Sweden II

I woke up the next morning to Joakim's girlfriend Fatima making breakfast for the two of us. I hadn't met her the night before, so it was a bit awkward at first. She was really sweet, and we ended up talking and drinking tea in Joakim's studio for hours. It was pouring rain outside again, and I was in no hurry to leave, so it worked out well. She ended up drawing me a map with all of her recommendations on it and then heading off to work.

After stalling for a few hours to see if the rain would stop, I decided to bite the bullet and just go to my hostel, the place I'm currently staying. The place very clean and proper. Clean in the sense that you have to take your shoes off when you enter the main sitting room; proper in the sense that you have to take your shoes off when you enter the main sitting room. Also, there is mandatory "silence" after 11 at night.

There are some other peculiar things about the place, and they seem very in keeping with what I've heard from Joakim and Fatima about Sweden's philosophy of rules and rule enforcement. Mainly, pretty much everything the hostel offers other than the room costs money, but the actual paying is based on the honor system. For example, there is a sauna that you have to pay to use, but there is nothing preventing you from using it without paying; the expecation is that you will go up to the front desk, be honest about the fact that you are about to use the sauna, and then go use it. The same is true with the laundry machines: they are in a public area, they work without any coins being inserted, and there is detergent sitting there waiting to be used...the expectation is that you will tell the front desk you want to use them and then give them money. I can't decide whether this is weird to me because living in America has convinced me that people aren't naturally designed to follow rules or because it's actually weird. In any case, I have been good about following all of the rules.

Another slightly peculiar thing about the hostel--but in a good way--is that they offer free pasta to their guests. You are expected to provide your own sauce, but the pasta is there for the takin' (as Sarah Palin would say). The effect is that every night the kitchen is full of 20-somethings making pasta with various sauces and speaking all sorts of foreign languages (which in this case means not Swedish). The only thing about the hostel that is not idea is that there are communal showers and bathrooms. Ugh. I guess that's what I get for being spoiled with private bathrooms at NYU. Luckily, since everything is so clean, the only significant negative about communal bathrooms is that they are scattered all around the hostel and so finding a vacant one in the middle of the night can be a hassle.

Breakfast in Sweden consists of sandwiches. The end.

Also, hamburgers are pork. Which is disgusting. It's a really unnerving feeling to bite into a hamburger only to find that it is really a breakfast sausage patty.