First Impressions

Yesterday,  our first day in Uppsala in full possession of our faculties, was a day of settling in, walking around town, and meeting with friends.

The early morning was clear and cold with temperatures around freezing. Our first excursion was to a small grocery store called ICA about two blocks from our apartment building where we stocked up on necessities and a few luxuries.  Then we walked to the town's main shopping area and bought some extra bath towels (those issued with the apartment were paper thin and fairly useless) along with a few other items.

On every occasion, when we went to pay for our purchases, we were mistaken for Swedes and spoken to in Swedish until our blank looks and replies in English made our identities clear.  I felt a bit flattered that we weren't immediately pegged as Americans but actually, the people here have a lot in common with those of western Washington.

Ethnically, of course, looking at the crowds in the shopping area, we could have been looking at the people who frequent Park Place in Kirkland. Considering the number of Scandinavian transplants and their descendants in the Seattle area, this was not surprising. The clothing styles are often outdoorsy much like at home and, as I often notice in Seattle, people come out in huge numbers on a sunny day. Clerks in the shops are courteous and superficially friendly just as we are used to.

Later in the day, we visited one of CJ's colleagues, Ingrid, at her house which is less than a 10 minute walk from our apartment. She lives in a modest (by upper middle class American standards) and comfortable two-story house with a small garden, large western windows allowing the afternoon sun to pour in, shelves of books (very few in English, I noticed) and, incomprehensibly to an American, no television and no car.

About a block from Ingrid's house there is a large public park with forest, streams, and apparently miles of hiking trails. She walked there with us and, while she and CJ mostly talked shop, I looked at the local trees, plants, and birds. The forest here has a surface resemblance to our forests on the dry side of the cascades, i.e. pines whose bark resembles our Ponderosa pines but is not as red, flowering underbrush, and a few ferns. There are also lots of Birch trees perhaps analogous to our Aspens.

Overall, it seems to me that culturally and botanically, this part of Sweden is a variation on a theme shared by the Pacific Northwest. I could feel almost at home here.

Here are some things I have NOT seen in Uppsala: McMansions, obviously poor neighborhoods, conspicuous consumption of any kind, large numbers of homeless (there are a few Roma begging on street corners but we are told this is a recent phenomenon), large fancy cars, SUVs.

In the evening, we went to dinner at Dan and Charlotte's apartment.  They made us a delicious dinner and the wine was flowing.  Afterwards, we watched the first two acts of an opera on TV during which I became overcome with sleepiness.

We walked back to our apartment in the rain. Have I really left home?