How do I know I'm in Scandinavia...?

Today's a trying day..

Following the food trend...

Eating here is fantastic. Very simple. Very refreshing. Of course you can find nearly every ethnic food you could want, but really, I find myself eating extremely well with the very basics. Fruits, vegetables. Yogurt smoothies for breakfast. Fresh breads. Hard boiled eggs. Small cold-cut sandwiches. Coffee. Coffee. Coffee.

But, it did get some taking used to. Here are couple things that, coming from America, you notice (you know, besides the metric system):

• Things are sold with less pasteurization. Milk, eggs, and other dairy products will typically last about 7-8 days. Good thing my previous residence got me constantly checking the expiration dates on food out of habit…
• Produce is smaller, but probably the same price. I suspect more local and organic sources.
• The breads and cheese selection here are sprawling. Seriously. And the hard cheese is in typically sold in 1 lb packages.
• Vanilla extract is in powder form, not liquid. 
• You don’t buy red meat. It’s crazy expensive. Chicken’s not as bad. But veggies and beans is where it’s at…you know, from a poor student’s perspective.

 And of course, there’s the differences in what surrounds the food you’re eating. Like how I swear the microwaves work faster here. And how plastic containers for, say, cherry tomatoes and the like, are quite flimsy (less plastic). And how yogurt is sometimes in cardboard boxes. And how there are far less plastic bags in plastic bags in plastic bags in boxes. The packaging here is great. And recycling here is practically mandatory—like breathing.

This week, I plan to launch my first endeavor to bake something in a European kitchen. This means converting my American recipes to metric measurements, looking up Swedish vocabulary words, finding the equivalent supplies, and—most importantly—figuring out how my oven works.

Being that the odds of this project gong horribly wrong are quite high, I promise I’ll post my findings.

I definitely just cut myself with a cheese slicer…

It’s Tuesday, and since class hasn’t picked up really from introductory classes (Library Tutorial, 10-12.00; How to Write Academic English, Part 1, 13-15.00…), I’ve been alternating between reading my new museum texts and soaking up what’s left of the sun in true Swedish fashion…

But anyway—good news! Today I found (to my utter delight) the Pike Place equivalent in Göteborg, called Stora Saluhallen, located down right in Kungsportsplatsen where, in the last days of summer, you can still find people wearing sunglasses and nomming on sandwiches on the sides of the canals. Saluhallen is a great big building, built in late 1880s, by an architect by Hans Hedlund, whose work you can spot pretty regularly around the city. It sits in a great open courtyard, where, if you get there on time, there are outside vendors from neighboring Swedish farms selling their own produce, and smaller bakeries selling decent lunch deals to the throngs of tourists and locals.

Inside is quite stunning—a grand, light-filled hall that’s ripe with the smells of spices, cheese, bread, and peppered meat, and everything echoes with the talk of people. In narrow lines, there are dozens of smaller, private stores that sell nearly everything tasty on this Earth that exists. In my slow dance around the place, there were bread and cakes for sale, plentiful white cheeses, green and maroon olives alongside handmade gnocchi and truffles, dried fruit and exotic nuts, bright red coffee tins and glass jars of spices, rows of white-marbled meats and ribs…

I’m actually quite at peace, just thinking about it, really. 

Class starts at 10:00, thanks, plus or minus 15 minutes...

So my first day of graduate school started this week. It's been a strange couple of days, filled with schedule changes, cramped rooms, and awkward meet-and-greet parties in which I already met some phenomenal people...

Apparently, with the end of free tuition for international students, my program is the biggest the school has seen in its small ten year history. There are nearly 50 students in the class, the majority of which are Swedes and Canadians (ha). I think the oldest student is rounding 45 or so, and the youngest is pegged at an eye-opening 20-years-old. Almost all the students come from an art/history/anthropology/archeology/cultural/communication background. I am absolutely the only person with a hard science degree.

Well, I can't say I didn't expect it.

The curriculum is thought-provoking. Like, for instance--did you know that 95% of museums were established after World War II? or Did you know that exhibit representation and presentation are two drastically different things with serious visitor implications? [Well, neither did I.]

At the moment, we're taking it slow, going over what is required of us as students and the format of how school will go for the next couple months. Combinations of lectures, group work, and individual assignments seem to be the norm, and several trips outside the classroom are scheduled. Next week, I go to the Maritime Museum in Göteborg to do my first critical museum evaluation, and I hope to god I find something interesting there.

But aside from the lecture topics and getting to know my culturally- and academically-diverse classmates, I am rather sad to say the rest of my first week in school has been lamentably stressful. 

Despite having at least 60 or 70 students in the School of Global Studies (which includes all the masters programs, of which there are two others) that are from outside of Sweden, it has been extremely hard to get helpful information from the faculty on how to establish our lives here in this new city. With the help of Magnus and Katarina, I appear to be one of the few international students who seems to have their act together. But the majority of international students seem to be grappling with one, some, or all of the following: jet lag, lost visas/passports/luggage, lack of personnummers (see previous post), no bank accounts, no card keys to buildings, no library cards to print course material, broken computers, language barriers, or in the most extreme cases, no living residence. In any case, time before, between, and after lecture is usually a chaotic mess of desperate student chatter: because the administration don't seem to have the answers, most of the students have been depending on each other to get what they need. 

I'd love to say that the disorganization ends there, but unfortunately, aspects of class itself are just as unsteady. The passion in our class is serious; you can feel it the air when you enter the room, everyone's got a personal credo for being there. But for the last couple days, much of lecture has been either repetitive or agonizingly slow. Some people I've talked to have argued that this is merely the difference between graduate school in Europe and graduate school in America---but one thing is clear: many of us, wherever we're from, are getting frustrated with how the faculty doesn't seem to have it together.

Personally, I share many of the same sentiments as my peers. However, while everyone's been talking about personnumers and where the nearest IKEA is, I find myself sitting back in my chair, nervous and critical.

So far, it is very clear that this program caters to art/history/cultural museums. Much of the early coursework highlights aspects of collection, display, and societal stereotypes---all of which is, truthfully, interesting and indeed relevant towards science museums. And, to their credit, the faculty has attempted to integrate material that does have a certain "scientific edge" (ie: evaluations of natural history museums, emphasis on analytical and statistical data, etc.). But it seems, more and more, that my bachelors in molecular biology seems to peg me automatically as either the "natural history" kid or the museum-clueless nerd in the back of the class.

Let me get this straight: I'm not trying to sound bitter. I am optimistic and excited to be the wild card in the group, and many people have told me outright that they appreciate having someone from my background present for lecture. But let's take this for example: as museology students, we are given "get-into-museums-free" cards, which grant us entry into at least five or six museums in the city. But my genre of museums---science and technology centers---are excluded from this, so I must make an extra effort to access places more relevant to my line of study. And when I ask the director whether it was possible to negotiate something with our contacts at the local science museum, Universeum, his first question was if studying the natural history museum will suffice.

No, I want to tell him. No, absolutely not.

Needless to say, I'm looking forward to next week. Hopefully then, I can stop paying for things solely with cash, I can visit some cool museums with some cool people, and the unease that has been rippling through the class will start to die down. But I can't help but feel, as I sit in these Swedish cafes with my coffee and freshly-printed articles, that something better appear soon that justifies me coming here and bringing my life in Seattle to a grinding halt. 

Anyway. Here's to next Monday.