All Roads Lead to ABBA

Stockholm is sort of an odd duck, culturally speaking.

To me, this is one of its major selling points.

As I mentioned last week, the city seemed to me to have a vaguely 1970s socialist aesthetic —not so much in the architecture, which is universally lovely — but in eyeglasses, clothing, fonts, and graphic design in general.

To be fair, this poster from the Swedish Postal Museum is actually from the 1970s. But most of the advertising we saw was very much along the same lines:

Stockholm also takes great pride in its most famous export: ABBA.

Anyone out there need a refresher on ABBA?

Yeah, okay; I didn't think so.

As a side note, you may be interested to hear that according to the Internet, ABBA is often referred to as "Sweden's greatest gift to the world."

You know, if I were a Viking and I read that? I would be seriously pissed off.

One of the highlights of our trip last weekend was a visit to Stockholm's music museum, where we played all kinds of crazy instruments made out of keys and tubes and springs and ping pong paddles.

We also walked through an interactive hall containing 800 years of music history, starting with Gregorian chant and moving to primitive instruments and then chamber groups, then progressing (in a sense) to polka bands and then big bands and then jazz bands.

All of this important cultural development culminated in (you guessed it!) Sweden's greatest gift to the world.

We were also amused to find ABBA's drum set standing in a place of honor in an exhibit on world percussion.

And, if you wanted to try drumming along to music on an interactive drum pad, your two background track choices were Duke Ellington and ABBA.

Don't get me wrong: I'm all for ABBA.

I just wonder if their critical role in the development of music wasn't a little...overstated.

I have to admit that we also really enjoyed shopping in Stockholm.

I like to think that I'm not one of those people who consider shopping to be a fun leisure activity, and certainly not while on vacation.

But I also think that 18 months in the Netherlands has starved the core American part of me that likes to look for and buy things.

Between the limited selection, high prices, surly shopkeepers, and communist-era store hours, shopping in the Netherlands is just a grim business.

Even the flea markets and rummage sales are sort of depressing.

So when we find ourselves in another country, shopping suddenly seems like an extremely fun thing to do.

Luckily for John (if not for our savings account), Stockholm has what might be the most amazing science fiction bookstore we have ever seen, with four stories of books, movies, t-shirts, cards and games.

Does it go without saying that we visited twice?

We also visited a British food store, where I found a box of PG Tips, my favorite tea. This box is large enough to last me through the Apocalypse. And then some.

It just so happened that the British food store had a handful of American products.

This made it even more fun, although it was a little disconcerting to see a very American product like Bac-Os right next to a very British product like Marmite.

In the interest of avoiding an international incident, we resisted the urge to smuggle a giant bottle of Aunt Jemima pancake syrup back into the Netherlands.

Speaking of culinary delights, we found that the food in Stockholm was much better than we expected.

To be fair: we did not have very high expectations.

In some cases, this was not without basis:

But in other cases, we were pleasantly surprised.

We were staying in a great hotel on Skeppsholmen, a quiet, lovely island in the middle of the city. A former Royal Marine base, it's home to a few museums, a couple of restaurants, a hotel, and not much else.

As a side note, our favorite museum on Skeppsholmen was the Moderna Museet, where we saw a great exhibition by the American artist Ed Ruscha.

Unfortunately, we arrived only 45 minutes before the museum closed, as I misread what our tourist brochure said (in English) about the hours.

We would have gone earlier anyway, except that while taking a quick break at the hotel, we were transfixed by a televised competition that can only be described as Swedish synchronized horse acrobatics.

With play-by-play announcers. And complicated scoring. And a horse on a tether. And a team of six ladies wearing electric blue leotards and elaborate braids.

We wanted to stop watching and go to the museum, but we were not physically able to turn away from the television.

A week later, the fact that I cannot find this sporting activity — anywhere! — on the Internet only enhances my suspicion that there was some kind of Swedish peyote circulating in the hotel's ventilation system.

In any case: after our lovely but brief visit to the art museum, we wandered over to the other side of the island to a small outdoor restaurant overlooking the water.

It also overlooks a bunch of quasi-houseboats, most of which confirmed my theory that people who live a certain distance north of the equator don't really care what other people think.

Note that I was perfectly happily taking homestead-y boat photos until John said something like, "I just want to point out that there's a guy in that hammock."

Eeek!

But back to the restaurant:

We were not totally convinced that we wanted to eat full-on Swedish food, but the whole atmosphere — the water, the sunset, people having a drink while wrapped up in wool blankets — was so great, we couldn't pass it up.

As it turned out, it was one of the best meals I've had in a long time.

Salty homemade bread. French onion soup to take the edge off the chilly evening air. Whole smoked trout with sour cream, red onions, dill and hard boiled eggs. Spanish wine. To top it all off, a dessert of sour cream pudding with strawberries and ice cream and crunchy things that can only be described as sweet croutons.

It was pretty much total bliss.

Speaking of odd ducks...

One upside of coming back to our regular lives in the Netherlands is that I've learned two new handy expressions in Dutch.

One is krenten uit de pap. This translates to "raisins out of the porridge", and it refers to a situation in which all of the special things are gone.

I don't know about you, but there are a lot of objects in this world that represent something special to me.

Raisins are not one of them.

The other is vreemde eend in de bijt.

For anyone not up on Dutch water terminology, a bijt is a "hole in the ice".

Vreemd means foreign or strange, and an eend is a duck, so a vreemde eend is a duck who doesn't belong with the other ducks in said hole.

Leaving aside for the moment the hilarious fact that the Dutch have a dedicated word that means "hole in the ice", this turns out to be a very handy concept.

In the interest of not getting fired, I generally err on the side of not writing about my job here.

But let's put it this way: there are moments at work pretty much every day in which, one way or another, I feel like a vreemde eend.

The other reason that I love this expression is that I feel like it must be the source of the otherwise totally inexplicable English phrase "odd duck".

John, for the record, is having none of this.

"Who on earth says 'odd duck'?" he asks.

Me, for one.

Also my grandmother.

And lots of other people, all of whom are possibly over the age of 70.

True Love

With heartfelt apologies to miscellaneous boys of Fulton, New York, I think it's fair to say that my first true love was a Volvo 240 DL.

A 5-speed.

In dark green.

As a result, I had high expectations for this past weekend in Stockholm.

John had a week-long conference there, and I joined him on Friday evening via a mildly arduous bus-to-train-to-bus-to-discount-airline-which-I-always-swear-I-am-never-using-again-to-bus-to-subway journey.

But much to my chagrin, Sweden is not crawling with Volvos of that glorious 1980s vintage.

Most of the Volvos that I saw were newer-model station wagons, which just don't have that same boxy allure.

However: many of them were tricked out with elaborate rearview mirror extenders for the pop-up campers they were towing.

Which made up for it, sort of.

Another major consolation is that one can purchase an extensive array of Volvo advertisement postcards in Stockholm.

This resulted in a rare instance in which John probably should have imposed a budget prior to letting me enter the store.

Calamitous Volvo shortages notwithstanding, Stockholm turned out to be a really fun place to spend the weekend.

I liked a lot of things about the city, but my favorite part was that it has a vaguely 1970s socialist aesthetic, paired with a passion for bleeding-edge art and design.

As an added bonus, the Swedish language is hilarious.

Dear Lovely People of Sweden: when I say that your language is hilarious, I mean that in the nicest, most respectful way possible.

It's just very, very difficult to take anything in Swedish seriously.

The recorded voice on the subway, for example. The guided tours at the museums. The heated discussions between couples at restaurants about whether to order rhubarb soup or sour cream pudding.

To my ears, it all just sounds like, well...I think we all know who I'm talking about.

Catching Up

We've had one of those months where we get home from a trip, take the perishables and dirty laundry out of our backpacks, and leave everything else packed for the following weekend.

The upside is that we've been out and about, enjoying the summer and doing fun things like sailing and eating our way through Paris.

The downside is somewhat more pedestrian:

It's a grave understatement to say that our apartment is in disarray.

Our refrigerator contains little more than a stale loaf of bread and about 15 kinds of homemade pickle (by which I mean spicy chutneys, not gherkins).

We have a mountain of dirty clothes in our bedroom that rivals K2 in height and adversity.

Plus I've been slacking unconscionably on my favorite Sunday morning activity: writing Peanut Cheese.

All hope is not lost, however: our pint-sized washing machine is thrashing away upstairs, and the more-or-less unabridged versions of our sailing and Paris adventures follow below.

Ma Vie En Poulet

Paris is famous for a lot of things: it's known, for example, as the City of Lights, the City of Romance, and the City of Dreams.

I think the world is missing the fact that it's also the City of Chickens.

For example, Paris' many trendy boutiques pale in comparison to Mr. Chicken: Original Chicken Clothes:

We also found ourselves on Chickenmonger Street.

(Note to my two French-speaking friends, who are going to complain and point out that this is just a French name, not the word for chickenmonger: work with me, please! Surely this has something to do with chickens...)

And my personal favorite: Chicken Point's restaurant.

This might be the most puzzling use of the apostrophe s that I have seen in recent memory.

And I can't help but wonder: which part of the chicken, exactly, is the chicken point?

This is a long and con-pol-uted (groan) way to say that there are two things I really loved on our maiden voyage to Paris: one is the food, and the other is the healthy dose of quirkiness.

Chickens represent both of these, although I strongly prefer the quirk factor of chickens to the food factor.

Unlike more austere, Northern European cities who shall remain unnamed, Paris felt like it had something interesting and/or weird hidden around every corner.

We stumbled on a exhibit by the Japanese artist Takeshi Kitano at the Cartier Foundation for Contemporary Art, which was amazing in all senses of the word.

As our friend Mary (who was our tireless tour guide, translator, and at least for people like me who are terrified of French waiters, food orderer) points out, this video doesn't even begin to reveal the weirdness of the exhibit.

But it does give you an idea.

I should point out that there is a bonus chicken around 0:37. If you can't find it, direct your attention to the mouth of the alligator.

Other examples of quirkiness:

Space Invaders in the 15th arrondissement...

Dinosaurs at the Palais de la decouverte...

Speed Rabbit Pizza...

In a city where rabbit is considered a reasonably conventional type of meat to eat for dinner, I found myself wondering if this suggests pizza delivered with the speed of rabbits, or the speedy delivery of rabbit pizza.

The Cemetery at Montparnasse was full of quirky variations on eternal rest. One of our favorites was the "I'm not dead yet" tombstone:

Another was further proof that nothing says "I miss you" like dead flowers and packing tape.

Slightly less quirky but still somewhat charming were...

Billboard painters in the subway (note that the green blur is an incoming train):

Cute numbered washing machines in cute French laundromats:

Boxes of fruit at Paris' ubiquitous open-air markets:

The contraption-filled Stravinsky fountain:

And photos taken with the mirrors in the lobby of Mary's building, which has an elevator the size of our Dutch refrigerator:

This sort of pains my inner cynic, but all of these delightful little things plus the gorgeous French spoken around us made me feel most of the time like I was living in the movie Amelie.

But as I mentioned, the quirk was only part of the fun.

Since there's nothing quite as exciting as hearing about five days' worth of breakfast, lunch and dinner, I will spare you the rundown of all of the delicious things we found to eat in Paris.

Perhaps I can just say that after living for 18 months in a food-indifferent Northern European country who shall remain unnamed, bingeing on Paris' many culinary options made us very, very, very happy campers.

We were also lucky enough to have perfect weather, so most of our meals were long and leisurely affairs at tables outside.

I took the following series of midday photos of John and Mary discussing what semolina is, exactly, as we contemplated our dessert options at the Lebanese deli down the street.

Lest you think that we skipped all of Paris' landmarks in favor of eating and taking photos of miscellaneous weirdness, we at least pretended to see some of the sites.

Note that it's impossible to take self portraits at the Eiffel Tower without ending up with the tower sticking out of one's head.

Blue skies at the Sacre de Couer:

Random sculpture in the Tuileries:

The Louvre reflected in John's glasses:

Notre Dame and the Seine:

Some eternal sacrifice back at the Montparnasse Cemetery:

And last but not least, a little bit of friendliness at the Notre Dame Cathedral.

Because nothing says "City of Romance" like Catholicism!

Dillingham Syndrome

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote briefly about our super-fun sailing class on a 40-foot boat in the Ijsselmeer, but I'm not sure I really did justice to the finer points of the experience.

This being the Netherlands, there was a good chance that we were going to experience driving rain, sleet or other forms of meteorological armageddon while out on the water, so we followed the sailing school's instructions and brought a giant duffel bag full of fleece clothes, long underwear, and waterproof everything.

I have to say: there's nothing quite as Dutch feeling as riding one's bicycle to the train station while carrying a backpack loaded down with multiple pairs of knee-high rubber boots.

Other than getting drenched in the process, I suppose.

Much to our surprise and delight, we had gorgeous weather for the entire weekend, so our treasure trove of cold-weather gear stayed neatly packed and stowed.

As I mentioned, the Ijsselmeer is a large freshwater lake created through some tricky Dutch engineering early last century.

It has the same feel as the Great Lakes in the U.S., in the sense that it has waves and wind and its own weather systems.

Its shore is dotted with tiny towns, all of which have marinas for the considerable number of Dutch people who own sailboats or motorboats and spend their weekends out on the water.

As our sailing instructor pointed out, most of the old cities and towns in Holland were built when boats were the primary form of transportation.

As a result, approaching them from the water is a much different experience than driving through suburbs and outskirts and then finally reaching the old city center.

You can also tell how each town's church tower was (and still is) important for navigation, and it was particularly thrilling to hear church bells pealing out across the water

On Friday night, we docked around 10 p.m. in Muiden, a town that boasts 6,700 people, one castle and one bar.

Maybe it goes without saying that John and I haven't spent a lot of time in bars in the Netherlands, and certainly not after 11 p.m.

At the urging of our 25-year-old Irish classmate, we found ourselves drinking more Dutch beer than is advisable for anyone spending the next 48 hours on a boat.

As the evening wore on, we observed with interest that most of Muiden's 6,700 residents were also at this bar.

And through some act of demographic freakery, they were either men over the age of 50, or they were teenagers.

By teenagers, I mean people who look like they're 12, but are drinking beer legally and singing lustily to the Dutch pop songs blaring on the radio.

I find that Europeans are uniformly horrified to learn that Americans can learn to drive when they're 15, but can't drink legally until they're 21.

I see their point, but I find it equally disconcerting to belly up to the bar next to anyone who hasn't hit puberty yet.

The evening had lots of highlights: the unapologetically hideous music was one of them, and the tray of unidentifiable fried things that we inhaled in place of dinner was another.

For me, however, what made all of the watery pilsner worthwhile was learning that certain snarky people describe milk as "Dutch wine".

It's hard to convey properly, but one of the most alarming things about the Netherlands is that Dutch adults are big milk drinkers.

Really big milk drinkers.

It's hard, as a non-Dutch person, to keep my gaping mouth closed when I see a group of banking executives, primarily men over the age of 50, sitting around a boardroom and drinking milk.

Because nothing says business lunch like a big, frosty glass of milk!

In the end, we survived our latest night on the town in recent memory. We even survived our low-level hangovers and managed not to test the limits of the boat's finicky marine toilets.

On Saturday night, we stopped in an even smaller harbor town called Marken, which is famous for its wooden houses and canals in place of streets.

Marken is a good example of what I call Dillingham Syndrome:

If you visit a place that's bizarre to begin with (e.g. Alaska), and then travel to a small town reachable primarily by plane or boat (e.g. Dillingham), you need to be prepared for some really weird shit.

Much to our chagrin, Marken was hosting an event involving loud music and a tent.

For a more peaceful night's sleep, we zipped across the way to Monnickendam, which, at almost 10,000 people, is a thriving metropolis by Dutch standards.

We berthed for the night in a huge marina that gave me an unexpected jolt of nostalgia: it had the joyously familiar feeling of American campgrounds where my grandparents liked to stay, with full hook-ups, coin-op showers, and the same chatty neighbors who come back year after year.