Pancake Day!

It is Shrove Tuesday/Fat Tuesday/Mardi Gras/Pancake Day! Although the Swedes don’t follow the same tradition of eating many (usually too many) pancakes, I couldn’t resist:

Not the best pancake ever…but better than my first attempt which I couldn’t bring myself to photograph! Now I am very full and very happy, Pancake Day is a lovely tradition!

As I mentioned, in Sweden they don’t have pancakes, but instead have a special pastry for Shrove Tuesday, the semla. Unfortunately for me semla are mainly made up of cream and, being lactose intolerant, that makes them a no-go area for me. My friend who came to visit last week got to try them out though, so here is what a half-eaten semla looks like (and also what part of Leanne’s face looks like):

They’re basically bread buns filled with almond paste and cream, which sounds just as fattening as pancakes. After reading wikipedia I have a couple of rather exciting semla “facts” (as factual as wiki ever is…):

- Each Swede consumes on average five bakery-produced semlor each year, in addition to all those that are homemade.

- King Adolf Frederick of Sweden died of digestion problems on February 12, 1771 after consuming a meal consisting of lobster, caviar, sauerkraut, smoked herring and champagne, which was topped off by fourteen helpings of hetvägg (a ye olde name for sema), the king’s favorite dessert.

 

Pancake Day seems like a fitting fatty end to my unexpected 5 day weekend (I found out about my extra days off a week in advance). After a busy few days with Leanne I’ve basically done nothing during my extended weekend. Well, I say nothing, I have managed to watch most of Game of Thrones (by the end of today I expect I will have watched the whole first season). I do love being addicted to a good TV show!

 

 

The above photo is a true representation of my weekend. Note, the empty bottle of wine in the background was drunk by myself and Leanne, I am not a wineaholic.

 

And finally, I would like to share with you a photo I took today after straightening my hair for the first time in ages (it’s surprisingly long!):

 

 

Without photographic evidence I can never be sure whether or not I’ve unplugged my straighteners. I am completely crazy.

Living a cliché is really rather fun

Today I spent the afternoon sat in a café doing a spot of “work” (I am pretentious and sometimes I do a bit of writing to pass the time. Then I decide I hate everything I’ve written. This is what I am referring to as “work”.) while drinking coffee and people-watching. If I’d have been writing on my blog I feel I would have been a worse cliché than I already was. Laptop out, typing away, sipping on coffee, watching a film crew filming a couple of young women having a chat and then leaving the café, from numerous angles, numerous times. Oh, wait, the last bit isn’t quite as everyday poser as the rest. I really hope they were filming the Stockholm version of Made in Chelsea…

When I was writing my dissertation last year I used to go and work in Starbucks. I know, I know, Starbucks is an evil corporate machine but there’s really not that many coffee shops in the UK which have soya milk (although the longer I’m in Stockholm the less I feel the need for anything other than pure, strong coffee) and my favourite Starbucks in Edinburgh is on Princes Street and has a wonderful view of the castle. It made writing about parrots and saints and deer and beheading less painful (yes, those really are all topics covered in my dissertation). I enjoyed being in a nice environment while doing my work, having people around me to watch, but also to guilt me into actually writing something for fear that they would notice me checking the football scores, doing a little Facebook stalking or imaginary shopping on Topshop and judge me. And today, for a couple of nice hours in one of my favourite cafés (Café String, if you were wondering) I had that same feeling of purpose (although I didn’t actually have any purpose to speak of) and, probably more importantly, it was rather lovely to be around people rather than cooped up in my room like Rapunzel or a leper, depending on how attractive I’m feeling.

Breaking the Ice

I have been living in Stockholm for over 6 months and have become somewhat blasé about the immense (for want of a better word) coolness of my current home city. Sure, Gamla Stan is pretty and I do love colourful buildings but I’ve seen them before. Yes, the perpetual blanket of snow is rather lovely but I can’t help but think about the impracticalities rather than the romance when I see it (can’t go running, might fall over at any time, can’t always tell how deep the puddles are, slush is not attractive, etc.) This week, however, I reached the level of over-excited-child that I felt constantly when I first arrived. And what, you may ask, was the wondrous thing that incited my excitement? An ice-breaker!

Ah, not that sort of icebreaker. A boat that breaks ice. My friend from home came to visit for a few days and that gave me a good excuse to do some more of touristy-Stockholm. When I first arrived I went on the Stockholm Sightseeing Tour Boat and it was fantastic. The water was blue, the sun was shining and I learnt lots of interesting stuff about Stockholm that I now pass off as my own facts when people come and visit. Basically it looked something like this:

 

 

The Winter version of the tour that Leanne and I went on had slightly different scenery:

 

The water, obviously, freezes during the cold cold winter. But the boats can break the ice and continue running throughout the year. Pretty much one of the coolest things I’ve ever seen: sailing through thick sheets of broken ice. We also had pea soup and glögg, both of which I love. All in all it was lovely to get back that feeling of awe about Stockholm, I know it’s a brilliant place but sometimes the mundaneness of my day-to-day life stops me from seeing how lucky I am to live in such a wonderful city.

 

Also, I would quite like to use the icebreaker as an icebreaker sometime…just need to get the wording right!

 

 

Brrrrrr – Living with the cold (Warning! This post overuses parentheses)

 

Ok. So it’s been a while. I know, I know, I say I’ll write and then nothing for weeks on end. I’m like a bad boyfriend, and like all bad boyfriends I’m popping back up now it’s (almost) Valentine’s Day and I know you’ll forgive me. Also like a bad boyfriend, I forgot to get you anything. I hope you’re happy enough with a bit of a re-cap about what I’ve been up to.

 

Let’s start with the reasons I haven’t been writing. Mainly there are 2:

1. I’m lazy

2. It’s been so cold I haven’t really done much

2.b) Not doing much mainly consists of drinking coffee and staring at handsome Swedish men with moustaches while sighing quietly to myself, I wasn’t sure if writing about this would make a good blog post. We’ll have to see how it goes…

 

Before Christmas it never really got that cold, all the Swedes told me how it wasn’t a proper winter and there should have been more snow and I should have felt the need to wear as many jumpers as possible at all times. Now the weather has become Swedish. It’s been down to -18 degrees and I for one am rather enjoying it. Yes, the cold has been giving me migraines and yes, I need to constantly reapply lipbalm so my lips don’t entirely dry out and yes, it is painful when I leave my mittens at home and my hands turn a not-so-fetching shade of pink but this is what I signed up for when I decided to come to Sweden! And it could have been so much worse, there are many places further north of Stockholm where the cold would even get through my fur hat and freeze me to the bones. Plus I rather like the snow, I like how crunchy it constantly is underfoot and I like how it hasn’t melted and turned into slush or refrozen, turning the pavements into icy-death-traps. I’ve just about stopped feeling like it’s perpetually Christmas and I no longer squeal when I see fresh flakes falling from the sky. I’m just enjoying the day to day business of snowyness.

 

 

This photo was taken from the bridge between Liljeholmen where I work and Hornstull where I go to the gym (a prime spot for people-watching, especially since the people in question are often young men with hilarious tattoos). Do not be fooled into thinking that it shows a quite narrow frozen river, no, no ,no. As far as the eye can see that used to be water, said water has now frozen and been covered in a couple of fresh layers of snow.

 

 

Hopefully this photo makes the ice and snow situation a bit more obvious. It’s it gorgeous? Walking over that bridge everyday makes me very happy. And very cold.

 

The only niggle I have concerning the weather is that I am now unable to spend much time outside and in Sweden outside is the only place to find free things to do. Due to being poor, I can’t go to museums all that much and the cinema prices are extortionate (also it seems less socially acceptable to go to the cinema alone here, I didn’t feel like a massive loser catching a film solo in Edinburgh and I definitely miss that) so I have to hide from the cold in the only places cheap enough for me: cafes!  Here in Stockholm many cafes even offer free coffee refills so for just 25kr (ish) I can overdose on caffeine. (I have also learnt how to time it perfectly at school to always get a fresh cup of coffee, I quite often reach that point where my hands start to quiver and my head feels fuzzy, but I can’t not pour myself a cup when it’s fresh!!)

 

I can now order my coffee in Swedish (although I have recently found out that I’m not eligible for the free Swedish lessons, which is rather annoying to say the least) and am learning how to recognise a joke simply by tone of voice so I don’t give myself away as an ignorant foreigner (I’m pretty sure my accent gives me away as a foreigner, but the speaking-Swedish aspect hopefully gives me the air of not being ignorant). The cafes here are lovely. They make me feel at home, they give me plenty of prime targets for people-watching and I can sit for hours catching up on my reading (this was one of my aims for this year, I think I’m currently averaging 2.5 books a week, depending on the book and how much time I spend on public transport). Although sitting in a cafe means I’m not exploring Stockholm to the max, I think I am experiencing real Stockholm. Sweden has a wonderful cafe culture and I am trying my best to make the most of it. Sure, I fika on my own more often than I’d like, but when I leave Stockholm I certainly will miss the cafes. I think I may now be a reformed Starbucks addict!

 

I think that’s enough for today, it’s late and I don’t want to start talking complete nonsense. I have a lovely friend coming to visit me for a platonic Valentine’s Day (again, like a bad boyfriend, I’m not actually free for a date on the most romantic day of the year) and hopefully exciting things will happen (that I may even photograph so as to make my blog more attractive to the skim-readers amongst you) and I will be able to regale you with stories and stop being such a bad boyfriend! To try and make amends I shall leave you with a photo of a beautiful snowy scene, enjoy!