Sweden?

"We tell ourselves stories in order to live... We look for the sermon in the suicide, for the social or moral lesson in the murder of five. We interpret what we see, select the most workable of the multiple choices. We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the "ideas" with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience." -- Joan Didion, The White Album

Everywhere I travel people ask me the same question: "Why did you come here?" I've yet to provide a good answer.

Try as I might, I cannot come up with a coherent explanation for my desire to wander aimlessly through eastern and central Europe with no direction except that derived from a listless curiosity, restless feet, a skyscanner app, and access to a map of the world.

It was a Tuesday and my sister’s birthday and I was in Sweden, 200km west of Stockholm in the sleepy township of Palsboda, 20 minutes from Orebro. Leaving Krakow for Warsaw for a flight for which I arrived far too early, the baggage took more time to appear for claim than consciousness held me on the plane.

As Julius Caesar allegedly triumphed “Veni, vidi, vici,” the Swedish exclaim “Villa, Volvo, vovve.” House, Volvo, doggie. This is the Swedish dream. Oddly or admirably fixated on the notion of settling down, starting a family, and nesting against the winter cold, the Swedish life modus operandi is one that terrifies the traveling youth. Nonetheless, the impulse is such that staying with locals and meeting their families results in some truly awkward moments as they immediately survey you as a potential life-mate and factory of future progeny, when all you really want to do is pick up the USB internet plug.

Candy anyone?

Similarly, a lift to the nearest bus station can turn into a family-visit extravaganza as similarly en route is a party at which they are expected. So I found myself one chilly afternoon in Orebro’s most ecologically sustainable villa, one run exclusively by the raging elements of wind and sun. The house of the sister and one also home to Titus, a baby Swede with whom I briefly exchanged pleasantries, so naïve to the local tongue that I misunderstood the lyrical meanderings of a toddler for Swedish and kept looking around for a translation. Playing already with a plastic kitchenette set, the domestication starts early here.

Drinking peach ciders in the car driven by the brother, “Filip, do you want to come with us tonight?”

(In Swedish) “I don’t want to come with you, but I do want to come tonight.”

We pulled up at an apartment building behind an ICA, the local supermarket chain of this part of regional Sweden, or so I imagine. The snow had relented, but the chill was still penetrating. Five storeys of anxious stairs later it was another situation into which I had somehow appeared and for which I had no faculty to anticipate or process; no bearing upon which to base my comprehension. How I ended up here was beyond my ken, so the situation was out of grasp.

I like to think this is a good state of mind for travelling, functioning as if the world itself is born anew every minute before my blinking eyes.

The door opened to a shrieking blonde, a high table surrounded by stools seating three others and altogether too much alcohol for such. A white and cream one bedroom apartment with a commanding view of snow-capped Orebro. 

One fifth of the living space was taken up by a hair covered cat play-tower, the denizen of which prowled imperiously around it like the Emperor in his new clothes.

Shaved to a poodle, the once proud Hampus (pronounced Ham-puss) had been reduced to an irresistibly amusing plaything. Mewling with determination, he ignored the giggling with the appropriate aloofness for a cat of noble bearing.

Hampus

It was here I also met Magnus and Karin, two twenty-one year olds engaged and very much in tune with the villa Volvo, vovve philosophy.

Indeed, similarly important to the house, car and doggie is tacos. Tacos I hear you ask? In Sweden? Supermarkets have significant sections dedicated to the taco. Special cheese combinations, numerous wrap and shell varieties—all so that the Swedish nuclear family can gather about the TV on Friday night, watch Swedish Idol and consume those most delicious exports from south of the border, down Mexico way.

Similarly food-centric is the fika, a Swedish way of saying let’s have coffee, some eats, and a chat. I enjoyed a fika first in a sprawling mall, opting in this case for a semla with my coffee. A cream and marzipan filled donut type arrangement dusted liberally with icing sugar, the correct process for the eating of which requires consuming the daintily anointed lid before engaging more directly with the fat soaked sponge.

Fika was part of a crash course in Swedish culture, a journey that began in IKEA, a company of which the Swedish are proud of completely without irony. There is a certain sombre focus that one can observe as you follow the carefully guided path through flat-pack heaven when there purely for cultural purposes; the chin-stroking intensity of those pondering which aesthetics of an arm chair best reflect their personality, but which must also be practical enough to be the resting place of their buttocks for moons to come.

Hallowed land

At every supermarket there are walls of pick and mix candy. But for the real thing you must go to a candy store at which the geometric maze of plastic containers with numberless riffs of sugar and chocolate are tantalising but for once not terrifying, the dilemma of choice easily assuaged by ample use of the plastic scoop and a preparedness for excessive consumption all in the name of cultural exploration. Swedish candy is very salty.

Rashly booked cheap flights always come back to haunt. Flying out of Stockholm Skavsta at 7.20am when I was staying two hours’ worth of car ride away was not a solid plan. So the odyssey of my airport nostos involved two buses, three sandwiches composed on a bus station bench (as I danced deliriously to tunes mainlined to my brain through sheer volume in order to pretend that I wasn’t stuck outside in -3 degrees plus wind chill for another half hour) and a pleasant night’s rest on four curiously curved chairs in the Stockholm Skavsta airport café as the floor buffer hummed tunelessly around me.

Bus stop dinner

Lying under the yellow halogen I pondered the disparity of ergonomic comfort for the backside and the back, a difference ironically underscored by the zeugmatic similarity of lettering. Thoughts that seemed coherent if not faintly witty but on a reflection my brain was incapable of making, most certainly not.

The fitful waking of paranoia and I’d grasp at my bag like a child reaching for its mother, my means of continued survival all in one stained place.

In that interzone of cognitive function I boarded the plane, passed out, and woke up in Berlin.