:: swedish mass transport

For Americans, Canada is the quintessential mirror-image country. It’s possible for the unobservant visitor to feel right at home, oblivious to the many small oddities. But look closer, and things are askew. Red mailboxes. Purple 10-dollar bills. Milk in plastic bags.

I thought about Cayce Pollard, Gibson’s cool hunter, when I was feeling defensive about a recent trip to Sweden. With enough frequent flyer miles to go almost anywhere, and with more adventurous friends heading to Bhutan, I felt as if my boyfriend and I were opting for the most unchallenging, safe destination imaginable. I feared it would be like Wisconsin, only illegible. But I had forgotten about the power of mirror-image ordinariness to enrich experience. And after spending two weeks in Sweden, I strongly recommend travel to mirror-image places as a head-clearing antidote to the suffocating, America First righteousness that surrounds us like a noxious gas.

I’ve always been curious about Sweden. My paternal grandfather was born there, and a relative recently traced us back to 1824, through an assortment of Svens, Nels and Gunillas. A naturalization document dated 1900 certifies that my grandfather “renounces forever allegiance to any foreign potentate, and particularly to the King of Sweden”.

In the Sweden of my imagination, everything is clean and shiny. Apartments and public spaces have been stylishly furnished with light wood and stainless steel from IKEA. It is green, and perhaps wet. It is something of a socialist paradise—public good first, private profit second or third. It’s relatively well-off, but the chasm between rich and poor is less horrific than ours. My idea of Sweden as a stand-in for everything progressive was validated in Corey Robin’s recent piece, “The Fear of the Liberals” in The Nation: “… if America took seriously the liberal commitment to equal opportunity, everyone would have safe housing, healthy diets, doctors, fresh air, well-stocked libraries open all week—Sweden itself.”

Thoughts of seeking out relatives evaporated when we found that Strömsund, the Eklund homestead, was kilometers from nowhere and, according to the Rough Guide, contained one business, a pizza parlor. And let’s be honest: I have plenty of relatives I’ve never met right in my own backyard. When friends describe having their vacation plans hijacked by new-found foreign family, I shudder. The charm of being swept up in a Swedish hospitality hurricane is lost on me. I am more curious about the place than the people.

:: the texture of sweden

So we flew into London, and then on to Stockholm. Let it first be said that immigration authorities in both places are friendly, casual, and notably multi-cultural. They wear street clothes and seem to be following a tourist bureau model rather than a military one. At Heathrow, we pass through many document checkpoints, and the questioning about our luggage does seem sincere and insistent. But there is none of the fear and intimidation that passes for security at home. I had just enough time to buy a Guardian, which featured a front-page story on the Brazilian who was shot dead by London cops on the tube two weeks earlier. He jumped a turnstile, he was wearing a suspicious bulky jacket, and he fled when police yelled “halt,” it had been said. Not true, not true, and not true, it turns out. In Stockholm, the police are invisible. We hear an occasional siren in the distance, and spot one police car in two weeks.

For us, the point of travel is to play house. It’s as if we’re auditioning places, always asking “what would it be like to live here?” We rent a sunny apartment in a lovely residential corner of Södermalm from a woman who is away for the summer. With self-catering, there’s no one around to explain anything, so everything must be discovered. We go to the supermarket, pick up groceries, trade theories about what they are, and imagine cooking them. Simple routines like paying for them are confounding. Clerks take our cash and feed the bills into a machine. Exact change pops out-they don’t get involved in counting out money. This reminds Randy of the time in London 10 years ago when we noticed clerks doing their jobs while sitting down, which revealed how unthinkingly we’d taken standing up for eight hours as a given in our supermarkets. Life can be organized differently, the observant traveler discovers!

The apartment overlooks a small park and Sophia School. It vaguely suggests what a successful public housing project might look like. It’s strange to inhabit the personal space of someone we don’t know, guessing what her life is like from her furnishings: two pianos and lots of classical cds, shelves of cookbooks, unfamiliar appliances, oddly formatted bills and bank statements. We have to figure out many things we normally take for granted—how to operate a washing machine, what the weird pipe thing in the bathroom is, how to recycle. Is the toilet supposed to make that sound?

At a cottage on the island of Öland, far from Stockholm, the birds sing unusual songs, and we hike among oak trees from 800 A.D., which cast a different shade on the meaning of “old.” We’re in a forest preserve, but in Sweden the line between private and public seems a little fuzzy. It’s legal to pitch a tent anywhere, for instance, including on private property. The nighttime silence on Öland is so penetrating it feels like a kind of noise.

We return to Stockholm for five days, and a different apartment. We’re surprised to learn it’s not the entire apartment we’ve rented, but a room in an occupied one. Our host, Lavida, is a designer. Of what, I never learned, but she moved to Stockholm from Poland in the 70’s and spends the summer doing “color therapy.” We’re relieved to have someone to settle some of the myriad mysteries of daily Swedish life for us. For instance, what is a Loppis? We see this hand-written sign all over, and it’s not in the dictionary. She describes what we eventually recognize as a “flea market,” called this because “the stuff jumps from owner to owner like fleas.” I had never given the phrase a thought, assuming that it had to do with the notion of the cheap, the second-hand, the flea-ridden. I loved her explanation, whether it came from Polish, Swedish, or her imagination.

One day, I mention that I have never seen a more morose, dour mood among morning commuters anywhere than on the Stockholm T-Bana, the subway. Lavida agrees. She says that Swedish people will do anything for you if you need help, but first you have to get their attention, which she demonstrates by crouching down and looking up into imaginary downcast eyes. Perhaps going to work is harder in a place where life is happy.

Her apartment, like the first one, is in a neighborhood of Södermalm, on “Greta Garbo Square,” across the street from Garbo’s building. One evening a group of fans is clustered outside, listening to a guide. From the incomprehensible stream of Swedish, the word ninotchka breaks loose and floats above the devotees.

Lavida says that Swedish is a very easy language to learn because it is like English and German. I can accept this in theory, but we have been at linguistic sea for ten days, utterly dependent on the kindness of the English-speaking strangers who are thankfully ubiquitous. I grow weary of having to work so hard to figure out signs and interpret messages. On a crowded rush hour bus, we are only able to decode the driver’s mysterious scolding as “Step away from the back door!” when all eyes turn to stare and we realize that the words are aimed at us. Swedish words seem to have too many consonants, like scrabble tiles after an unlucky draw. They are rarely pronounced the way they look. Go ahead, say “Byxelkrok.” Wrong.

The inability to communicate in Swedish is especially frustrating because the word for hello—hej, pronounced “hey”—is so charming and friendly, and seems to invite further communication. Every encounter starts with hej, or sometimes hej hej! We complain, but imagine what it would be like for a non-English speaking Swede to travel the US. Where Europeans embrace the reality of many languages, our attitude, in this as in so much else, seems to be “our way or go away.”

There are surprisingly rare encounters with English, aside from the occasional overheard British football fan. On a ferry to Vaxholm, the unmistakable and jarring monologue of an American woman. Her subject is real estate.

Stockholm exudes fashion. The “Nordic blond” is not just a lazy stereotype. Though it’s a multi-cultural city, blond does predominate. Beautiful long hair comes in the kinds of variegated shades that Americans spend fortunes to approximate. Tight, low-slung hip-hugging jeans with eight inch cuffs are the norm. Everyone is on the phone. Little armies of 14-year-old Swedish girls look like they belong to the Eloi tribe in Time Machine. People wear shoes, not sandals. When sitting in an outdoor café, the urban soundtrack is soles on pavement, not the flips and flops of naked American feet.

There are two national daily newspapers, one progressive, one conservative, although these political categories are somewhat suspect. Hillary Clinton would be considered on the right in Sweden. English language newspapers are surprisingly hard to find, and then only the International Herald Tribune and the Daily Telegraph are available. When I find one, Senator John Warner’s denunciation of the ungrateful Iraqis who don’t appreciate all we’ve done for them, just puts me in a bad mood. Embarrassed, I hope this news hasn’t made it into the Svenska Dagbladet. But their papers are filled with Swedish news, Swedish concerns, and the pronouncements of their own idiotic politicians.

Two of the four national television stations are non-commercial and loaded with what we would call public interest programming. We watch the news, as if we understand it. A new Volkspartiet—people’s party—has been founded, but is it right or left? The crowd at their convention looks prosperous, but so do most Swedish people. There are many home improvement programs and gardening shows.

One night, we watch Swedish Jeopardy, Swedish Millionaire, two old Will & Grace episodes (with Swedish subtitles), and several really terrible old episodes of “That Seventies Show.” Yet the next night, Noam Chomsky’s Manufacturing Consent airs in its entirety, but is followed by a truly awful yet fascinating couple hours of “Swedish Idol.” Every performance, strangely, is in English.

Sweden is a country of many beautiful, crowded bookstores. There are acres of untranslated Scandinavian literature but I’m confined to the English sections. I buy five Henning Mankell mysteries, the British mass-market sized editions, not the Black Lizard trade size we have in the U.S. Though I’m no fan of the mystery genre, these addicting books, steeped in Swedish sense of place, are the perfect companions, and I blow through them in a week. In each, a crime must be solved by comparing the stories of witnesses. But now that our every public movement is recorded by cameras, making conflicting testimony irrelevant, how will this new reality be incorporated into future Mankells?

The music stores all seem dominated by U.S. and U.K. artists, with big displays of the new Coldplay and Kanye West. A friend has asked me to track down some Kent cd singles, and I’m determined to pick up some true contemporary Swedish pop. I’m drawn to a tune I hear often, blasting from doorways and cars. It’s the quintessential summer 05 Swedish pop hit, and I must have it. But when I hear it on the radio, the ID is impossible to catch. By chance, I hear the song one day in the music section of a department store, and a friendly clerk is able to provide me with “Om du var min” by Nanne, which is indeed in the Swedish top 10. “It’s schlager,” music boy informs me dismissively, a popular genre that, to my ears, recalls Abba crossed with Laura Branigan and elements of early 80’s disco. The songs are bouncy, campy and sometimes cloying, but there are hundreds, and all in Swedish.

I have a mild but pesky infection that’s scaring me enough that I decide to find treatment. I join a group of Swedes in the busy waiting room of the “City Akutet,” to which I’ve been referred by a help line. After paying 1,000 kronor (about $130 U.S.) and presenting my passport, I wait to see a doctor. I’m impressed by the efficiency of the operation, and note that the clientele seems a lot more prosperous than that of the urban emergency room in my neighborhood. And with universal health care, everyone but me is insured.

There are two lines in the waiting room, emergency and lesser-emergency. The patient takes a number and waits to be called. Number-dispensing technology is highly refined in Sweden. Wherever people need to congregate to await service—information desks, the drug store, the train station—the first step is taking a number. These are not the flimsy scraps one might tear off at a busy American bakery or shabby post office, but elaborate printed cards that seem designed for a larger purpose than a ten minute wait.

After the brisk, business-like registration process, I’m surprised by the casual demeanor of the doctor, who is more interested in educating me on the history and geography of Swedish last names than on diagnosing my illness. But I get the antibiotics I want.

The modern parts of downtown Stockholm remind me of East Berlin, or at least what I imagine a socialist city would look like had it been successful. Planning is not a dirty word, and there are signs of it everywhere. All of the new urbanist, pedestrian-friendly elements that would delight Jane Jacobs are present. A frighteningly efficient bus and subway system sports electronic countdown clocks at every stop. Bicycles are used by thousands for daily commuting, creating bicycle traffic jams. There are no freeways. There are almost no SUVs on the streets, and when one appears it looks cartoonish and ridiculous. Cars come in two sizes, small and smaller. The rare pick-up truck seems driven for use, not status. Gas costs $6.07/gallon.

There are public parks and squares everywhere, in constant use by people and dogs. Sweden is nominally an evangelical Lutheran country, but the beautiful churches all seem like museums. Perhaps there are cities in the world with a larger population of children being pushed in strollers, but I’ve never been to one. It seems as if the entire country has given birth within the last two years. Sweden lavishes benefits on families—a mother or father is paid in full for two years after the birth of a child, and the state picks up nearly the entire cost of education through high school, and beyond.

Just before leaving, the first inkling of Katrina news comes with pictures on Swedish TV. I sarcastically remark that we could fill in the words because every hurricane story is the same. Oops. The full horror is apparent when we pick up a copy of the Independent, with a front page image of George Bush strumming a guitar beside a photo of a floating corpse.

The insidious notion that all the world is clamoring to become more like us, that we are the center of the world’s preoccupations, is best exploded by seeing how irrelevant we are in other places. The world may be infatuated with superficial American pop culture, but that doesn’t mean it aspires to our privatized health care, our cut-throat competitiveness, or our social priorities. The mainstream liberal government of Norway was just thrown out by a Left coalition that wants to increase already generous social spending.

Like reading books or listening to music in genres outside our usual favorites, travel forces us to pay attention to the ordinary and the automatic. Try on a new persona, try on a new country. To see that there are other ways of organizing life- some better, some worse, some just different- is a gust of mental fresh air. Americans live in a bubble, our attention yanked this way and that, from one spectacle to the next. There’s nothing like stepping outside the bubble, even briefly, even if it’s only to visit a mirror-image place. Two weeks out of the country is not just a vacation, it’s inoculation against the rampant virus of arrogant triumphalism

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