Our last week in Uppsala

Saturday, April 28

Our last week in Uppsala has been calm and quiet. Except, of course, for last Saturday when I raised hell with about 150 rabble rousers in the Uppsala March for Science. You can see from the pictures that I was there with a bunch of true radicals.

A common math joke

Look at these people! It looks exactly like a Seattle crowd.

Here we are listening to a rousing harangue in Swedish.

After the incomprehensible (to me) bullhorn speeches, we left the main square in the Uppsala Centrum, and marched up the hill to the Gustavianum museum and from there to the Ångström Laboratory at Uppsala University. 

This was a very Swedish march, very orderly and polite. We even waited for the light to change before crossing the street! I had some interesting conversations with my fellow marchers, mostly about U.S. politics. Awkward.

Our last week has been quite social. On Monday evening, Ingrid came over and we started out talking about her possible visit this summer. Later the conversation turned to scholarly matters and I went off to read a book.

On Wednesday, we took Ingrid out to lunch for her birthday at a Scandinavian/Japanese fusion restaurant called Noia and it was surprisingly good. Ingrid was a bit resistant to letting us take her out because here, the tradition is for the person who is having a birthday to pay for everyone else's meal! Negotiations were intense but we prevailed.

As we left our apartment to meet Ingrid, it was raining. During our walk, the rain turned to sleet. Then to hail. Then to snow. This was on April 26!! After lunch, we walked back in bright sunshine. Next time, we will come in May.

Wednesday evening, I went to the English Bookshop for a reading group meeting. We had read Dust by Mark Thompson which is a coming of age story of two young boys in New Jersey during the late 1960s. It is an engaging book, mostly about death as it turns out, and while the characters are American, and the action takes place in the US, the author is British. More to the point, so is the publisher which made for some weirdnesses like getting a flat tyre on a road trip to Savannah, or coming to a realisation about an inter-racial situation. There were about nine people in the group and, in addition to me, there were three Americans there, expats all. One of them, who is about my age, came to Sweden as a high school exchange student and never moved home again. I think I remember her from two years ago.

On Thursday, I took a long walk to the Viking burial mounds at Gamla Uppsala. The forecast was for a sunny morning and rain in the afternoon so I got an early start. It was a beautiful cloudless morning but cold: in the high 30s when I left our apartment.

Typical Uppsala residential neighborhood

The Gamla Uppsala church

I went into the museum and took another look (we had been there in 2015) at the Viking artifacts and older items found in nearby excavations. When I came out, clouds were overhead as the weather change had started. This made for some good pictures. It takes about an hour and a half to walk from our apartment to Gamla Uppsala so I was on the trail for a total of about three hours. I managed to make it back before the rain started.

The three largest mounds

The Gamla Uppsala church, one of the oldest in Scandinavia

On Friday, we went on a shopping trip to the downtown area, Uppsala Centrum. On the way back, the weather was nice so I took some more pictures.

The beautiful Fyris River

The Cathedral, obviously

 Since I was getting hungry and my blood sugar level was falling, I suggested we have something to eat before my mood turned grouchy. So we stopped at a kaffe (cafe) across from the cathedral for fika, a charming Swedish tradition of drinking coffee, or hot chocolate in my case, with a pastry.

A random Uppsala scene (walking past the main University library)

Finally, the forsythias are starting to bloom!

A strange Nordic tradition for the unofficial start of spring on April 30 at 3:00PM. Apparently, after that time everyone (well, students) changes their black hats to white and then they all go out and get drunk. This notice is on the door of our apartment building. If you expand it, I think you can read it.

In the afternoon, we went to Julie's house for cake and tea and good conversation. Ingrid also joined us. Since Julie travels home to Seattle with her two boys every year, we hope to get together again in July. We also discussed the possibility of a house exchange sometime in the future!

Today we clean our apartment and tomorrow we leave for home.

Random picture: this is the bicycle parking area at the railroad station in Uppsala. The number of bikes in this town in incredible.