Learning to Fisk

Today ended much as it began; with herring. Ended with my first personal flirtation with preparing the fresh fish – a strong-smelling but delightful tryst, deliciously endowed with liberal amounts of hot butter and garlic. Began more timidly – those of you who like adventure food will agree – with a twist in flavor on the much-loved pickled fish. (There are no less than 5 flavors of pickled herring at the bodega-grocery the train station; at the full-scale one in the middle of town, I stopped counting at 8. The jars further down the shelf had begun to include mussels, shrimps and other sea-bits, and I could no longer in good conscience categorize them as herrings.) Though mustard, and lemon, look like nice flavorscapes to accompany the fish, I started my Swedish pickled herring perusal with dill. Dill is ubiquitous here, tucked into all kinds of sauces and salady things and herb mixes. (I'd even be willing to insist I've seen sprigs in some floral arrangements, if you need a good anecdote.) In fact, if you're going to have a seasoned foodstuff here, I've been assured it would be safe to bet it will be seasoned with dill. Or the occasional juniper berry.

Much of the spice-box I suspended between wooly pants and wooly sweaters on the flight over was designed to outweigh this whole dill-obsession. Heavy on the dried peppers (ancho, chipotle, cayenne and aleppo), but also on a couple of mixes that simply cannot be easily swayed to the Forces of Sweet. Because dill most certainly can. Yep, sweet pickled herring is what I ate this morning, and as much as I enjoy pickled herring –and flaunting the sweet-breakfast convention in general – it was kind of weird.

In between herrings, then, was a super mundane day of travel-city-logistics: learning how the public transportation card is filled with money (equaling more rides), acquiring a Hosteling International membership (equaling more beds), and finding an easy-to-read and cheap wrist watch (equaling, counterintuitively, a little less free time). The sum total of the day: increased fish quotient in my belly, and Increased Preparedness for Traveling.

Tomorrow, its back to oogling the magic of narrow, colorful cities pushing their ways up through the rocky floors mossy forests – we're going to Uppsala (say it Oop-sala)!

The word of the day is Herring: Sill (seel). And sillar (seel-ahr, that's more than one herring) are a kind of fisk. 

This Couch is Mysig

I honestly cannot recommend an east-to-west, 7-timezone airplane ride to anyone, but 32 hours after the fact, I'm doing pretty well. The first 10 hours were tricky, jetlag has gotten more sophisticated since I last tasted it. I kept getting second winds, feeling fine, looking forward to life, and starting out on adventures. Invariably, I got halfway (just inside the grocery door, to the apex of a loop around the neighborhood, up off the couch for a glass of water) suddenly was quite convinced someone was slowly but confidently pulling the linoleum/asphalt/ubiquitous birch floor paneling out from under my feet. Loss of balance was quickly ganged up upon by the sensation of being pressed by about 60 pounds of wet sand. I felt cold, and flush, and very very stupid. I'd persevere in a half-conscious sort of way, accomplish X goal without any feeling of victory, and slump back gratefully in stasis … only to get another second wind 15 minutes later. I made it til 9 before I lost consciousness and feel very very lucky that I could still say words by then.

Today, though, waking up was easy, and besides a total lack of attention span, I feel happy and normal. We walked through Stockholm, mostly the oldest island Gamal Stan, where the streets are two-wingspans wide, orthotically cobblestoned, and decorated with many antique and tasteful-tourist shops. It was a look-but-don't-touch day, a get-lost-on-purpose day, a oh-my-there's-skulls-under-that-dragon-statue day. I could hardly see the architecture for the bricks, and look forward to visiting again when peering into every window isn't so all my brain will allow. There's a gaming store (a big one with fantasy novels, comics and all kinds of geekphenalia) in which I'd love to spend an afternoon. It has a shingle hanging above the door with a painting of a dragon fighting a rocketship. Yay!

The city didn't smell like much besides cold, wet stone and the occasional municipal construction site. The buses smell like Sharpies. But outside boutiques and flower shops, on the little stone sidewalks in front of bakeries and offices, little fires were burning. Some were tea lights in colored glass jars, some were tiny campfires in little iron cages, all merry and flickering. These are mysig (say it mee-sig, with your tongue against your front teeth, the cuter you slur the better, and its an adjective), a sweet little assurance that the place within is Cozy. Friendly, nice, snug, sitting-with-friends-by-the-fire-with-a-mug-of-glogg cozy. Sweden is just about the cutest.

Now it is dark (has been since 4), just above freezing, and we've finished a dinner of corn chips (a brittle, super-finely-ground-corn local brand), home-refried black beans (they came canned in a box!) and fresh salsa made as spicy hot as we could handle. Somewhere winding through the neighborhood I can hear the chiming of an ice-cream truck.

My vocabulary is growing, mostly thanks to Engelsk Bildordbok (a Swedish-to-English dictionary done completely in pictures – nouns are awesome!):

Svamp is your singular Mushroom (more than one would be svampar)

Ren is Reindeer

Dogs say “Bow!”

And the word for Uterus is Livmoder