tall ships

The Tall Ships are in town so we went down to take in the might of these fabulous ships.

It's hard with two kids in tow, especially when one is cranky and the other is a new born.

The weather wasn't really helpful either, alternating between glorious sunshine or miserable rain. One or the other gives you a chance to make a decision --'Should I stay or should I go'---

We did go aboard Tre Kronor--Briggen. It's nice to see her as a ship afloat. She's come a long way from the timbers we have witnessed evolve in her cradle on Skeppsholmen.

Tomorrow we'll watch the parade in the harbor.

1kr for a bag

I just paid 1kr for a plastic bag at Lagerhaus--a trend setting knickknack shop with high-priced crap. Some stuff is fun so I like to peek in and buy me some cheap crap.

Ringing up cheap crap I see that Lagerhaus has joined the penny-pinching retailers who charge customers for a bag to carry their goodies home. Back when, only supermarkets and IKEA were stingy enough to charge for a bag. Systembolaget followed suit and now the flash retailers have turned to sucking pennies/kronor out of us consumers.

I was so close to asking the poor shop assistant, "Isn't it embarrassing to charge customers a krona for a bag?" Because it has to be. You buy several hundred kronor of inventory and they want to charge a krona--one krona--to take it home with you in a bag.

The argument I hear people use to defend this greedy practice is "Otherwise people take a whole bunch of bags home with them." However, before this trend mushroomed, the retail shops put your purchases in a bag they took from behind the counter and handed you the whole shebang. Now you not only have to pay for the bag, but put your own cheap crap away.

I can accept that I'm stuck somewhere between a cheapskate and thrifty with irrational bursts of spend-thriftiness. I would like to think I am always generous --but that's not what this is about.

It's about us consumers allowing ourselves to get suckered out of kronor here and there and we think it's just and fair...we're fools. If I have a shop and I could get away with having people pay an admission fee I suppose I would do it. If people are wasteful enough with their money to throw it away--I suppose my motto should be the same as the cheap crap shops...

Throw it my way.

summer parking

As anyone with with a car and no assigned parking spot in Stockholm knows: Parking sucks. Well, most of the year.

Summer is actually a dream-come-true for finding a spot; there's always one somewhere. It's so easy these days that if I can't find a spot within a hundred meters of our front door I feel cheated.

There's an illegal spot across the street that never gets ticketed. It's not legal because it's not 10m in from the intersection. For some unknown reason the parking guards leave it alone. Unofficially, we've feel the cheat spot--as we call it, is as close to what we'll ever have as our reserved spot. At this point, a 450-700kr ticket would be cheap rent for all the times we've used it.

Before we end on the topic of ideal times to park, the absolutely most ideal time to find a parking spot on the streets of Stockholm is the evening of Midsommar's Eve. One year we came home to a nearly empty street.

One can only dream.

understanding dog and whale speak

Like in Finding Nemo when Dori claims "Iiiiiii, speeeeaaak wwwwwhaaaaaale" I think I'm getting closer to understanding the signals of Swedes when communicating.

I have been saying for a while that Swedes speak dog and whale.

What I mean is that for us Anglo-speakers, and certainly other non-native Swedish speakers, there are messages/signals communicated between Swedes that we miss. Many of us get irritated, angry or even upset when we believe the "polite signals" --please, excuse me, thank you--aren't used by Swedes when communicating.

I am now completely convinced they are used, but we cannot "hear" them because they are on a "frequency" we cannot hear --like what dogs and whales can hear.

This came up at dinner last night with Swedish friends. One got it immediately and called it the appropriate "signals" while another kept trying to interpret my "evaluation" trying to figure out who I was calling more or less direct.

Alas, that's the run in I still get faced with all these years later. As neutral and nonjudgmental as I tireless try to be, Swedes, even my oldest friends, interpret my analysis as a likely criticism or at best--judgment.

I only mean we don't understand all the Swedish signals and as a result we misinterpret.