What the hell are they doing over there?

"So what the hell are they doing over there?" I can hear you asking, my faithful reader.
"What is it like to land in a different country? How are they spending their days? In what ways is Sweden different from the US? Or from Taos?" Even though I'm on the other side of the world, I can clearly hear you wondering. 

Or maybe that's just me, trying to make sense of all this change.

Well, I have answers.

I can start by saying that IT'S A LOT. As in: THERE'S A LOT TO DO.

In no particular order, our days are consumed by:

• Getting Kodiak to school, and back (although he's just on the cusp of riding his bike there and back by himself.. which is a big step!!)
• Walking Griselda, or doing whatever it takes to exhaust her inexhaustible energy
• Finding bicycles (we got through that already)
• Managing the arrival of the container (still not here, arriving Friday, lots of paperwork)
• Trying to learn the road signs here so we can drive legally
• Dealing with the paperwork associated with moving here, which differs for me than for Christina, but involves:
-Getting the residency permit card (me)
-Trying to get a personal number, which you need for pretty much everything (me)
-Getting Kodiak registered so he can get health insurance, etc.
-Trying to register our business here
-Insuring our house, and car (car: see below)
And while doing all of the above, we are also of course trying to...
• Explore this place we now live in
• Do fun things with Kodiak in the afternoons and on weekends
• Make art (or at least make plans for making art)
• And learn Swedish. It is perhaps not too surprising that I am not yet finding a ton of time to practice my Swedish.

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We bought a car last week... a VW Up! (The exclamation point is not my editorializing, it's part of the vehicle name)

One interesting thing is that buying and registering a car is quite a bit easier here than in the states. Here in Sweden (and this was true in Spain as well) you do NOT have to visit a government office of any kind to buy a car, and you do not have to show anyone your driver's license. Everything is done by mail. We do not yet have our Swedish driver's licenses, but this was no impediment to buying the car. With the exception of a VW diesel bug that we had a few years ago, this is certainly the smallest car we've ever owned. But... it does get between 42 and 60 mpg.

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Way back in 2016, when we moved to Barcelona, I wrote that visiting a town's thrift stores and book stores (especially used book stores) was one of the ways that I got to know the place. Well, Lund and Malmö have some pretty good thrift stores. The best thing I've yet to find, by far, is this taxidermy Peregrine Falcon... (at least I think it's a Peregrine Falcon...)

I haven't really found any amazing used book stores here yet, which is slightly surprising considering it's a university town. But I have not, by any means, exhausted the search.

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I think it's a natural human instinct to want to compare things... or compare places, in this case... and I find myself often comparing life here in Lund to life back in Taos. But I think it's important that I be careful in the way that I construct my comparisons so that they are meaningful. What I mean to say is this: when one considers, for instance, the fact that Lund has quite a few public-access, outdoor workout facilities...

... it is tempting to jump to the conclusion that "Sweden just takes better care of its citizens than America." But is this really a comparison between Sweden and America? Or between rural and urban? Taos is a tiny town which I would call more rural than urban (and a poor little town, at that) and Lund is a city (albeit a small one.) By population Lund is 15 times larger than Taos, and considerably wealthier. So a more fair question would be: How well does a wealthy little American town of ~90,000 take care of its populace? Does that town have public access workout facilities? I don't have the data to answer this specific question, but the point is that one must be careful to construct comparisons fairly... to compare apples to apples... if one wants meaningful results.

So I'm still working on making those meaningful observations. A few things I can say with a reasonable degree of certainty are: 

• Services seem to work better here. Civil servants are very efficient and relatively nice. Mail from government agencies comes really fast. People working in stores are nice and helpful, and attend to you fairly quickly.

• People seem less angry and fearful here. People of all different races are jumbled together in work spaces and in public spaces, and it's not uncommon to see people of different races walking and talking together. I'm sure that also happens in some parts of America, but there are a lot of places where it doesn't. Anyway it's refreshing to see. 

• The roads are WAY better. Traffic in the cities is significantly more complicated to navigate because of the large number of bicyclists everywhere, and you must therefore drive more slowly, but things seem to run smoothly nonetheless. There are roundabouts (traffic circles) everywhere and they work well to keep traffic moving. 

• People don't make eye contact on the streets here very much. I have some theories about why this might be, ranging from "it's just cultural" to "people are more self-absorbed here" (and smart phones certainly contribute to that) to "perhaps eye contact is really just about sex and people have now outsourced hooking up to apps, so no one needs to look at anyone else anymore".

A last observation I'll make about our arrival in Sweden is that, for whatever set of reasons, it has felt suspiciously smooth. What I mean, specifically, is that it feels to me almost like we've moved to some more northerly, better-functioning part of the US. I've joked with Christina that I think we may have actually moved to Minnesota. I have felt very little "culture shock", certainly MUCH less than when we moved to Barcelona. I attribute this to several factors: 

• Everyone here speaks English.

• Sweden is, in general, not VERY different looking than America. It is useful here to think of Barcelona, with its narrow streets, gothic architecture, and generalized 'visual density', as a contrast.

• We've lived in Europe before, and so it's not so new to me anymore. 

It's exciting to feel you're in a brand-new place that feels really different from home, and so in a way I miss the culture shock. 

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I joined the public library (which is quite good) here in Lund in my first week. It's one of the few things you can actually do here without a personal number. I immediately checked out a few books... one on learning Swedish, another on understanding contemporary art, and another on J. C. Leyendecker. I was already vaguely aware of Leyendecker, but the book was a revelation. I have now added him to my list of favorite artists, and... more importantly... he shot to the top spot in my list of painters I would like to emulate (at least in terms of his style).

These are good examples of why I love his style- it is crisp, bold, and high-contrast... a very "illustration"-style. 

Amusingly, as a gay man he fits right in with all my other favorites... Bacon, Caravaggio, Cadmus, and McQueen. One thing I find quite entertaining is that he managed to surreptitiously insert homoerotic imagery into his work in a time when it was not at all acceptable...

Observe the barely concealed erection... in a national advertisement!

... and he did this while working at the very highest levels of the American advertising industry! That takes some daring!

He was a direct predecessor to, and inspiration for Norman Rockwell, who borrowed his style and became even more famous, despite being less talented (I'm sure some will disagree but to me it's obvious!)

Am I guilty of talking about painting, and how I'd like to paint, more than I actually paint? If you read this blog, you know that I am, and it's a fact about which I am embarrassed and which I intend to rectify. I now have my own painting studio in this home we've newly rented in Lund, and our container is finally arriving on Friday(!!!) so I will have no more excuses to get back to it. My first few dips back into painting will simply be copies of some of Leyendecker's faces and hands.

Until next time... Hejdå