Big Brother Sweden

I don't want to alarm anyone, but today I got a letter in the mail from the Swedish government saying that a pap smear has been scheduled for me for the 16th of November. I asked The Handsome Swede about this, and apparently that's how it always is. The government makes preventative care appointments for you automatically. They don't rely on personal initiative at all. This, I knew about before I came here. And yet, there was nothing approaching my shock when I got a letter in the mail only one month after arriving saying I was due at the gynecologist. I have to say, I'm all for it when it comes to healthcare. But who knows how far this will go? What's next: a letter saying it's time to invest in bonds? Write my will? Fear is in my heart.

The Maelstrom of Immigrants

Now I've been through a week of my Swedish classes, and I can give you a much more precise idea of what's going on.

There are over fifty of us in my class. I dub it: the international house of Bedlam. Over in one corner we have the Russians, in another the Angolans, not far off the Afghanis, and toward the front: the three Mohammeds. I haven't quizzed everyone yet on where they are from, but so far I've met an Iranian, an Egyptian, an Angolan, a Korean, a Jamaican, a Hungarian, a German, and yes, even an American. I have made friends with the Iranian and the Egyptian; we sit together. The funny thing is that people never raise their hands. The teachers (we have three now) have to be careful to calibrate the timing of their questions to us, because as soon as they ask, cacophony reigns. Although all the students seem to have been living in Sweden for several years already, and based on their loquacity as they holler out long-winded answers, I'd have to say they all seem fluent in Swedish, down to a man they have incomprehensible accents. I can't understand a word they say. Not a word. The teachers are often equally stymied.

It would be hellish if it weren't also hilarious. The Swedish teachers, who are 30-ish Swedish women, are already betraying signs of burn-out. But they are very nice, very funny, and very smart. For whatever reason, I'm not having any trouble with the Swedish level. The other students look at me funny when in our small-group discussions it becomes apparent that I don't know how to say basic things like "fat" and "orange", but I don't feel embarrassed to speak Swedish with them, and my fluency is skyrocketing. I can express my opinions pretty well, using skeleton key expressions like, "let's not waste time" and "they are all very bad," and "that's difficult". In fact, I've found that the phrase "that's difficult," fits into all situations. ALL. Somehow in class I don't even think about the fact that I'm speaking Swedish. It just seems to come naturally. I always get my point across more or less, even without having the words I need, and that's exhilarating. Verbal fluency and active vocabulary do not run perfectly in tandem, I'm discovering.

I haven't spoken to the other American yet. She is a well-to-do(-looking) woman in her mid-forties with the flattest, most tone-deaf Swedish you've ever heard. As soon as she opened her mouth I could hear she was American, and then she went about forcing the teacher to correct all of her pages of fill-in-the-blank grammar exercises for her, instead of just asking a specific question, while the rest of us floundered.

As I mentioned, I've become friends with an Iranian and an Egyptian. I like the Iranian in particular. She's a young woman who emigrated with her husband three years ago. She's very sweet-natured and has enormous eyes. If she can get through this Swedish course, she wants to go to florist school and become a florist, her dream job. Whenever she talks about becoming a florist she blushes. I'm not kidding. To illustrate her personality further -- at the school they sell coffee and cake during the breaks, and she went to get a coffee and when she came back she suddenly cried out, because she still had the fifty cent coin in her hand she was supposed to pay with. She kept yelling and grabbing her cheeks, and ran at full speed out of the classroom to go pay for it.

She had an education as a schoolteacher in Iran, but after she finished, couldn't get a job because she was "not fundamentalist enough". The only way she could make money was to have private students come to her home, hardly a living. When I asked her whether, if I went to Iran, I could just cover myself with a chador and blend into the crowd outside, she seemed amused, and explained that there were many, many details of appearance in a woman which make it obvious whether or not she is fundamentalist, and that she herself, without any make-up or anything else, was still often insulted on the street for her non-fundamentalist appearance.

By the end of December we have to read a Swedish novel that takes place in Mozambique, rather well-known (it seems The Handsome Swede had to read it in highschool himself) and we have to keep a reading-diary that chronicles our reflections and criticism. We also have piles of grammar sheets to fill in all the time too, and a number of essays to write. The course focuses on getting us to a point where we can use Swedish critically, to make arguments and essays with strong theses.

Given how many students are in the class and how browbeaten the teachers seem, the quality of teaching will inevitably be somewhat poor, but school need not always have good teaching to have something to teach.

My first class

On Monday I went to my first day of SAS, the Swedish course that I was assigned to that I was so afraid of. It was just an introductory meeting, not an actual class, so I didn't get a sense of the level of Swedish of the other students. But there were two teachers, and I could understand everything they said, which was encouraging. Looking around, it seemed that I was the only non-refugee in the class.

To take these government classes, you have to be living in Sweden legally, not as a tourist, of course. And there are three types of people who would be living in Sweden legally: people here on student visas to study at the universities here, who would already speak Swedish or have university Swedish classes. Then there are the so-called love-immigrants, and I fall into that category -- we're here on "family ties" visas. Then there are the refugees. Sweden has one of the best records in the world for granting asylum to the politically persecuted and war refugees.

Clearly the refugees are much greater in number than the love immigrants, so it's not really surprising that my class seems to have few of the former. I don't know the nationalities of all the people in my class yet, though. I'll give you an update later. The only person I know for sure is the guy who sat next to me. He's Congolese. He's been living in Sweden for five years. He said he went to Paris for a while and lived there, but came back to Sweden because here in Sweden, everything is paid for by the government. Hmmm...

Anyway, with him I had my first naturally occuring Swedish conversation. It wasn't somebody humoring me, it was a real live conversation. So that was nice. Altogether I'll be spending fifteen hours a week in class, which is pretty much. I'll let you know how it goes.

Ch-ch-ch-changes Already

Bloglings, a new, scarier epoque in my Stockholm experience has begun, an era in which I must take Swedish far more seriously.

I finally had the documents I needed to go to the SFI central office (Swedish for Immigrants, the place where I waited in vain for several hours in my last post). I got there at noon and was sent upstairs for a drop-in placement test. My understanding was that this was mostly to see whether you were illiterate. They have separate classes for people who have higher education in their home country. So now the harrowing story of how I came to spend FIVE HOURS there.

First I had an interview. This was only about ten minutes long. The woman asked me questions very slowly, like where was I from (it turned out she had lived in Boston herself, many years ago when her husband was at Harvard medical school), how many years of education did I have behind me, etc. She was very friendly, and I was pleasantly surprised I could interact with her in Swedish without using any English. However, I was, uh, not eloquent. Whenever she asked me something, I looked at the ceiling, became highly pensive, and then said either "good" or "not good" after giving up on finding my vocabulary words which appeared to be playing hide-and-seek on me. Sometimes I accidentally put in German words. I waved my teach-yourself Swedish book at her and showed her what chapter I was on in the hopes that she would telepathically know all the details of my Swedish level. She seemed to consider. In what I saw by her expression was a long shot in her opinion, she got out a little book and opened it to a short text in Swedish and made me read it out loud. I did, and then she asked me if I had understood. Actually I understood everything. But I forgot the word for everything and so instead I nodded my head vigorously and showed my teeth. Then I went into an excited monologue about how 2/3 of Swedish words are encrypted German ones, except for my recent experience with the Swedish names of flora and fauna, these being entirely Swedish. Of which she understood: ZERO. Why did such a nice, intelligent lady understand only 0.00 percent? Because my monologue sounded something like this:

"Swedish and German like, very like. I know word Swedish sound German can we say 75 of 100? Yes, yes, you know? But some not like, these...(long pause as I look out the window searching for words) these, you know? (The light of understanding did not cross her face, and I saw I would have to plow forward.) Yes, ah, eh, some Swedish word not like German: these NATURE."

I will cut short my reminiscences of this interlude now. But let's just say there was considerably more time spent trying to get across what I meant by "nature".

So that was a little embarrassing. She pointed to a couple of words in the text and asked me what they meant instead, and miraculously I was able to begin to get across to her that I knew the meanings. Because of my vigorous head-nodding. At least she saw that I was TRYING to express that I understood even if I couldn't paraphrase them.

So then she consulted a computer and told me I could start SFI classes some time in the middle of next week, since they were all full at the moment. She gave me a piece of paper with the number of the office so that I could call and find out which school had a place. Then she told me I'd have a short written test in the other room.

We went to a big room with many desks where many people of many nationalities were sitting and taking tests. Along the side were computer stations, where one or two people seemed to be taking computerized tests. She explained to me very slowly and clearly that there were three topics for a writing sample, and that I only need pick ONE, NOT all three, as if it were really common for students not to understand that. And I'm sure is is common. I thanked her, and she left, saying goodbye and that I didn't need to come back to her when I was done. She left my file with the teacher at the front of the room.

So the test was easy. Just what's your name, where are you from. I was sort of giddy at how easy it was, and got a bit fancy, just for fun. For the writing topic, I chose "Describe a trip you have taken". I decided to describe my first trip to Sweden. I got very involved in it, biting my pencil and forgetting everyone in the room. I carefully only used Swedish phrases that I had painstakingly memorized from my grammar book and from pop lyrics, but with different nouns. I talked about how I had been nervous to come to Sweden because I loved THS, but was worried that I might not like his country, and what would become of our love then?! I must say, it was heartrending. Very heartrending.

I handed in my test rather proudly and was already on my way out the door when the teacher came and gave me ANOTHER test. I thought, "Okay, the test was longer than I thought," and sat down again. This time it was reading comprehension. It was a news story about a robbery. So I filled that out, teaching myself the meanings of words by their contexts. It took me a long time, but I did it too, feeling pretty confident I understood everything, and really pressing myself to flip things this way and that so that I could answer questions properly. (Something I've learned over the years: use tests against themselves! Most of the information you need to get a test right is contained within the test. Few tests are tests of knowledge, most are logic problems. The key is time -- you're dead if the test has a time limit. This one didn't). I turned it in, and the teacher glanced at it and then gave me two MORE worksheets to fill out, with two more texts to read, and another little essay to write. At that point, I realized the things I was being asked to do were getting harder.

It was while I was filling these ones out (now it was about the medicinal benefits of white onions, and a woman thief who swallowed all the jewels she stole), that I realized that there were three teachers at the front now, and they were talking to each other and looking at me. Getting nervous, I handed in these tests, and just then yet another teacher came in, this one very sharp, strict, and brisk looking, obviously some kind of authority. I couldn't understand everything they said, but a nice looking teacher said to me, "Your Swedish level was very bad in the interview," and she gestured at my file, "but you write extremely well and you don't have any problem with these comprehension tests." I looked at them, and didn't know what to say. Literally. So I said all I could say in Swedish: " I know German." I thought a light of understanding would cause their eyes to sparkle then, but no such luck. Apparently many Swedes do not consider their language similar to German. Probably only something they'd find out if they happened to study the language.

I was handed yet another test by a young teacher, but then the authority figure began to say something, and a discussion ensued. I didn't get everything, pretending to be busy with my new test, but what I managed to understand was:
"Have her do it."
"No, but if she can't speak, it won't help."
"It doesn't matter, speaking, she can learn."
The test I had in my hand was pulled back out of it. I was steered toward one of the computers, and sat down in front of it. Even once I was sitting there they continued to argue over me. I tried to look as innocent and David Copperfieldish as possible.
Finally with a clack of her heels, the boss teacher turned and went out loudly and forcefully. It seemed I was to stay at the computer. I looked at the screen and saw that it was the national test. 2 hours and 15 minutes. Aaaghhhii! I had already been taking tests for two hours! I was hungry and thirsty. But I'm so timid, I didn't want to rock the boat or have to expose my inability to talk Swedish by trying to ask in Swedish for a food break.

And yes, I had finally met my match. This test was timed. AND I was hungry and impatient. AND it was incredibly hard. There was a listening comprehension part that made you listen to Swedish radio. The essay questions for the writing part gave you a choice of topics like, "What if the world's oil supply were to be exhausted?" and "How might our society best organize elder care?"

I took the test for a long time. There was a reading comprehension part where I NEVER did manage to figure out ANYTHING about the topic. Finally, the room that had been full when I came in was empty. It seemed to be getting dark outside. All the teachers were gone. The boss woman with her clicking heels and brisk speech came back eventually. She asked how it was going. I said something like, "It...too...haard...for...me..." She told me they were closing. She took me into her office.

She was the kind of person who always sounded angry even when saying kind things, so it took me a while to figure out that she was saying that no matter how I did on the test, it was simply very good for me that I had taken it, in light of having little background with Swedish.

Then she looked at my results on her computer. She congratulated me because apparently I got a perfect score on listening comprehension. But the other stuff was abysmal. As expected. She said many things very quickly then. I got that she had decided I was a "fast learner" and that she had a school for me where I should start monday where they had classes for flexible, speedy learners. Then she handed me a sheet of paper, and I saw that I wasn't being sent to SFI at all anymore, but something called SAS, which appears -- now that I've had time to research it -- to be preparation for university study in Swedish.

The ironic thing is that my Swedish wasn't even good enough to understand where I was supposed to go on Monday morning, and I was so intimidated by my new persona as "the girl who knows Swedish" that I was ashamed to ask, because I picked up that she had already said it more than once.

So now I have to get up early on Monday and call. Jeez.

And who knows how much of a disaster this class will be when I show up -- the deaf, dumb, wonder girl.

The good thing is that whereas Swedish has been a play-language for me up til now, suddenly after that string of never-ending tests and interactions, it's all deadly earnest. (To my addled brain at least.)

Living in Stockholm

This move has been more disorienting than I expected. It's like walking into a pitch black room. At first you think, "Okay, easy-peasy, everything in this room is black," but then your eyes begin to adjust and you realize nothing was ever black, there are all different colors everywhere, but while your eyes are still adjusting you can't even tell what things are. "Is that a red, or a sort of orange?" you ask yourself, and as long as you don't know it feels strange to take on the task of describing it all on a blog. And I guess it's not just describing Sweden, but my own feelings as well, as long as everything is still in flux.

I've been studying Swedish like a deranged person, that's all I've really been up to. But I'll give you some particulars, too. Because it is less daunting, I'll give you them in list form.

WHAT I'VE BEEN UP TO; PARTICULARS

1. We went back to the apartment we're moving into on the 16th to learn about the laundry room, sign the contract, etc. It was extremely pretty in the evening, very nicely lit, and the kitchen, I must say, is fantastic. Hello Scandinavian design, I love you.

2. I got my personnummer, which is my Swedish social security number. For those of you not familiar, the personnummer, in Sweden, is far more powerful than a social security number in the U.S. With a personnummer, I can walk into any doctor's office or hospital and be treated, I can register for the university, anything I want. This went faster than expected. THS and I went to the tax office on Monday and they said I'd get it in a week, but it showed up on Thursday already. The next day, Friday, I went down to the SFI office (Svenska för Invandrare, or Swedish for Immigrants, the free Swedish as a second language classes offered by the state) but it was closed.

3. THS took me to the library and we checked out Astrid Lindgren children's books for me to learn Swedish from. We got various difficulty levels so that I could move up with time: two early-reader picture books, one more normal picture book, and one full-length novel -- The Brothers Lionheart, which THS told me he loved as a child. (I didn't get any Pippi books or Ronia the Robber's Daughter, because I read those as a kid in English. For me, the whole advantage of learning a language from great stories is that even when you're sick of dealing with the foreign language, you still keep plugging away at it in order to find out what happens next. This effect would be completely lost if I were to read something whose plot twists I already have filed away in the back of my mind somewhere.)

Upon return from the library, I read Assar Bubbla with great success. I got the whole story right away without a dictionary, which was shocking. I had assumed it would be much harder.

4. Monday I went down to the SFI office again to register for my Swedish class, and I took the Brothers Lionheart with me just to have a look at, since I was most excited about it, given THS's great review. When I got to the place, it was jam-packed with foreigners of every stripe. It looked like the Registry of Motor Vehicles in lower Manhattan or something. I took a number, and there were forty people ahead of me. So I sat down with The Brothers Lionheart and started to read, and the first two chapters were the saddest thing. I couldn't help myself, I started crying right there at the SFI office. Of course all these Russian, Chinese, Chilean, and Iraqi people with nothing to do but wait were staring at me, thinking I was a nut case. I mean, I wasn't bawling, but I had to keep wiping my eyes, and I believe they were red. Of course I felt absurd for crying in public, but also I felt a little strange to be sitting there waiting to sign up for SFI when I was able to read this book effectively enough to bring myself to tears. I think it's due to Astrid Lindgren's extraordinary gift for communication -- she writes in a way that's very easy to understand, and her writing contains a great deal of repetition in an incantatory way, so that if you don't have a word the first time, it soon comes up again, used in a similar but not identical context, and when it comes up a third time you begin to grasp it.

The other issue is that Swedish, as I'm discovering more and more, is a kind of encoded German. (Sorry, Swedes, I know you won't like this, but I'm just calling 'em like I sees 'em.) It's not that German and Swedish are similar like French and Spanish, where tons of words are automatically recognizable as cognates, but rather that you can begin to catch on to the ways in which about 2/3 of Swedish words are drastically morphed versions of German ones. So I'm finding that I have a pretty significant leg-up with understanding Swedish if it is written. As far as being able to understand spoken Swedish, and producing language myself, I still have a long, long way to go.

To get back to the SFI office: my number finally came up and I went to the front and within 30 seconds had been told that I needed more than a Personnummer to sign up for classes, I also needed a Personbevis. Which seems to be some kind of identity certificate. Now, because I looked around the entire office, I can say with assurance that there was no such basic information made available to the public so that they wouldn't sit there for hours needlessly, crying over The Brothers Lionheart. However, I probably should have found out about it on the internet beforehand. The good news is that I won't have to wait in line again, because actually you go straight upstairs for a drop-in test, if you have everything.

5. THS and I went to a record shop one afternoon to hear a Scottish band called Camera Obscura play a few songs, and since CO is an Indie band, the crowd was all Indie, which in Stockholm seems to mean something like: only wears 1960s clothes. So it was like we were in a Godard film, probably Masculin/Féminin, which I hear was shot in Stockholm anyway.

Sudden Luck

So, just one day after I was complaining about my stress over the apartment situation, we found an apartment. It's not ideal, because it will only be until the middle of January, but certainly not bad at all for starters. It's in a great neighborhood: a nice part of Södermalm, which is the East Village of Stockholm, artsy and off-beat. THS and I had assumed we'd have to get a one-room place here, because things are so expensive. While this place is in fact about the size we'd assumed, the space is divided into two rooms. Perfect, since that way we can each have our own space.

Arrival in Stockholm

I got to Stockholm on Friday. The flight was uneventful except when it was delayed because of what appeared to be a drug bust.

But that's another story.

Since getting to Sweden, I've been volatile. One minute I'm extremely happy and excited and studying Swedish with manic energy, the next minute I'm in a panic. What I'm most worried about is finding an apartment. Right now, THS lives in a student apartment that is about the size of a fancy shoebox. Moving around gracefully as a couple would require us to be athletic midgets. I'm on the big/messy side, and THS is on the even bigger/also messy side, and we're actually doing pretty well with it under these circumstances, but still the plan is to move out to another place by the end of the month.

Stockholm has one of the tightest real estate markets in the world, thanks to a combination of arthritic rent control and incredibly high demand. We are following several sites that have listings, but every time we call about a new ad, the person tells us the place is already gone, specifically that within five minutes of placing the ad online, the phone began to ring off the hook. So it seems if you don't call within the hour you have no chance. This has also been confirmed by several Swedish friends of mine who had occasion to sublet their apartments in Stockholm.

If any of you bloggie readers out there (assuming readers of this blog exist...(?)) know of a computer program that will monitor when a site is updated and automatically send you a notification e-mail or better yet cause your computer to loudly ding, let me know, will you? I think that would be the ticket.

In happier news, THS and I had our first extended interaction in Swedish today. It was our trip to the grocery. We spoke entirely in Swedish the entire time. Luckily I'm pretty good at correctly guessing the meaning of things he says, even if I can't understand every word. Meanwhile, I can't produce complete sentences to save my life.

So a typical interaction, translated, was like this.

ME: That! I want! (Pointing with an articulate finger)

THS: What, beets?

ME: No! No!

THS: Oh, you want pickles?

ME: Yes.

THS: Okay, let's get pickles, these ones over here are good, they're the least expensive brand and I think they're also pretty tasty.

ME: No! I want...they sour...

THS: You want sour pickles? Honestly, Ida, I think all pickles are sour and there's only one kind here, anyway.

ME: I want sour dill kind...

THS: There's only one kind, and none say dill on the label.

ME: No! There are two type pickle...sour with dill...and...and...and...and...and..and ...you know...and...(low moan of frustration)

THS: And what?

ME: Forget, forget. No pickle for me.

THS: What other kind? Say it in English.

ME: NO. NO PICKLE FOR ME.

As you can observe, I was very purist about only speaking Swedish today. I paid for it in many ways, not the least of which was picklelessness. The thing is, I don't like bread and butter pickles. Not at all. The risk was simply too great that I would end up with that egregrious pickle type.

Ah, the sacrifices one makes for language and taste.

I bet you're wondering whether I, a 27-year-old woman, mind having the communication skills of your average 1-year-old infant.

To that I would say: My friend, better not to think about it.