In April 2010, Honors College alum Dzeneta Karabegovic '08 was awarded a Fulbright Grant to do a research project on social networks within the Bosnian Diaspora community in Sweden. A Bosnian native and Burlington resident, Dzeneta designed the project as an extension of her Honors College thesis. She arrived in Sweden this past September, and will be in the country until next summer working on her project. You can follow along with Dzeneta's journey at her blog, It's a Process.
There is no bad weather, only bad clothing. The e-mail from the Swedish Fulbright Commission had detailed instructions about clothes for walking around Stockholm as a particularly cold, snowy day was expected for our Thanksgiving celebration at the American Embassy in Stockholm last week with my "Fulbright family," as we like to call each other. It's actually one of the first things I learned when I arrived in Sweden and a Swedish (or perhaps Scandinavian) proverb to live by. It reminds you of how much time you spend outside here, waiting for a train, biking in the snow, walking from one place to another as opposed to getting into your car and driving. Whenever someone says it, I think of Professor Mieder, a world-renowned proverb scholar and one of my mentors at UVM. It is also a reflection of the Swedish mentality. There are few things that faze Swedes. When fall arrived and brought darkness along, Uppsala's "Festival of Lights" lit up various parts of the city with classical music playing along to it. You can stroll along the Fyris River and enjoy the illuminated downtown even though it gets dark by 4pm. When the weather dropped below freezing, the cafes in Uppsala became cozier, serving warm drinks by candlelight, with unlimited coffee and tea refills and an endless array of cakes and pastries to accompany your fika, an institutionalized Swedish coffee break that can happen any time during the day. During one of these I recently was offered a dammsugare (vacuum cleaner), a chocolate covered sweet with marzipan and green or pink ends. I was told it looks like the old Swedish vacuum cleaners and I'm happy to continue to call it by its literal translation as I'm not sure if it even has a proper English one.
I have yet to see a Swede rush. They live by queues, taking a number and waiting to be called on at the bank, at ticket booths, in the grocery store, during meals. Swedish men love to show off their moves. I was invited to dance on numerous occasions within five minutes of waiting for my friend in a club in Stockholm. During my seminar on new military threats, I often felt like the abrasive American arguing various views, but I soon learned it was because Swedes are generally shy, and painfully polite most of the time. This comes off as a bit cold and distant at first, but once you engage them in a conversation, they relax and are generally very friendly and helpful (and tend to invite you for a fika). The level of gender equality stands out in Sweden as well with paternity leaves mandated just like maternity leaves, and countless fathers with babies in strollers or toddlers in their arms with no mom in sight a regular occurrence. Seeing the Swedish system at work makes me less anxious about having children at some point in the future, even though the United States still has some work to do on this front. I do look forward to returning to Burlington next year and anticipate the humid, sticky, summer days and Lake Champlain sunsets, especially as I add layer after layer of "good clothes" and brace myself for the increasingly colder, shorter days that await me in the coming months.