fishers, surfers and casters

It’s after midnight, and it’s still not getting any darker, and I’m wired. It has been a long day here, but for some reason sleep is not available.

Last night all the Fellowship students arrived. It was a great time. They come from everywhere – Eastern Europe, Africa, Latin America. I’m the only one from Australia, the plain white one.

Today’s seminar started at 8.30am and finished at 5.30pm. Mine was the last presentation (thanks to alphabetical ordering) and so I was as brief as possible. Many enjoyed it. I’m the only one here studying online religion, and so I thought I’d be the boring guy. I have to tell you, everybody else’s projects are terribly fascinating, and I’ll post the subjects once I get all my notes together.

By that time language didn’t seem to matter anymore. It was a bilingual session, with one interpreter doing English-Spanish and another doing English-Portuguese. Most of the African students are studying in Rome and speak Italian better than I do. Our ability to infer from Spanish to Italian seemed to work, as did the reverse for the Colombians and the Brazilians.

But I reckon what was also happening was the creation of a media-culture-religion study language. Across all languages was this academic-speak that was confined to a 200-word vocabulary or so. Our experiences in this field of study allowed us to connect beyond the tongue barrier.

Tomorrow we’re mapping everyone’s projects in a way that we can work closely as a global unit - at present all our work is isolated, yet we found many theories, ideas and methodologies in common.

I’m so excited and overwhelmed by what I’m a part of. It’s an amazing gift.

I decided to catch the train that’s going away from Stockholm today, and I’ve ended up in Uppsala. It’s Sweden’s fourth largest city and argued to be the oldest. Here lie temples and altars where virgins, dogs and horses were sacrificed to Thor and other Nordic gods until the Christians displaced the religion early in the eleventh century. There remains some disdain for what Christianity did to its history, and the city’s name illustrates the sentiment well. Uppsala is made of two words, upp, meaning up, and sala, meaning yours.

The city is the commercial centre for farmers of the northern plain, who are to blame for the pollution that runs from the rivers into the Gulf of Bothnia. Apparently the pollution has been so bad that fish packets come with warning messages – eating fish causes mouth cancer and blood disease, call 13 1984 to quit fish forever.

The seminar of Porticus fellows starts tomorrow, so this is my last day of touring. I’m excited about meeting all these students from around the world, though mainly African and Latin American. I’m the only Aussie, so I’ll have to be a good ambassador. Six beers should do it.

Sweden, founded by Roxette in 1991, is the world’s largest showroom of modular living, and a land of contradictions. Here a hamburger shop is called a Burger King, and a milk bar is a 7 Eleven.

In Sweden, an elevator is called a hiss, which is for men only. I didn’t discover this until after I boarded a herss and had this woman nursing a baby scream in my ear for two floors. 

It’s the worst time for Australians to be in Europe, with the dollar only worth around 50 Euro cents and 5 Swedish Krona. I bought a Guiness and a hamburger last night and it cost me about forty bucks. I decided to do lunch on the cheap and get some fruit from a street vendor at the Nationalmuseum. I couldn’t give her all the money she wanted so she’s got my passport and my watch until I return with the rest. Mum and Dad, I gave her your address in case some big men come calling.

Summer only stays in Swedenistan for 25 minutes a year, and we were making the most of it this afternoon. After two days of thinking hard about it, I decided not to go with the traditional Nordic coffee brown skin colour this season, but good ol’ Salmon red. It’s not the pigment of the day, or in Swedish, du jour, but it’s a statement.

The UK and Ireland appear to be the flavours of the month, with restaurants like London Restaurang and The Beefeaters’ Lounge. I’m not sure what kind of establishment is Patrick’s Bar and Kök, but it was closed this afternoon.

I decided to buy souvenirs for the family so sold a kidney and headed off to Gamla Stan. I was just about to buy my partner a 500kr watch when I found a leather bag for only 130kr. At that price I knew it wouldn’t be a cheap knock-off, and because I’m such a sensitive romantic guy, I chose that bag over the watch. It’s the kind of bag I would want if I were a girlie-girl like her, you know, spending time in meetings with Foundation directors and Parliamentary secretaries talking about how to create efficient youth-driven community programs, girlie shit like that. I asked the guy who sold it to me if it was a Swedish label. He said no, but a Swedish design, made in a little boutique in Vientiane’s upper west side, which is nice.

Just like we all predicted, a guy did approach me today talking in Swedish, looking lost. This time I actually kinda understood what he said and knew where he needed to go (he wanted to get to the underground, and I had just passed it a few minutes beforehand), but I decided to give him wrong directions anyway. Bloody Swedes.

I worked out why Swedensborough has such a large trade surplus of Swedish backpackers compared to Australia – there is a Government run scheme to reduce the number of Swedish backpackers from other countries coming into the country. They do this by letting drivers continue through zebra crossings, and by driving on the right-side of the road, so unsuspecting antipodean stupid tourists like me get hit in the back while walking and looking the wrong way. I’m going to make a complaint to John Howard’s boyfriend, the Foreign Affairs guy, you know, whatshisname.

I must go now as it is dinner time, and I’ve got a deal going with a souvlaki joint about selling a calf muscle. Ciao.

I arrived at Arlanda airport at around 4pm, and took a taxi to Sigtuna. I was driving through what I could compare to Christmas Hills in Victoria, only with water, forests and green, as well as apartment buildings and farm houses sidled up together. I was in awe of the green. I miss it so much. It is very very lacking back home. A very friendly middle-aged woman was my driver and tour guide for the half-hour that we were in the car. Apparently there are no laws about talking on phones whilst driving, and she never hestated to pick up her Blackberry and call another taxi driver if she ahppened to see their car driving in front of her. It was like spending some time with a seventeen year old boy hooning down Wyndham St.

We drove through thick green pine forest. I thought I caught a glimpse of the backside of an elk (either that or I had found the local beat) before we entered the town of Sigtuna. The stucco, white and red triangular houses and large churches remind me of movies of medieval battles, and apprently the town is famous for its Christian slaughter, like a massive replica of itself. I can’t wait to have a tour, and circumnavigate the large placid lake nearby.

But now I’m in Stockholm, walking aimlessly through cobblestone alleyways that seems were built so people or horses couldn’t walk on them, and practising my phrases:

• Ursäkta mig. Excuse me.
• Talar du engelska? Do you speak English.

I think these two will do me, as almost everyone here speaks English (and UK English too, not that MTV dialect that you find in Italy and Thailand), though at the train station I asked a guy if they spoke English and he spoke in Swedish for about two minutes, which I think was a list of all the languages he could speak. As interesting as it was helpful.

I’m tired. I’ve only slept three hours in the past forty. It’ll be light for a while so I’ll stay awke, and daydream of how I can get the family up here to stay for a year, and watch the colours change in the forests and streets. I’m missing them.