A Norwegian ski-venture

A few weekends ago I went with a friend on a ski trip to Norway. His Norwegian girlfriend and a bunch of her friends had a cabin for the weekend at Hafjell, a ski resort a few hours north of Oslo, and they had an extra spot for me to tag along. I later found out that Hafjell is right outside of Lillehammer and was one of the mountains used in the Winter Olympics back in '94, so it was actually a really nice resort/mountain. Anyway, I took a bus up to Oslo and then we took a car (farther) up to Hafjell to spend Friday through Sunday in the mountains.

Now, I'm not much of a skier. I went for the first time with my family when I was in high school, and then my second ski experience was five years later in Michigan. A couple of years ago I also learned how to snowboard in Michigan, but that's quite a different type of balance and skill. Now, another five years since my last time on skis, I wanted to give skiing another shot. While I fully expected to be a disaster around a group of seasoned Norwegians (someone in Gothenburg had told me that people in Norway are basically "born on skis"), it actually went pretty well, and I was able to handle all of the blue slopes we tried with only one soft fall at the end of the first day. So, we skied most of Friday and Saturday, and we hung out in the cabin with my new Norwegian friends in the evenings.

One cool thing that the resort held on Saturday afternoon was an "afterski" party at a lodge/bar/restaurant near the top of the mountain. This was basically a giant, sweaty mess of people who had been skiing all day gathering indoors, drinking, and dancing in a club-like atmosphere. I'm not sure if they have this at American ski resorts, but if not, they should - it was really fun.

A few thoughts on Norway, as this was my first time there (and I believe it's the farthest north I've ever been!). From what I saw, it is absolutely beautiful in the winter. Both the drive there and the views from the top of the mountain were breathtaking. I didn't really get a good look at a fjord (I was only in Oslo when it was dark out), but we drove around the largest lake in Norway, Mjøsa, which was an amazing scene. Another thing about Norway is that things are very expensive, but I was expecting this - from what I had heard from others, things in Norway are twice the price of things in Sweden (where prices are already ridiculous by American standards). Maybe it was because I was prepared and because I didn't buy very much, but I didn't think it was quite that bad. Okay, so a cheap beer at the afterski was the equivalent of about $14, but at an expensive place in Gothenburg it could be $11 or so. Other stuff that I saw at grocery stores and convenience stores only seemed a bit more expensive than it would be in Sweden.

Regarding the language, Norwegian is very similar to Swedish, with a few notable differences that I caught in my three days there. First, when they want to show appreciation, instead of the Swedish "tack så mycket" (thanks so much), they say "tusen takk" (a thousand thanks). Also, they pronounce the word for "no" differently - in Swedish we say "nej" (pronounced "nay"), but they say "nei" (pronounced "nigh"). Also, they have different vowels - the Swedes have the same vowels as in English plus the additional vowels å, ä, and ö, which the Norwegians replace with å, æ, and ø. Lastly, I noticed that a lot of words that in Swedish start with a "v" are spelled in Norwegian with an "hv", but pronounced pretty much the same. I'm sure there are many other differences, but that's all I noticed with my limited Swedish skills in my limited time in Norway.

All in all, I have a fairly favorable opinion of Norway - Sweden's happy, oil-rich, silly neighbor to the north. I guess it's kind of like Canada is to the U.S., eh?

Tusen takk for reading!
Steven

Oh, and here's some pictures and the foundation for my 2013 running album:
https://plus.google.com/photos/115872916923607849736/albums/5848636155282993857?authkey=CNa0m8etr8_gWA

What's missing?

Since I moved here, people have asked me whether I "miss" home. In some ways, I don't consider moving here to be all that different from when I moved to Maryland or to Michigan for the first time. It's a new place, it's cold, and I didn't really know anybody here before arriving. The hardest part about moving to a new place is saying goodbye to family and friends in the previous place, and this time I've actually added a lot of distance and expense to being able to go back and see people. Phone calls and email work exactly the same as they did before (aside from the time difference), so being away from "home" isn't so intimidating.

But what non-person things do I miss from the United States of America? I think a post on this can give you some ideas about the main differences I see between living in the US and living in Sweden.

First, let's talk about food. Swedish food is good, but it's not really anything new, exciting, or exotic. Swedes eat a lot of fish, which I like, and a lot of potatoes, which I'm not crazy about but will eat if they're on my plate. Swedish meatballs are really not all that common, and I can get the same meatballs at IKEA here as I could get at IKEA back in the US. In terms of fast food/restaurants, the only American chains in Gothenburg are McDonalds, Burger King, Pizza Hut, Subway, and Hard Rock Cafe, and I pretty much never go to those. Among the local fare, there are a lot of good Thai restaurants and decent pizzerias around, and then there are lots of other ethnically-themed restaurants that tend toward the more expensive side. We have a serious dearth of Mexican/southwestern cuisine (I could go for a Chipotle burrito right now), and it's difficult/expensive to find a decent burger (e.g., no Five Guys).

Another food-related difference can be found in the grocery stores. The ones I've been to here just don't have the selection that the American ones have, nor do they have brands that I was familiar with before. One thing that I always thought was amazing in the US was that if I found a recipe that called for some specific size of a specific product, the store would have it. Like, say, a 14.5-ounce can of stewed tomatoes with mexican green chilis. I'd see that on the recipe's list of ingredients and be like, "what are the odds that they have tomatoes in that style with that particular spicy accompaniment in a can of that size?", and then it's just there on the shelf at Kroger. Well, here, they don't know what an ounce is, and they don't have the same varieties of products. Unfortunately, that rules out most of the American recipes I can find on the internet, meaning I have to get creative if I want to cook (which is not necessarily a bad thing).

And it's not just food products that are different - I'm having to get used to new brands of other things, like shampoo and deodorant and laundry detergent. Even the deodorant product itself comes in a differently-shaped container with a weird applicator. Recently, I noticed that Unilever and Proctor and Gamble make a lot of the name-brand products here (both food and non-food), which probably means that they are the same or similar products as their American counterparts. Unfortunately, I never paid attention to the company before (did you know that Tide detergent is made by P&G?), so it's still all new to me - after nearly 9 months here, I still have no idea what I want when I'm shopping.

The next thing that I miss is not so much a thing as it is an atmosphere. While everyone speaks great English and my Swedish is improving, I miss not knowing the language that everyone around me is usually speaking. That's not (necessarily) to say that I want to eavesdrop on conversations around me, but it's just a different feeling to be walking around and not knowing what people are saying.

Finally, watching American sports is a lot tougher to do over here. As you can probably guess, people here don't care about baseball, basketball, or American football. During NFL season, one of the Swedish channels shows an average of one game per Sunday, and they cover up the audio with their own Swedish commentators. I've never actually tried to listen to it, but from what I've been told, these commentators don't know very much about American football. There are a couple of sports bars in town that show those NFL games (including the Super Bowl, which starts at midnight here!), but the selection at one game per week is severely limited. Other sports, like baseball, college football, and college basketball, are never on TV here, so they require some fancy internet work and are difficult if not impossible to find in high quality. This could probably be fixed by setting up a slingbox or ordering some super-fancy-special cable package (I think ESPN is obtainable, but I've never actually checked), but who has time for that?

I think I can sum this all up and say that the things I miss deal with familiarity. Familiar people, familiar products, familiar language, familiar sports. I think that if I stay here long enough I'll know lots of people, have a good idea of what Swedish products I like and dislike, be fluent enough in the language, and (ugh) start liking soccer and calling it "football".

We'll see about that last one...

Steven

About my work

I always have a hard time when somebody asks me what I do, particularly when it's someone that I don't know. I suppose my response depends on what I know about the person I'm speaking with. If I know that person works at a university, I say, "I'm a postdoc". If that person doesn't work in academia or I'm not sure, I say, "I do research". If it's somebody in Gothenburg, I'll say, "I work at Chalmers" or "I do research at Chalmers" (Chalmers is the name of the university). Unfortunately, the latter two responses often include a follow-up question like, "so, you're a Ph.D. student?" And then I have to say, "no, I just do research". For the casual conversation/acquaintance, this is often enough, but a lot of times people delve deeper with the bigger question: "So, what do you research?" Again, I can try to cop out and say that I'm in mechanical engineering, or more specifically, I work in a department called "Product and Production Development", but a lot of people seem to expect more details. This post is dedicated to answering all of your burning questions about what I do and why I moved to Sweden to do it.

My research looks into variation in product design and manufacturing and how it affects important product development goals like sustainability. That's the best one-sentence description I can come up with right now, so you can stop there if you're bored (or not bored enough), or you can keep reading for more exciting details about what all of that means.

Sustainability is a hot word these days (in fact, the growth in the use of the word is itself unsustainable: http://xkcd.com/1007/), and everybody seems to be trying to get into research and businesses that can tout sustainability. It sounds good, it's "green", it's good for the planet, and, in some cases, it sells. Today, governments care about sustainability, so they fund research projects, customers care about sustainability, so they buy things that they think are good for the planet, and hippies care about sustainability, so they hug trees and don't shower. But, what is sustainability? Most people usually think about the environment and how our actions are causing global warming or destroying the ozone layer or killing the polar bears. Some academic circles have adopted an idea called "triple sustainability", which involves three types of sustainability: People, planet, and profits. In other words, there is social sustainability, ecological sustainability, and economic sustainability. The truth is, developing a business around the first two types without caring about economics means that your business will fail before it can have a lasting impact on social and environmental goals. Social is the hardest one to define and measure, since it deals with things like community programs, health and safety of workers and customers, and human rights. This one is kind of on the back burner for my research right now, so I'm mostly looking at economic and ecological sustainability. This means I care about how design decisions affect manufacturing costs and revenues (economic) and the impact on the environment through resource consumption, emissions, and waste (ecological). One of my big questions is to find out what tradeoff exists between these two objectives. In other words, how many dollars/euros/kronor does it cost to reduce one pound of carbon dioxide emissions or some other environmental measure?

Now, back to this idea about variation in product design and manufacturing. In case you didn't know, no two items are ever exactly alike. The internet says that an iPhone 5 is 4.87 inches long, but if you measure the length of one iPhone 5, it may be 4.8701 inches, while a second iPhone 5 may be 4.8697 inches long (note: I have no idea what the actual tolerances are for iPhone parts, but I'm just using these numbers for the sake of argument). Chances are, you're either thinking: "Who cares?", or "That's ridiculous that a $900 device isn't built with higher precision!". I agree with both of you, and the question is really about where you draw the line. You could increase the precision and make it fit between 4.869999 and 4.870001 inches, or you could reduce the precision and make it fit between 4.8 and 4.9 inches long. The problem occurs when the difference is noticeable. It is especially important when you have a bunch of parts that have to fit together - if you noticed that the front cover of your phone is too wide and sticks out in relation to the back part, you probably won't be very happy with the appearance and feel of your phone. Even more problematic is when it affects the functionality of your phone; if the wiring inside isn't precise enough and something becomes disconnected, then you have some serious problems, angry customers, and phones being thrown away and going into landfills. Why don't we just make things with the highest precision possible? Because the more precise it is designed to be, the more expensive it is to make. So, designers have to balance how much variation they can tolerate with the costs.

So what exactly am I doing about this? My research group at Chalmers is involved in analyzing how to design products while taking this type of variation into account. We have developed software that can analyze how variation in a part (like the length of a wire) affects variation in an assembly (like the way two wires fit together for soldering) and how all of that variation might affect functionality (like does the phone/robot/car work?). My part in this is to bring in sustainability outcomes and look into how design decisions affect things like economic, ecological, and social objectives. I use models and simulations to predict how a decision like the tolerance of a dimension (the amount of variation the designer says is tolerable in the manufactured product, for instance, "within 1 millimeter of the designed length") or the material chosen will affect things like economic, ecological, and social objectives.

Finally, the big question: Why do we really care? Well, for one, I'd like to know how the three types of sustainability trade off when it comes to certain design decisions. I can choose to allow more variation in a part to reduce the cost by a dollar (economic sustainability), but that might raise the social or ecological costs. When a designer makes these decisions, they probably want to optimize for some objective, which is usually economic, but if they add in some amount of ecological or social criteria, the optimal design will change. Obviously, from a society standpoint, we want companies to value environmental and social goals, so how do we do that? There are two ways that I'm currently looking into. The first is letting the customers choose, which requires that they have complete information about the sustainability repercussions of every product on the market. One challenge there is in governments or industries mandating that this information is standardized, accurate, and available (imagine every item in the store having some "greenness" score right next to the price tag), but that probably can't happen until we prove that it's important. For one study, I ran a survey to find out how people value a product's price, environmental friendliness, and appearance of quality for a hypothetical smart phone, which shows us how people trade these things off when they buy something (or how they say that they trade them off). With all of the craze for eco-friendly or "green" products, along with the outrage over the worker health and safety scandals with things like child sweatshops and fires in textile factories, the market could give producers financial incentives to improve all three sustainability goals. The second way is to raise taxes for environmental and social impacts (like a gasoline tax), so another study I'm working on is to show how different types of legislation would force social and environmental impacts to become economic motivation. This could result in some meaningful recommendations for how governments can promote triple sustainability and how designers can optimize their products.

Is this the same kind of thing I did at Michigan? Sort of. At Michigan, I also looked at design optimization and tradeoffs using computer simulations, but that work dealt specifically with car and military vehicle safety rather than sustainability. There, I also looked at how customer demand and government intervention can influence the way companies design their vehicles. So, why did I move to Sweden to do this? First: "Why not?" Second, I wanted to apply my modeling and optimization and tradeoff analysis techniques to more general product design, which is an opportunity that my department at Chalmers could afford me. My current position also is entirely funded by the Swedish government, which means that I'm free to work on any research topic or product that I'd like to (i.e., I'm not restricted to working on any specific product or any specific research question). Some day, I'd like to influence the design of products either by designing them myself or helping policy makers develop laws, regulations, and guidelines that will positively impact how companies design things. Hopefully this can result in more environmentally and socially sustainable behavior by people, effectively saving the world from all of its problems.

Until then, I'll keep living the dream in Sweden.

Happy New Year!
Steven

Finally, some photos!

This past weekend I finally sat down and went through the digital mountain of photos I've taken since I got here, and I picked out some highlights to comment on and share. While they will make a lot more sense if you read through this post in its entirety, I know from experience that people don't always read and may miss the link if it's at the bottom. First, I'll subject you to a one-sentence summary of my picture- and note-worthy happenings since I arrived: I went on a short road trip to a couple places north of Gothenburg, visited some islands on the coast of Gothenburg, took a "work" trip to Jönköping, visited Stockholm, went to Budapest, celebrated the fourth of July in Gothenburg, visited Belgium, went to London for the Olympics, took a side trip to Paris, had a conference in Chicago with a side trip to Michigan for a wedding, went to Copenhagen, ran a half marathon in Stockholm, went to Stockholm and Copenhagen again, checked out some things in Gothenburg, and celebrated Festivus with some friends from work. So without further ado, you can find my 2012 photos here:

https://picasaweb.google.com/115872916923607849736/SwedenEurope2012?authkey=Gv1sRgCOyTyr6lsN_vMg

With further ado, I'll start from the top and go through some of the more significant trips. To explain a few of the sequences of pictures, I should mention that the geography around the west coast of Sweden includes a lot of rocky islands, and Gothenburg itself has two archipelagos of rocky islands that can be reached via a system of trams and ferries. Apparently, visiting these islands in the summer is the big thing to do. There are some cool towns and islands outside of Gothenburg as well, but to get to those it's much easier to drive (assuming you have access to a car).

Early in my Swedish studies, I met a bunch of foreigners who were also taking the beginner's Swedish course, and we started going out for drinks after class. A few of them I still keep in touch with, which is nice. One of those that I don't still keep in touch with (I think he moved back to Germany) rented a car and invited some of us on a road trip to see some of the places north of Gothenburg. This was less than three weeks after I moved here and I hadn't seen much yet, and so I went along to check it out. We drove north to a fortress called Kungälv, then farther north to an island called Marstrand (which also had a fortress), and we ended by "making barbecue" (that's what the German guy called it) on some rocks by the water. There were some nice sites and some interesting history at the forts, but I think the views (check the panorama from Marstrand) were more fun for me than climbing around the forts themselves.

A couple of days later the weather was really nice, and so one of my colleagues invited me to leave work early and check out the Gothenburg islands. We took a ferry from the mainland to an island and started walking, and we soon came to another ferry dock and saw a ferry that was about to leave for a second island. We had no idea to which other island it was going, but of course we were curious, so we ran and hopped on. This took us to Kalvstad, which is a small residential island with not much to see, but we walked a lap around it, climbed to the top of the hill that was the island, took some pictures, and relaxed and enjoyed the sun. After around an hour on the island, we went back to the dock to take the next boat back, and we discovered that we had just missed a boat, and the next one wasn't for another 45 minutes. There wasn't anything left to see on Kalvstad, so we had to wait. Eventually, it came, and we went back to the first island to catch the original ferry back to the mainland. While we were waiting, the sky turned dark and it started to rain. We met a local who said that it only rains on the islands like twice a year, so lucky us, we got to experience it! Unlucky me, I didn't have a jacket, and with the rain came wind and chilly air, which made for an unexpectedly unpleasant afternoon!

The first major trip I took was when Jenn, one of my friends from Michigan, came to visit for a week and a half in June and July. She had spent a few months in Budapest during college and wanted to go back, and we found a really cheap flight there (thanks, Ryanair!). So, we went for five days. It was ridiculously hot while we were there, and unfortunately our hostel didn't have air conditioning. Regardless, we took three walking tours, hiked up a mountain, ate some delicious food and drank cheap beer, went to two different "baths" (basically these are complexes with several swimming pools, and one of them had some saunas and different types of therapeutic baths), and spent a solid chunk of a day in a mall (one of the few places with air conditioning). It's a beautiful city with a lot of interesting history, and I'm really glad we went. We returned to Gothenburg on the fourth of July, and we celebrated in style by making barbecue on my side-lawn. This was actually one of the more American fourths that I've celebrated - we made delicious hamburgers and (I) drank American whiskey and played American music loudly out the window while sporting American flags. U-S-A! The next day, Jenn and I took another economically-responsible Ryanair flight to Brussels, where we spent a day before taking a train to Leuven to meet up with our mutual friend and former Michigander, Eric. There, we enjoyed some food, drink, and music, and spent an epic travel day taking trains and boats to Mechelin, Dordrecht, Rotterdam, Antwerp, and back to Leuven. Those were all really cool cities, and I probably could have spent a couple of weeks in Belgium and the Netherlands just exploring and enjoying the architecture and sites, but alas, we had to make do with a couple of days.

Back in February, I was in Chicago and met up with my friend Natalie from college and her then-fiancee/now-husband Ryan. They mentioned that they were going to London for the Olympics with Natalie's brother and his friend, and I could join them if I wanted. Well, I took this more seriously than they probably intended, and I found yet another Ryanair flight and some available Olympic event tickets that matched theirs, so I flew over there and joined the party. Unfortunately, for most of the events I wasn't able to sit with the others from the group, but with them having the hotels and the scheduling already planned, it turned out to be a great time. On the first day, we saw archery and judo events, on the fourth day water polo, the fifth day beach volleyball, and the sixth day football (soccer). Days two and three we didn't have any events, so we went over to Paris to be tourists. I discovered that I'm not a huge fan of Paris with its snooty people/attitude, but I did get some awesome crepes on the last night, which made it worthwhile. Anyway, most of the trip was in London, and the Olympic atmosphere was just awesome with lots of friendly patriotism throughout the city.

Shortly after returning from London, I went to Chicago for a conference, followed by Ann Arbor for a couple of nights and my friend Kraig's wedding in Farmington Hills (Michigan). The day after I got back to Sweden, I left for Denmark for another conference. I came back from that, and a week later my friend Dan from Michigan came to visit. We spent a couple of days in Gothenburg and a couple of days in Copenhagen to experience the Scandinavian scene. A week later, I went to Stockholm for the Stockholm half marathon, where I obliterated my personal best (whoo!). Two weeks after that, my friend Tom from Maryland came to visit, and we met up in Stockholm, spent a few days being tourists there, came back to Gothenburg while I worked for a couple of days and Tom went to Oslo, and then we spent the last weekend in Copenhagen. Since then, things have settled down a bit, and after a couple of months of mostly uninterrupted work and Swedish classes, I'm looking forward to my next trip to Atlanta for two weeks covering Christmas and New Years.

When I told my parents over the summer about all of these travel plans, they asked: "Don't you have to work at some point?" The answer is, yes, at some point. But not during the summer. Literally, my 60-person floor had an average of 3 people present per day in the month of July. Also, I have 5 weeks vacation per year, and somehow I didn't use it all yet, so I don't think I've overstepped my bounds with travel. Next summer I already have some conference plans and family visiting, and I hope to see more of you over here as well!

Thanks for reading, and again, the photos are here.

Enjoy!
Steven

American Influences

During a week in which Americans are commanded by the Constitution to eat obscene amounts of food and show our gratitude for all that we have, I think I should give thanks to America and all the ways that it influences my life, as well as the life of the average Swede, here in Sweden. First off, US culture has a more significant influence on Swedish culture than I expected. Yes, they like to make fun of me for being ignorant about other countries and not speaking other languages, but this is mostly in jest and they understand that for a country the size of Europe, it's really not needed to speak another language and we have enough geography of our own to learn. I could equate me not knowing the name of the political leader of Denmark to them not knowing who the governor of Alabama is (not that I actually know or care who the governor of Alabama is, but it's kind of the same idea). Movies, television, and popular music (no country music, unfortunately) are pretty much exactly the same here as in America (i.e., made in Hollywood), and movies and television are almost always shown in English with Swedish subtitles. There are a few Swedish TV programs, but I don't think they are very popular compared to American shows. A surprising number of the Swedes that I've met have spent some time in the US studying, and as a result of this and the non-dubbed television and movies, there are a lot of Swedish people who sound very American when they are speaking English. Not being much of a cinephile myself, I usually find that the Swedish people I talk to know a lot more about American TV and movies than I do.

I mentioned in an earlier post that the American election was all over the news here, and for the couple of months leading up to it, the first question people would ask me upon learning that I'm American was what are my thoughts on the election. As an American, I'm obviously an expert on it, right? Well, this led me to want to satisfy their expectations, and I followed the election and the news coverage pretty closely. A few days before the election I learned about a "Democrats Abroad" chapter here in Gothenburg, and they hosted an election night "watch" party, which I thought would be fun to check out. I went there around 10pm (4pm ET), expecting to only stay for an hour or two, but I ended up staying all night until an hour after the networks called Ohio (like 6:30am our time). The party had lots of food and drinks, and they even had an American trivia game to help us pass the time in the early part of the night. There were probably around 25 people in attendance - they were not all American, but that night I think I met more Americans than I had in the previous six months of being here (which was probably about 5 - there really aren't many of us in Gothenburg). Most of the people who were there have lived here in Sweden for a long time and moved for a spouse or a job - there were probably 3 or 4 people around my age, but I think only one of them was actually American and the others were either very interested in American politics or were friends with other people there.

One of those people was a Swedish girl who went to college in Oregon, and a couple of weeks later (i.e., Thursday) she hosted a big Thanksgiving dinner and invited me. It was really nice - she and a friend spent a day and a half cooking and had everything one would expect for Thanksgiving. There was turkey and gravy and stuffing and sweet potato casserole and vegetables and cranberry sauce, and for dessert there was apple pie, pecan pie, pumpkin pie, bread pudding, and apple crumble. I ate entirely too much, and it was delicious. I think there were three of us there from America, and about 15 other people from the host's masters degree program at the local business school. So, for those of you who asked if I celebrated Thanksgiving, the answer is yes. In general, though, Swedes don't celebrate Thanksgiving, and many of them don't know much about it as a holiday.

Speaking about holidays, I should mention the Fourth of July and Halloween. No, they don't celebrate July 4th here (duh), but I certainly did. My friend Jenn from Michigan was visiting that week, and we had a little barbecue in my front yard to celebrate America. It was actually really nice - we made hamburgers and veggies on a grill and drank some American whiskey and played some patriotic music. We went out to a bar afterward and I wore my American flag and Jenn wore an awesome American flag shirt that she found at a mall in Budapest (where we were traveling previously). All in all, it felt like we did July 4th right. Regarding Halloween, from what I've heard this wasn't really celebrated in Sweden until a few years ago. Now, due mostly to American TV and movies (I think), the Swedes are starting to celebrate it, and there were a few parties around town the weekend of Halloween. I even heard about one of my colleagues with kids taking them trick-or-treating. I didn't go to any of the parties or dress up myself, but it is notable that this holiday (which doesn't actually deal with America like Thanksgiving and July 4th) has caught on over here.

Well, I think that's enough patriotism for now.  Go USA!

Steven

There's no place like Göteborg

I think it's time to write a few words about my new home, the lovely city of Gothenburg. To the Swedish, that's Göteborg (pronounced something like Yuh-teh-boorg without really enunciating the 'g'). This is really not an easy word for English-speakers to pronounce, hence the English translation, Gothenburg, which sounds like it looks. You may not have heard of the city, or you may have only heard of it because of the second and third Stieg Larsson novels (by the way, Sahlgrenska hospital is like a mile from my place), but it's one of the major cities of Scandinavia. The capitals (Copenhagen, Stockholm, and Oslo) are bigger and more well-known, but I'll say that Gothenburg probably comes next in terms of importance and attractiveness. This claim is due to its central location (3-4 hours from all three of the aforementioned capitals), the status and location as a major port, and that it's the next-biggest city in the region (as long as we don't count Finland, which we don't). We are somewhere between half a million and a million people, depending on whether you count the city itself or the "metropolitan area". That's 5-10 times the size of Ann Arbor, and about one-fifth the size of the Atlanta metro area. It's big enough to warrant an airport and a major train station, yet small enough that it feels like a community, and I can go for a run and circle the entire useful part of the city.

The public transportation is fantastic - there are buses and trams that run all times of day, and a ride with transfers costs about 18 kronor (like $2.50 - $3, depending on the exchange rate). There are also bike lanes and sidewalks along most of the roads, and despite the facts that it's almost always lightly raining, the city is built on a rather steep hill, and in the winter it gets dark for an insane proportion of the day, people are always biking. I bought a bike a few months ago, and like almost every bike I've seen here, it has fenders, a built-in rear-wheel lock, a clip in the back to secure belongings, and a little bell to warn the pedestrians that you are about to mow down. I also bought a u-lock, a helmet, and a headlight and taillight (safety first, Mom). I still don't like riding in the rain, but I've gotten over the hills and darkness problems, and I mostly use it to get to the gym and to my Swedish classes when it's dry enough (it cuts 15-20 minute walks down to 5-8 minute bike rides). In the city, it feels like bikes and trams and pedestrians have the right-of-way over cars, which makes me really glad I don't have to deal with driving here. Speaking of which, I'm of course sad to have sold my car before I left Michigan - it was a good car and it treated me well. At the same time, I'm quite happy that I no longer have that responsibility, particularly while I'm living in a place where I really don't need it or want it.

Now, I have to mention the climate, which to me is the biggest drawback of Gothenburg. It sounded nice on paper/computer (weather.com) when I compared it to Ann Arbor - it has cooler summers and less cold winters. Seems more temperate, right? Well, the summers are actually a bit on the chilly side, with it rarely going above 70 F, and the winter started a bit early, with some rather cold weeks happening in September. This temperature is accompanied by a pretty significant difference in daylight between winter and summer. Back in late June, it got dark around 11:30pm and light before 4am. This was actually really rough for me, because my bedroom at the time had big east-facing windows and insufficient blinds, so I didn't sleep well for a few months as the sun would wake me wayyy too early. In about a month we can expect the opposite with only 4-5 hours of daylight, and I think the toughest part of that is that I'll leave for work when it's dark and go home when it's dark, but it's really not all that bad. I have a big window in my office at work, so I'll always get to see the light when it's around. The final bummer about the weather, which I mentioned before, is that it's almost always cloudy and drizzling. I don't think the streets have been dry in 3 months - it's kind of ridiculous. But, I'm getting used to it, and it bothers me less every day. Last week, the sun peeked out from behind the clouds, and it was so glorious - we couldn't help but smile! I looked around, and everyone else was smiling too... weather can really bring people together!

Okay, now you may have asked yourself a few sentences ago why I didn't just buy better blinds for my windows. Well, the apartment that I started out in was only available to me for 6 months, so given the temporality of the situation, I didn't want to invest in that place. Now, you may be thinking: why did you move into a place that you'd have to leave so soon? The answer is that finding a place to live in Gothenburg is a nightmare. If you think about trying to find an apartment in New York City, it's absurdly expensive, but it's possible. Here, it's not too expensive, but it's also not too possible. This is because there are price ceilings on apartment rentals, so no matter how good the location, owners can only legally charge up to a certain amount for rent. This creates what economists call a housing shortage - way more demand than supply. There are some second-hand ways to rent apartments (similar to Craigslist in the US), but they usually come with unpredictable roommates and other situations. If you want to rent in a legit way, there's Boplats - the official, first-hand apartment rental agency. Boplats is fair and balanced - they work on a priority system, so the longer you've been in the online "queue", the more priority you have and the more likely an apartment owner will offer you a place that you've applied for in the system. The problem is that you have to be in the queue for years to get anything near the center of the city. Like, ten years. Or, you have to know somebody, in which case they might let you skip the queue and just give you the place, which of course further aggravates the ten-year wait situation. Anyway, I joined the queue in January, and between June and August I applied for about 50 apartments and didn't get any offers to see a place. Fortunately, my department was able to set me up with a place (they had also gotten me the initial temporary place), though I wasn't able to see it or learn much more than the square meterage and price before agreeing to take it. I also had to start the lease a month early and pay double rent in October, which was expensive, but gave me time to slowly make the transition.

Anyway, now I'm all moved into my new place, and I'm happy with the location, the space, and the west-facing bedroom window. I'm looking forward to all of you visiting me soon so I can show it off!

Ha det så bra,
Steven

Välkommen!

Welcome to my new blog about my travels, experiences, and life in Sweden!  I've been thinking and talking about doing this for a while, and now it's finally happening.  We'll see if this amounts to weekly posts, monthly posts, or perhaps nothing more than this post, but I think this can be a good way for me to keep in touch with my life in America while documenting my experiences abroad.  While I may have moved very far away, my friends and family in the US are important to me, and I want to keep in touch as much as possible.  This is not to say that all I have to do is send completely impersonal posts to the public internet and expect you all to treat these as personal messages - this is more a way to update you and remind you all that I'm here and interested in hearing your updates, and hopefully it'll spark more individual conversations via email, chat, phone calls, videochat, teleportation, etc.  That said, you are welcome to publicly comment on any of my blog posts or send me a personal email at hoffenson@gmail.com - whatever you prefer.

I'll start off by saying that I can't believe it's already been six months since I moved to Gothenburg.  Time is really flying by, and I wish that my progress at work and in learning Swedish were a little bit further along, but I do feel like I'm moving forward on both fronts, which is good.  I just started my third Swedish course, which is level B1 part 2.  Right now, I feel like I can understand about half of what I hear in Swedish, and maybe two-thirds of what I read, but I really don't have much practice speaking because everybody switches to English whenever we are talking (since nearly all Swedes can speak English way better than I can speak Swedish).  I'm hopeful and confident, though, that I'll be conversing fairly proficiently in another 6 months.

Just like moving to any new city, it's been a little bit tough to build a network of friends, and I think this has been exacerbated by the minor language barrier and the relatively introverted nature of the Swedish people.  I do feel like I've made some good friends through work, as well as a few through the Swedish courses and sports that I've been playing, but my social network is still much smaller than what I'm used to from my groups of friends in Georgia, Maryland, and Michigan. It probably doesn't help that I live alone, but I actually really like the independence I get from that.  Anyway, at this point I'm starting to feel pretty good about having made some good friends and finding things to do to fill up my free time, and I think that this will continue to improve over time.

My summer and early autumn were very busy times, which is part of the reason why I dropped off the email update bandwagon.  I think I should probably describe my trips in more detail in later posts, but as an overview I had 4 visitors and traveled to Budapest, Belgium, Holland, London (Olympics), Paris, Chicago, Ann Arbor, Aalborg (Denmark), Stockholm a few times, and Copenhagen a couple of times.  It's really nice how easy it is to get around Europe, and some of the flights were around US$50 round-trip!  And I know some of you are going to ask me what my favorite place was out of those trips, and I'll tell you right now to please not ask me that question.  Each of those places is very cool in it's own way, and I really hate picking favorites.

Since it's still election season, I have to mention that American politics are surprisingly well-known to a lot of Europeans, considering how little we typically know about foreign politics, and it seems like whenever I meet somebody they ask me about the election.  Almost everybody I've met over here supports Obama, and I suppose their main interests lie in foreign policy, but they are also very socially liberal over here.  The American left (liberal/democrat) is pretty far to the right (conservative side) of most European political views.  People here don't seem to understand why conservatives in the US are so against universal healthcare, which most other developed countries have.  And on the foreign policy side, they like that the democrats use diplomacy and cooperate with other nations to avoid war.  Some Americans argue that this makes us look weak, but on the other hand, it makes us look reasonable.  I know that not everybody reading this blog agrees with these views, but I think it's important to understand how outsiders view us, because it can't be a bad thing for other people to like us.  Anyway, I'll be happy when the election is over so I can read the news and learn something interesting rather than the same stuff over and over.

Okay, that's probably enough for my first post.  If you want to subscribe (i.e., get an email update every time I post something), you can do so by putting your email address in the "Follow by email" field and clicking "Submit" in the top-right corner of the page.  If you can't figure that out and want updates, just ask me and I'll send you an email every time I post!

Med vänliga hälsningar,
Steven