After a full week in Linköping–Siberian Clipper!! Brrr!!

Linköping was having a mild winter, until Wednesday afternoon when a Siberian clipper came in. Since then it’s been COLD!! The thermometer seems to get stuck at -10°C (14°F) throughout the day, more like -15°C (5°F) at night. We’re in for a couple more days of it–through the weekend, then a very gradual warm-up.

So what have I been up to? Wednesday was a big day for new-country adventure. Harry was scheduled to give a talk at AstraZeneca, a Swedish biopharmaceutical firm outside Stockholm, around lunchtime. So Per, another of his collaborators here, picked us up at 8:30 to drive about 50km (30 miles) to Norrköping to get fingerprinted and photographed first, for our residence cards. At the welcome sign to the city was a giant bicycle like this one, only bigger:

Now, THAT'S a big bike!!

Peter and Per had tried to get us an appointment so we wouldn’t have to wait around, but the office is short-staffed and they couldn’t even get a return phone call; we crossed our fingers that we could get it done in a timely fashion, and it worked! We were in and out in about an hour, and I was set loose on my own with a “Got your passport? Got your bus pass? Have fun! Take a look around Norrköping on your way home, and I’ll see you this evening.”

At first it was a walk in the park–literally! I was bright-eyed and energetic, and soon found myself at the edge of a large, quiet park that looks like a hub of activity in the warmer months. Lots of paths (and an adorable clutch of day-care kiddies out for a walk), an outdoor concert shell, a mausoleum and graveyard, a big tennis park. Quite a few people were out walking, some of them with a sense of purpose, others more for pleasure.

Ducks on the Göta Canal

The Göta Canal, a summertime attraction in its own right, ran along one side of the park. I enjoyed my walk, stopping to take the occasional picture, but after about 40 minutes I decided I should make my way back to town. So I walked along the other side of the canal for a while, past lovely waterfront homes, on my way back to a major street.

This beautiful house, a block back from the canal, could be apartments.

It was cold, but I was feelin’ good!

This Swedish playground horse is...Swedish!

When I came to a bus stop I got on the first bus that came along going in the direction I thought I wanted to go. After all, I had neither an agenda nor a bus map, so what difference did it make?

First challenge: How do I make this bus pass work? It turns out, there’s this electronic card reader, but it offers several options–in Swedish, of course. I watched the woman in front of me touch one part of the screen and then hold her card up to the panel at the bottom. Then it was my turn. I was at a loss, and had to ask for help. She very competently did her thing, smiled, and handed my card back. ‘That’s great,’ I thought as I thanked her, ‘but I still don’t know what to do.’

After a couple of stops the bus veered off in the wrong direction, so I changed to another bus that said Resecentrum (transit center) on front. It veered off, too, but I wasn’t worried: buses often take circuitous routes so they can service more locations on the way to their destination; and besides, it said Resecentrum on it! Each approaching stop was announced by an overhead graphic at the front of the aisle and by a recorded voice. Great! I could practice Swedish pronunciations by listening to the recording and reading along. This was fun!

More and more people got off the bus; after a while nobody was getting on; and then the bus came to rest in front of an apartment building. When I approached the driver to ask about Resecentrum, I discovered that he spoke no English. (Uh-oh!) He took me to the bus that was standing in front of ours, where the driver was fluent. (Whew!) This was the end of the line, but her bus was going back to Resecentrum and she would make sure I got there OK, even though [as it turned out] she would be relieved for lunch before we got there.

On the way back, a young Englishwoman with a baby boy welcomed the chance to chat with aother native speaker of English. (When in a foreign land, you can’t be too picky, I guess!) They’ve been here for 10 weeks. Her husband is working in forensic IT analysis, and they’ll probably be here for a year. She’s actually learning Swedish, but she gets so nervous about rules of grammar that she gets shy speaking it and usually just uses English. I know what she means! I get tongue-tied in the same way when trying to practice Spanish or French. I wish in retrospect that we had exchanged names and contact information. One of these days I’ll learn to capitalize on such opportunities.

By this time it was around noon, and I decided to get back to Linköping. If I’m going to be learning my way around town, I ought to start with the town where I live. So I passed up the chance to tour an art museum and headed straight for the train station.

Trains, buses, and trams are all run by the same entity, so I used my bus pass for the train ride. I still didn’t know how to use it, though, beyond handing it to the driver or conductor and looking helpless. The conductor saw on his screen that I had just been on a bus, so he deducted that ride from the price of my train ticket. “Yes, Ma’am, isn’t technology wonderful.” (Col. Potter, M*A*S*H)

Speaking of M*A*S*H, look what I saw at the Linköping Resecentrum:

We're almost midway between Palo Alto and Macao.

I stopped at a cafe in a modern, upscale mall downtown and opted for another mini-adventure: What IS that dish, in English? (Who knows? The very nice man doesn’t speak English.) OK, I’ll buy it. Delicious! It was called köttbullemacka, which I’ve finally managed to translate as “meatball sandwich. ” Judge for yourself: does this look like a meatball sandwich to you?

Served with a knife and fork, it was a beet salad spread thickly over heavy, whole grain bread, and topped with a few small meatballs and token salad veggies. It was so substantial that dessert wasn’t even tempting!

After lunch I did a little window shopping and worked my way through some of the errands I had set for myself–bank, optician to reset lens in clip-on sunglasses, quick stops for wine and fabric softener–and decided to head for home. At first I had trouble finding an optician, so I searched from my smart phone. (How did I manage before my smart phone??) It directed me to a shop just behind me. Once I had found that, every other business was an optician; most of the rest were hair salons. I need to find a place to cut my hair, but I’ve been planning to ask someone with a nice-looking short haircut where she gets it done; wouldn’t you know, almost all the women here have long hair! So I looked through the windows of the salons I passed, but most of the clientele seemed to be men. There were a couple of women, but their hair was already washed and sectioned. Fortunately, I can wait a couple of weeks on a hair stylist, so I kept walking.

It was snowing in earnest now; the temperature was dropping; I still didn’t have a hat or scarf; and my abundant energy from the morning was a thing of the past. I had wanted to check out Swedish conversation groups at the library, but it would have to wait for another day. One last errand: find bus schedules, and then use them to make my way back. Two different people told me, in excellent English, where to pick up bus schedules, at a place called Nils Buss. “It’s easy! You can’t miss it!” I missed it. After wandering around and around, I finally gave up and went down to the resecentrum–at least I didn’t get lost this time! But when I looked on the schedule rack, all that I saw were for out-of-town destinations. This must be the train-station part. Oh, well, I saw on the computer last night that I needed to take Bus 20, so I went back outside.

The bus terminal consists of 15-20 separate bus shelters, each of which is the designated stop for a few bus routes. At the last one, when I still hadn’t seen #20, some girls showed me the master list of bus stops on the wall: Bus 20 would be at one of the first shelters, in the row nearest the train tracks, that I had dismissed as train stops. The 13-minute wait was cold, but I toughed it out, and gratefully boarded when the bus pulled in. When it got to the Science Park, 1 or 2 km from our house, though, it turned around to head back to town. Here we go again! The driver showed me a stop for a bus that would take me to the feeder street near home, and while I waited I called Valentin to make sure I was on the right track. “I’m not sure there’s a bus that goes from where you are to our neighborhood,” he said. “But you’re really close to home; it’s only a short walk.” (Uh-oh–where have I heard that before?) I’d only been walking a couple of minutes when my cell phone rang. It was Valentin. “Where are you? Stay right there, I’m coming to get you.” What a relief! I didn’t warm up that whole evening. It took half the night in a warm bed before I was comfortable again.

When he left for work on Thursday morning, Harry  gave me strict instructions not to overdo it! So I stayed inside, finished knitting my hat,

Ahh! This should help!

read, and did a week’s worth of laundry. That’s a mini-adventure, too, of course, even though Monica showed me how to use the machines on our first [marathon] day. The default value on the front-loading washer was for a 2-1/2 hour cycle! That didn’t make any sense, so for later loads I managed to shorten it. I wonder how the 2-1/2 hours were spent? I didn’t sit by the machine to find out.

The night before, as I said earlier, the Siberian clipper had come through, so it was fine with me to stay indoors. On Friday, though, I decided to sally forth again, but just to Ryds Centrum, the neighborhood shopping center. As luck would have it, when I stopped at the bus shelter to check the schedule, a bus was coming in just a couple of minutes; I took it, figuring I’d walk home.

I checked out the bibliotek, and found that it’s a tiny branch library in the student housing complex. It must be staffed by a single individual, as it’s open only MWF 10-3 and closes one hour for lunch. It has a very limited collection, and I didn’t see any music CDs (except for a couple for preschoolers). Maybe when we leave we’ll donate those books I don’t plan to bring home, if the Linnérs don’t want them. I left the library without asking about Swedish conversation groups, although it occurred to me later that it may be the perfect place to find one, given the demographics of the student community. I’ll ask one day next week.

My “couple of grocery items” multiplied like rabbits. Fortunately, I had decided to carry a small shopping basket, as a constant reminder about weight. The rolling shopping bag was easy to pull behind me this time. (See? I am trainable!) Once again it was twilight as I was leaving RydCentrum, so I hopped on the bus that was rounding the corner just then, and missed out on my walk home. (Darn!) But at -10°C at twilight, I didn’t mind too much.

Now I know what bus number serves our neighborhood, and I even know how to get the bus from downtown (transfer at RydCentrum); but I still haven’t succeeded in using my card “all by myself.” Each time I hold it in front of the card reader like the other passengers do; each time it flashes red, and the bus driver rescues me.

So I keep learning, and I still have a lot to learn. When you have to start with the most basic skills, it’s a real eye-opener!

At the end of Week 1, we have our residence cards and our bank account. I have a new knit hat. Julie’s “care package” has arrived with my fleece scarf, orthotics, walking shoes, and sock liners. Our larder is stocked. Harry keeps finding cold radiators to turn on (Go, Harry, go! More! More!) Wizard has decided we’ll do just fine.

I think he’s right.

 Melissa