 20 minutes' time from leaving your cozy apartment, you can find yourself hiking on a forest path or making your own forest path. And we've been doing one of either of that for the past three Saturdays.

I haven't been bringing the camera in our longer 6- or 7-hour hikes where would have been a hassle to carry a camera bag, but to give our feet a rest last Saturday, we took what we thought would be a somewhat shorter tour near Jursla, a subdivision north of the city located at the foot of a mountainous forest. I'm happy I brought the camera with me because there were so many things to see and it had been the most varied hiking tour we had so far. Aside from just walking up and down for hours, we also got to see out from some lookout points, visited an old iron age house ruin, and even had to climb up some rocky hills. Marcus used the compass more actively to look for routes along the roads less traveled; we crossed bogs and we struggled through twigs, branches and undergrowth. The whole tour didn't take much shorter than our other hikes as a result. We crossed a smaller distance but had to pass through more "jungle".

Pictures of dense forests tend to look all the same after a while, especially when you're not in them to experience how forests really are different from each other. Some forest ground are mossy, some are wet and slippery, some are dry, some are littered with rocks, some feel nice and bouncy. Different shades and shapes of moss, small plants and mushroom grow in different places. Forests also have different light, and indeed different temperatures depending on what trees are growing and how tall or spread out the trees are. There's really nothing like experiencing it. And come to think of it, it's strange to feel lucky to have an opportunity to walk in nature when the history of civilization is more or less that of people wanting to live out of it.

Without further ado, here are some pictures of the fun parts of our tour. No pictures of jungle though, but just the parts where we dared to take out the camera!

At the edge of the forest (in Kvillinge, north of Norrköping)

Coffee breaks (yes, even hikes have fika) are a good time to take out the camera! As a rule, we take a break every 50 minutes to take a warm drink and something sweet, and to change socks.


Going down a smallish cliff where a rope was affixed for hikers' convenience


Sometimes, there were no ropes, but hands, feet and a good balance do the trick.


Ruins of a fornborg (Iron Age hill fort – the link takes you to a wiki article; more on Swedish fornborg here). There are three such hill forts near each other in the Kvillinge-Jursla area.


Yxbacken ski slope north of Jursla, on a very windy day. Our last stop before going down and taking the bus back home

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Norrköping municipality's website has maps and descriptions of nature reserves and hiking paths in the municipality here. If you live in Sweden, your municipality may have a similar list. "The green map" that shows details in the geography (altitude, landmarks, roads, paths and land use), which can be bought in outdoor-gear stores should also come in handy if you're considering to do a longer hike for the first time. Good boots,

Monopoly - and Mellanopoly

As we were cleaning out Marcus' dad's old storage room looking for old stuff that used to belong or have been handed down to Marcus, we found, among other interesting childhood memorabilia like old handwritten projects (in the days before everybody had printers), a very old Monopol board in a yellowing box.


It's the very same thing as Monopoly, but in a Swedish version licensed under a company called Alga-spel. The streets here all correspond to actual areas in Stockholm, with "Centrum" as among one of the most expensive places to live.


Everything about this board is so vintage-y (or retro-y?). The Chance and Community Chest cards look like they've just been created with a typewriter – they look a bit like those old library catalogue cards from the past, but in faded pink and blue!


The houses and hotels are all made of wood. The playing pieces are plastic; only the train and the limousine remain from the set, though.

When I was in high school, my siblings and I used to have a tradition of playing Monopoly after dinner while waiting for the New Year. There was lots of banter and laughter – until people started getting bankrupt. Obviously, at one point in time, the richest players would continue to get richer as they accumulate assets and buy the others, who also have to pay more and more rent, off the game. Makes you hate capitalists, really.

As for me, I loved playing the game – when I was earning the most money, of course.


The guy in the middle is RJ, our family friend, who was happy being the small-scale capitalist. It wasn't going that well for my brother, on the other hand, as it was for me.

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About a year ago, surfing for some Sweden-related sites, I ran across this fun online magazine for non-Swedes, The Turnip, which now seems discontinued. (The yellow turnip, or rutabaga, is also sometimes called swede). Most articles there poke fun at very typical Swedish things from the foreigner's perspective – kind of foreigners' "inside jokes", in that some require some familiarity with Swedish objects or culture to see the humor in them. Among the things that made me laugh was their new Swedish take on Monopoly, the Mellanopoly – "the Swedish property trading board game where the aim is to have roughly the same as everybody else"!


Mellan means "middle" in Swedish. The rules of this "new" game, which you can read about in full here, make reference to the so-called Swedish model, believed to be the third way between capitalism and communism, of giving security to all citizens through high taxes ("Super Super Tax" in the board). Swedes are believers of equality and fairness – sometimes exaggeratedly so. So, the game also pokes fun at the Swedish jantelagen, a belief that everyone should strive to appear like everybody else. "Perfectly normal, successful Swedes go to great pains to appear to be no better than anyone else because this would not be fair or equitable," my Swedish culture book reads. "It extends to the way people dress, their cars, their demeanor in public, and their inability to accept compliments gracefully."

Just look at Ingvar Kamprad, the founder of IKEA and one of the richest men in the world at one point in time. In an article about frugal billionaires, I read: "Even though he is worth approximately $31 billion he still wears very casual low cost clothing along with decorating his home with low cost furniture from his store. In addition, he still drives a 1993 Volvo!" From another article: "An April 2008 article in London's Daily Mail described the Swedish billionaire, with his faded coat and scuffed shoes, as looking like 'another pensioner scraping by on a tight budget.' Kamprad takes pride in furnishing his home with IKEA items he assembled himself". He also insists on traveling economy class with the rest of his employees. What's good enough for his employees should be good enough for him, he thinks. Or vice versa: he doesn't think he deserves anything more than what an ordinary employee does.

Is that Mellanopoly, or what?

Kidding aside, Filipino politicians who actually do think they're something could learn a thing or two from Ingvar. Do the filthy rich really have the right to flaunt their assets (if they were indeed accumulated in a fair manner), when there is tangible social inequality? Like the way Monopoly works, generations of rich groups will continue to have an advantage over generations of others who have virtually nothing, which really makes one think of what assets we "deserve" from birth, inheritance, or socialization. Are higher taxes, and consequently, less money for each individual's personal spending in order to give security to others the solution? Probably only if people, not least the politicians who manage the tax money, have a philosophy of mellanopoly, I think.

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Marcus and I have since played two games on the old Monopol board, both of which I had won. Because we were only two players, it became obvious that the game was steered by chance, mostly through what we drew from the Chance and Community Chest cards, but also based on who lands on whose property more times until the game becomes too unequal. I was pretty happy with myself, but if you're the bankrupt one too many times, I can understand the game play does get pretty damn irritating.

One of my favorite things

Hej! This one is just a shortie. I feel short of time to blog right now because I'm doing two courses in Stockholm, which requires me to commute a lot each week. I've also enrolled myself in boxing classes, apart from doing swimming and spinning, and they keep me busy (and tired) when I'm not cracking books.

Just wanted to say that my favorite cookie brand of all time, Ballerina, came up with this new seasonal flavor, pepparkaka (gingerbread) in time for the Yuletide season (Yes... even here, there's a bit of Christmas air as soon as months begin to end with -ber).

Anyone who met me in my first year as an MA student here knows I'm absolutely addicted to Ballerinas. I literally had to stop myself from looking at them so as not to buy them. They're so good and so inviting to eat. Thankfully (or unfortunately), they phased out my favorite flavor, banana that year. They replaced it with mint, which I don't like as much. Nougat, I thought, was delicious but a bit too plain, and that put an end to my Ballerina devouring.

Today I saw that they had the pepparkaka flavor in the store, and as I just finished spinning then, I thought I'd reward myself by trying it out. Heheh. There. I just needed an excuse. It's really delicious and the gingerbread taste is very distinct. Talk about combining two things I like! Thank goodness the flavor is seasonal, or I might just have found my new favorite flavor.

See Tags: Food

Food journal number 57: Skaldjursfrossa, with a recipe for Västerbottenpaj

Skaldjursfrossa – a happy Swedish word. The mouth, which opens for the first syllable, puckers as if for a kiss for the second, and the two last vowels jump out of the mouth with a joyful intonation. True enough, the mouth also puckers and lets out sighs during a skaldjursfrossa. The word means a seafood feast –literally "seafood reveling".

The eating of seafood, especially crustaceans, are quite special events here as the price of fresh seafood is quite high. The last Friday of September, with its start-of-autumn weather, was our backdrop to the seafood feast. Margareta had the idea of buying crustaceans home instead of eating them out, and invited us to our own little seafood party in their home.


We had havskräftor, or Norway lobster, boiled plain (in Sweden, they are called "ocean crayfish" but this is a misnomer; they are related to lobster more than they are to crayfish). These were normal-sized and thus much, much larger than the frozen Norway lobster which we baked during the crayfish season. Even for being a lobster though, don't expect its tail to be bigger than a thumb. It's thumb-sized pure seafood goodness! (I'm humming to the tune of "Les Poissons").

Another yummy creature in the buffet are these crabs from the west coast of Sweden. They translate to Wikipedia as "edible crab" (sometimes also "Cromer crab") and live in the Atlantic. Their shells are darker and thicker than the crabs I'm used to from the Pacific. The Atlantic crabs' arms are hairier, and their bodies are almost pure fat, except for the areas around the arms and the arms and claws themselves. Lovers of crab fat – a delicacy that can be bought in bottles from the Philippines – will love this.


We also had shrimp. Though medium-sized, they really are shrimps, figuratively, in comparison to the size of other crustaceans out there.

Some differences between how Filipinos and Swedes prefer to eat their seafood are the sauces and the side dishes. In the Philippines, cloudy vinegar is the preferred dip to boiled crustaceans, and they are eaten with rice, the steamier the better (crab fat with rice is a major yum, by the way). In Sweden, there is a dill- and mustard-based seafood sauce, and it is not uncommon to eat seafood with some kind of vegetable or cheese quiche ("paj"). Mats whipped up that seafood sauce in the small footed bowl in the above pictures. The quiche, which you see in the background, is a cheese quiche out of a special Swedish cheese called Västerbottensost, baked by Margareta.

Västerbottensost is a cheese has traditions from the second half of the 19th century. It is cooked and stirred in its vat for a longer time and ripens for 18 months, resulting in a strong taste. Västerbottenpaj is also a classic autumn quiche and can be made with chanterelles (another autumn delicacy). And because I can't make seafood from scratch, here's a recipe of the Västerbottenpaj to round up this post:

Västerbottenpaj

10-12 slices

2.5 dl flour
1 dl grahams flour
150 g butter
2 T cold water
whisked egg for brushing

4 dl milk
2 dl cream
350 g grated vAsterbottensost
6 eggs
salt
black pepper

1. Heat the oven to 200 C.
2. Combine the two kinds of flour, salt, and cut the cold butter into the mixture until it resembles crumbs, preferably with a food processor. Add the water and knead quickly into a dough.
3. Press the dough into a pie form, ca. 28 cm in diameter. Make high edges. Set aside in the refrigerator to cool for 30 minutes.
4. When the 30 minutes are done, whisk up the egg and brush the unbaked crust with it. Pop in the oven for 10 minutes. After the 10 minutes, take the crust out and take the temperature down to 150 C.
4. Heat milk and cream in a large pot, and take away from heat. Add the grated cheese and stir until it melts. Stir in the 6 other whisked eggs – they will not coagulate, surprisingly enough. Add salt and pepper to taste, and pour the filling into the pre-baked crust.
5. Bake again for 45 minutes.

Serve with seafood! :-)

Thanks again, Margareta and Mats, for all that seafood yuminess!

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See Tags: Food

Fashion advice, please?

I haven't touched this blog for more than a week. Not that there isn't much to say; it's been really activity-filled for the last two weeks, but I think I'll save telling about them for another time since they kind of all have to do with exercise and I'm all for varied content here ;-) Besides, I'm still waiting for more pictures before I can blog about the other topics I've been meaning to share.

Until then, let's talk about me. ...Err, I mean, hair!

Yes. It's about me and my hair. I've been in a pony-tail for most of my life, and since about two years ago, I thought I'd get bangs and wear my hair down (picture here). I think bangs are great! Problem is, I can't seem to keep them on my forehead like bangs should be. They want to go to the side, or worse, to both sides (which looks strange when I tie my hair). Another problem is the whole 'do gets kind of awful when the bangs get longer (read: bad hair day for a week or two. Just look at some of my Facebook pictures, ugh!), so every three weeks or so, I have a dilemma between letting the bangs grow or cutting them short myself. I usually do the latter.

Here's my question. I want to keep my bangs, but I want to update my look to save me from bad hair days. I want something that will change my look and has a feminine touch. Whenever I go to a salon though, they tell me that I should know what's best, but actually, I'm clueless. Lately, however, I've been thinking about either one of the two things. Should I:


(1) Have it cut short like picture number 1?
(2) Let my bangs grow, and color my hair, like in picture number 2?

Please look away from the fact that these hair models have the silliest poses on earth to display their hair with. And my hair doesn't have to look exactly like the ones in the pictures; that's just to give you some idea. My hair is wavy; I'm willing to use products to tame it if need be, but lately I actually don't have any problems about it puffing out into a mane, which is why I'm daring to change my look.

Related hair-questions: if you know anything about hair and styling, can you guys also tell me how I can keep my bangs down? With a round brush? With spray?

And what are your opinions on color highlights? Cheap? Flashy? Labor-intensive? Do you have any suggestions on color?

Advice appreciated!

Thanks,
Bangsy Joy