Not very surprisingly, my first weekend—week, really—in Stockholm was a bit of a whirlwind. After an unfortunate series of redeye flights that left me with an enduring crick in my neck even two weeks later, I landed on Friday morning at Stockholm Arlanda Airport with five of the other seven people in my program and set off on a day-long quest to find our housing, visit Ikea for linens and such, and get groceries.
There wasn’t much to document that first day, and I was too jetlagged to document much of anything anyway, but I did enjoy this giant concrete lion positioned along one of the pedestrian streets we traveled. As I later found out, these are everywhere in Stockholm. Apparently after an incident where a vehicle was driven into a pedestrian street, the city started placing them at the spots where pedestrian streets intersect car streets in an effort to avoid a repeat.
On Saturday, the real orientation weekend began; everyone in my program gathered for two days of all the touristy Stockholm shenanigans we could manage before we could get swallowed up in work.
We had a lovely lunch at a cafe in the Royal Djurgården. Their bread was delicious, I definitely want to go back at some point!
I was surprised by how small the Nobel Prize Museum is inside, but they’re constrained by their building, which has enough historical value that they’re unwilling to build any kind of expansion onto it.
We took a walking tour through Stockholm’s Old Town on Sunday morning, which led us past plenty of neat architecture while telling us a brief history of Stockholm’s founding up through its present day.
After the tour, we were all happy to pause for lunch at Vete-Katten bakery, which had an excellent window display!
My tea and beet-chevre salad was nice, but I do have to admit that I think I did prinsesstårte better, on the whole…my quest for Stockholm’s best prinsesstårte will continue another week.
We ended our weekend with a guided tour through the Royal Palace. The drapery behind the silver throne definitely showed its age—it used to be much brighter blue, and the silver thread used to actually shine, apparently—but you could still tell how beautiful it must have been in its prime, and everything else seemed to be in a much better state of repair.
Work is…well, it’s about the same as any first week of research in a new lab. Meetings to learn what everyone’s research is about, paperwork to get a key card for the building and server access, reading lots of background papers, etc. You know the drill. The building I work in is nice, though! It’s fairly new, and I like the atrium.
Also, there’s fancy coffee machines in the lunchroom, and far be it from me to complain about free hot drinks. It’s not quite the HMC CS department’s snack spread, but that’s a high bar.
There are also these great little tetrahedral packages of shelf-stable milk that seem to be the norm to use in coffee instead of creamer, and as someone who isn’t the greatest fan of creamer, I’ve been enjoying them! It took me a little while to work out how to open and empty them reliably without spraying milk on myself or on the counter, but I’ve gotten the hang of it now.
So far, the biggest challenge I’ve been facing here in Stockholm is the doors. For some reason, I and everyone else in the group who I’ve talked to about it have been having trouble with them. We keep trying to pull on doors that ought to be pushed, across many different doors and buildings, even when we’ve gone through that door several times before and really should know better! I haven’t figured out yet what the core of the problem is, but I think it’s a small difference in the way doors and their frames are built together that’s messing with our ability to guess which way doors swing based on American doors’ visual cues. Without any American doors to compare these to, though, it’s hard to say for sure.
If you want to help with Door Science, please send pictures of a variety of doors focusing on the area where door meets frame on the vertical edge nearest the door handle. Ideally, each door should be photographed from both sides, both closed and open a couple inches (4 photos total of each door). If I can collect enough, your photos may make their way into the world’s most exciting powerpoint night presentation on doorframes someday.
In other news, the obligatory crochet check-in: I slowed down a little in my first week as I was getting settled, but all the time I had on planes and in airports on the way to Stockholm helped compensate. Since I’m late to writing this post, I’m not quite sure which pieces I made in which week, but I got through roughly two stacks of six hexagons each.
Lyra Cromwell 