Sweden!

Ambi and I aren't the best at updating the blog for the four or five people who read this (yes, I jest, it's really like six or seven), and for that we apologize. With classes for me and dissertation for her, we just don't take the time needed for a blog like this. Heck, I even devote more time to my daily sports blog, of course that's for purely professional purposes and this is simply for fun.

That said, I'm a flight from Helsinki to London, and I thought, you know, I can whack out a blog post or two and channel some rage (@#$% you, FinnAir!) at not being able to eat on a flight once again into something productive.

I just spent the last week in Gothenburg, Sweden for AoIR 11.0, a conference for internet researchers. We gather annually in alternating years between the States and Europe, and this year just happened to be in Svenska. Without making the obvious crack about the conference being in Milwaukee last year, the opportunity to travel to Europe and two new countries (Sweden and Finland) was just to good to pass up.

Especially when you consider it was my first presentation at a professional academic conference. Not only that, I chaired the panel I presented on. This was a pretty big deal.

Like most of us, my thoughts about Sweden have been acquired and molded by the media. I've met a few Swedes in my time, and while I engaged them in conversation, we didn't perform an in-depth analysis on Swedish norms and culture.

I don't think it's too far beyond the quick to presume that most imagine Sweden at an beer drenched Aryan-filled utopia of dirty dirty sex. While part of that may be true, (and let me tell you, it does exist), the whole notion of a land filled with perky breasted blond haired blue eyed bombshells is a complete myth.

In fact, I found nearly the same diversity I would in Chicago or any major cosmopolitan urban center around the world. I saw all shades of the ethnic spectrum and all were speaking Swedish with the same clarity. I didn't hear a vast linguistic diversity, there weren't a ton of people walking around speaking Spanish or Russian.

I'm not fooling myself into thinking that this is the norm across Sweden. I'm willing to bet in a small northern hamlet like Bjurholm, that there's a ton of Somalis speaking Swedish. But in Gothenburg, I heard Somalis speaking Swedish, and to be frank, that's awesome.

I don't know if it's a cultural norm, some overt pressure on non-natives to speak Swedish, but everyone spoke Swedish, and happily, opened every conversation with me in it.

Contrastly, no one in Japan assumed I was Japanese, and more often than not, I was assumed to be American. But here in Sweden, I was never picked as an American, only when the Swedish required was beyond my linguistic capabilities. Even then, American was not the first nationality assumed. Who knew I looked Finnish?