My Easter Sunday, or Glad Påsk, in Sweden

Easter is approaching in Sweden, which not only took me by complete surprise (like, "oh what it's Easter tomorrow?") but has also slid in another dose of that oh-so-wonderful culture exchange I haven't felt since December.

So, shall we? 

I give you, Easter--or Glad Påsk--in Sweden

another day in Göteborg...

Saturday in Göteborg, when Pete and I ran 13K and Monique made rhubarb jam, and when I scored half-price coffee, and we all barbecue in the courtyard, since no one expected it was going to be 63 degrees... 

Cafe Record: cheap eco-friendly coffee, second-hand records, and cafe food

Love the colors; it's like a dusty Matisse painting in here...

High-rise kitchens

Coffee and pedometers; smoothies after a 13K run...

My friend Monique, from Germany, trying to make do with a bathroom scale for her rhubarb marmalade

rhubarb jam making resembles curling wrapping-paper ribbons

The sides of the building baking by 3pm

My dear friends, Lisa (from Holland) and Monique (from Germany), who are in the Global Studies
program at Göteborgs Universitet. While I study museum identity and participatory strategy,
they study conflict resolution and human rights...

Lisa and I, letting my hair dry in borrowed sweatshirts :)

May: Absentminded Crocuses, a Ferris Wheel, and Summer Plans

Things are quieting down now, which is a welcome change after the maniac traveling I've been doing for the last couple months. It feels good to have an uninterrupted block of time back in Gothenburg, especially since the program's end is encroaching so quickly. I have decided to go back to the States for the summer before Dublin---to see and celebrate the sun with those I care about, and also to make some quick summer cash as a Lead Teacher for Pacific Science Center's summer camps. So now my days in Sweden are literally quite numbered, and it feels good to be home with only plans to enjoy.

And April has happily obliged. This week finally brought sun to Scandinavia; today, it is nearly 60 degrees. For a couple days now, the skies have been clear, and so finally the edges of all the trees are finally glowing that newborn-pale green, and all the crocuses have simultaneously popped out of the ground, like startled, absentminded heralds. I noticed yesterday, as I was running, that the dead-leafy underbrush in the woods of Slottskogen is now overrun with large, white wildflowers---yes, I'll give it a day or two now, and Sweden will be in full-fledged spring.

May plans to bring a number of things to my life in addition to flowers. There are three major things that are happening in the next seven weeks that will be fighting for my attention:

Gothenburg's International Science Fair and the European Association for Science Events Annual Conference. Every year, Gothenburg has thrown a massive science festival that takes over the town with informal science events, lectures, workshops, performances, experiments, you name it. It's a trend several European cities have been doing (Edinburgh being one of the oldest, having recently celebrated it's 20th festival just last week). Naturally, I am very excited to see science celebrate publicly on such a scale, and so I plan to participate in two ways...

1) ...by putting on a small exhibit of my own as a "real-life" cellular biologist in one of the cars of Gothenburg's giant revolving ferris wheel for 1 hour. That's right: a science lesson in a ferris wheel. Who knew you could learn about stress granules 8-9 stories up...

2) ...and by participating as an intern at the EUSCEA Annual Conference, a two-day closed event that is host to international organizers of science festivals and plans to address a whole spectrum of science education issues. I met with one of the founders of the Gothenburg festival, Jan Riise, last week to confirm my volunteer status on this. Not only was he an extremely approachable man, he promptly and kindly followed up our conversation by providing me with some very cool Swedish doctoral theses on science centers and teens. He also is interested in my old systems biology project I did for the Pacific Science Center (who knew?). Needless to say, I think I will learn a lot from him...

I will most likely report back on both of these things (most definitely on what I do in the ferris wheel, ha!) back here in about two-three weeks...

The second thing is a real exhibition, put on by the students in this International Museum Studies program as a final project. The whole massive group has been split into separate teams, which in turn are responsible for the content, design, marketing, educational programming and production of a catalogue for an exhibit we will put on for the public May 31 through June 6 at three museums. We have been given little warning or guidance for this task (surprisesurprise), and the sheer size and diversity of enthusiasm of our group makes this a formidable task. I am head of the events and programming team, so in addition to the general work, my schedule's also crowded with managing meetings as part of a steering group that is the communication bridge between the actual museum curators and, well, us.

Let's hope it'll be worth our time. I hope so.

The last thing is more of a combination of good old-fashioned labwork and wrap-up. Lundberg Labs has had me working on constructing strains and testing preliminary conditions for a large-scale genetic screen they plan to do with S. cerevisiae. The work has been very pleasant (very different from the pacing of American research; lots of fika and limited money), and before I go, I will have to get as much done as I can and present a final report on what has been accomplished before both I and my supervisor take off for the summer. I'll also have to wrap up things here in Annika's flat; boxing up what I'll need in Ireland, separating what Gabby can take home early, and selling the rest. I am terribly sad to leave Annika; she has been one of the best roommates I've had, so it seems too premature.

So, as you can see, the infrastructure to my spring is turning out to be quite a netted mesh. Many people have similar plans; a lot of my friends are headed away form Sweden by the end of May. I expect a lot of dinner parties and picnics---which is wonderful. Warms me up for swan-diving back into the Seattle social scene. But I do hope we all stay in touch; I'd hate to think many of the friendships forged here were more situational than substantial. But hey, I don't want to play the pessimist. :)

But did you hear that, Seattle friends? I'm coming home!

6 Weeks. 5 Cities. 4 Countries. Go.

It's April 16. It occurred to me today, while blearily munching on stale crackers in the kitchen after finally getting in the door this morning, that I haven't necessarily updated my blog about any of my most recent trips outside of Scandinavia. Some of you may have heard about my chocolate-and-cappuccino-inspired adventure to Germany and Hungary that happened in March, but April has brought me also to the outer reaches of the UK through a class excursion to check out museums in Scotland. Needless to say, I've been a lucky girl, and now that me and my wallet are exhausted, I get to reap the benefits of reflecting on what I've learned in the last six weeks...

In an effort to save time (because in all honesty, I could write a novels about all of these places), I'll try and highlight some of the details of these trips here, which include:

Berlin, Germany

Budapest, Hungary

Dublin, Ireland

Glasgow, Scotland

Edinburgh, Scotland

I've also uploaded albums with more pictures from Berlin and Budapest
as well as Dublin, Edinburgh, and Glasgow on Facebook. You can find them by clicking on the links.

I've also discovered that I can upload videos from my trips on YouTube. There, you can find not only
some of the short, random films I took from these last six weeks, but older videos featuring
making snow-angels in Stockholm, Catalonian Memorials in Barcelona, panoramas of Gothenburg,
and much else.

Enjoy.

World Pillow Fight Day

It's true what they say: Swedes are pretty reserved. It's hard to see anyone crack a smile in public in the winter, and in lines at the grocery stores, libraries, or clustered on the trams, a lot of your crowd-encounters are done in complete, stony silence. 

But (and this is what I like the most)---this by no means means that Swedes don't know how to have fun. :)

Here's a few clips from Gothenburg's participation in World Pillow Fight Day, brought to you by Flash-Mob-Gothenburg. At 3pm, the pigeons all flew up in a frenzy when a screaming man in dreads runs out from two blocks down, flailing a pillow. And then, all hell breaks loose. 

Sick again...

What to do on a misty Saturday morning, when your head hurts and it's likely you'll be sick by 5pm?

Make pancakes. Oatmeal-Apple-Almond pancakes.

After March Madness brings...more Madness.

Wow. It’s April already. I guess that goes to show you how busy March was. Let me just say, it was an agonizing end to the Collections portion of my program. Six dry cups of tea, two old dinner plates, seven overturned books, and two magpies watched me typing frantically on my bedspread in the candelight to finish this exam. I turned that bastard in at 24.00 on the dot and instantly flopped back in the bed. Finally: done with material culture…

I'm happy to report that March has also brought to Gothenburg slightly warmer temperatures—much to the collective relief of the area. Gray, gritty rain has been coming in from coast these last few mornings, blowing sideways and sometimes straight up, but usually running dry by noon. And when it does, the air is heavy with that soggy smell of spring. Slick, brown mud lines the path up to my flat now, and from the large, single-pane windows of the kitchen, I’ll sip tea by the radiator by five, eying the clouds and watching the magpies re-align their feathers again for the next morning…

Sweden definitely feels like home now. There is a comfort level now present in my life that had not been there before. I think a lot probably stems from the traveling; the continuous ‘coming-backing’ to Gothenburg has certainly widened a hole in my heart for this place. Although the city has a lot more to offer, I find I am constantly seeking refuge really when home; I hardly go out nowadays, preferring to stay inside to read books and try and improve my cooking skills. Plus I’m sick again. And I go to Dublin and Glasgow in little less than one week.

But, if I look back on my life last March, it’s a staunch contrast. Instead of frantically labeling dozens and dozens of tiny tubes, my days now are incredibly relaxed. If I have class, I get up at 8:00, make a Wasa-bread-and-cheese-yogurt-and-berries breakfast, ride the tram to class, and sketch on the sides of my notebooks in the halls of an old hospital-turned-school building until noon. If I don’t have class, I get up at 9:00, go to work to do a bit of wet science, and by four I’m in a café, either with friends or alone. While there are still things here that get me wildly frustrated, I think it is these moments when I snap back into reality: that this is my reality, and it is right fanciful one—one that I may not have again for a long, long time. I mean, it is quite feasible here sometimes that the hardest decision in the day is whether to get a pastry or not…

This is not to say that I am not busy. As ridiculous as that may sound, graduate school has definitely got my head buzzing—so much so that sometimes at night, I can’t sleep. After three courses worth of literature that I’ve never read before, and ideas that never had the chance to really ignite, it sometimes feels like my head is a spinning compass, constantly pointing to new things. As a result (and maybe from the Collections course), I’ve started to lose my perpetuity for clutter in favor of Swedish white minimalism. Lately, the only breath of air my sprinting mind takes is when I enter—dare I say it—a big, bright, white cube.

April and May plan to bring major events, though, to these otherwise calm days. In less than a week, I travel to Ireland and Scotland with my class to study Glasgow’s Open Museums, one of the most innovative and inclusive museological infrastructures in the world. When I return, work at the Lundberg Lab will hopefully change over to larger, more exciting trials of my earlier experiments. In addition, the Gothenburg Science Festival—a major 15-year-old event of public science activities, lectures, and symposiums across the city—takes place in early May, and I’ve registered for about 50-60 hours of lectures—including the International Symposium on Science Journalism and the European Science Event Association 10-Year Conference. Not to mention an odd little side-job of mine involving a Ferris wheel...

And all this takes place in the background of what looks to be our most intense course yet in the program, which cumulates in an actual exhibition and an actual exhibition opening at two of Gothenburg’s museums in early June. Our two module directors are a duo Swedish curators with fantastic chemistry, who have arranged for us a (comparatively) stunning array of speakers within museum management. As a gesture of good faith, the course opened last week lectures with the famous Nina Simon—exhibit designer and museum consultant from the Bay Area who is top-dog in the museum field right now. I was positively thrilled when her first slide that morning read: “Hi, I’m Nina, and I want to change museums.” Needless to say, I bought her book, The Participatory Museum, on the spot.

Oh, and another thrill factor that spiced up my day last week: the exhibition opening—the party for the debut of my first exhibition ever—falls on the first day my dear sister, Gabby, arrives in Sweden. Kickass.