Thursday, September 06, 2007

apartments, Swedish and pies

The party turned out well. About 20 people (including me) were there. And the pies? I don't see what all the hullabaloo is about making pie crusts. They turned out well. Yes, I've made flakier, and I've got ideas on what to do for next time, but that's at best a minor niggle. Helene looked at it and said "it's an American apple pie." I think because of the top crust. Swedes tend not to do that.

Good news. (And in Swedish you can say "good new" - "news" can be singular). I've found a short-term apartment. It's a 2 room-and-kitchen ('r.o.k'). In reading more about Swedish history, they weren't broken up as "bedroom" and "living room" because they weren't that distinguishable. For example, the entire family might live in a 1 rok, so the 1 room was for living and sleeping. And the bathroom was in the courtyard.

But this is a 2 rok, at about 44 sq. meters, or about 480 sq. feet. My house in Santa Fe was about 1,100 sq. ft. or 102 sq. m. And Sara and I managed pretty easily there. After all, it was meant as a post-war home for young families so should handle parents + 2 or 3 kids. By the way, Sara's back home! Her unit's out of Iraq and she's in Santa Fe again. Though obviously not in my old house.

Anyway, I don't need that much space. It comes furnished, and the price includes the water, power, internet, and heat, as well as access to the laundry room. Unlike US ones where the machines are all coin-op, use of these is included in the rent.

I started with my Swedish course at Folkuniversitetet. It's been annoying and frustrating, for reasons I haven't figured out yet. Still, I am learning. Now that I have a Swedish id I went to the library and got a card for there. I've checked out Swedish versions of Calvin and Hobbes, and of Heinlein's "Have Space Suit, Will Travel." Heinlein is one of my favorite authors and that book, along with "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress" are at the top of my list of favorite books.

This means I'm learning how to say "transmogrify" in Swedish, and "spacesuit" and many other essential words. Calvin and Hobbes has been pretty slow reading, and I figured that perhaps I wouldn't read the Heinlein because it's a novel rather than a cartoon. But I took it out and started reading it. And it was good. I've read the story so many times in English I nearly have it memorized, even now after I don't know how long. So I can figure out what's going on from the context, and that helps a lot. Plus, I don't have to worry that I'm missing something subtle. I know the subtle parts. I'm wanting to learn the obvious ones.

So I'm very excited about that too. One things to note though is that the book was written in the late 50s, and translated within a decade afterwords, I'm assuming. That means it has some older vocabulary. As one example, it used "gebit", which isn't in my otherwise extremely good 'Prisma's Abridged English-Swedish and Swedish-English Dictionary.' It's in the online one as 'domain'. The context was "top man in a specialized domain" and I've been looking for a good word to say that I work in a "specialized field".

I was wary because it wasn't in Prisma. At salsa I asked someone there (a Swede) if she had seen that word. I even had the book with me, so I showed it in context. Nope, had never seen it. Later I asked Jacob. It's a German loan-word, with the original meaning of 'career', that in Swedish became more specialized. It's not common these days because English has taken over a lot of the "lets's be cool and use foreign word" parts in Swedish.

I know a Swedish word that a good number of Swedes don't know! (perhaps. a sample size of 2 isn't much).

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