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.
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.
posted by Ida at 1:57 PM
1 Comments:
Things sound like they're going well! I hope your apt works out. I've never read any A.L. books other than Pippi - I'll have to look them up on Amazon. While it's years early, I'm trying to keep a list of kids books that I want to get for Beatrix.
I love the pickle story. Heh. Bread & butter pickles are so gross - I agree. It's so frustrating to have complex thoughts and ideas in your head and have them come out of your mouth as fragmented baby talk. It sounds like you're improving quickly. A discussion of pickle varieties seems more advanced than 'Excuse me, I need to pee' and 'Need coffee, please'.
Hang in there! Love, Ellie
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