Sweden has a lot of hamburgers, coffee, lakes, chewing tobacco and facial hair. People seem mostly serious, friendly but not outgoing, with functional clothing and faces.
There are lots of detailed rules designed to make things just and orderly, and there is great affection for automated systems involving coins and buttons. Recycling systems are rigorous, formidable and omnipresent. As you walk into a supermarket you pass rows of bins for glass of every colour, papers, cans of different metal, batteries, various categories of lightbulbs - each with its own buttons and dials promising hours of decipherment. Parks contain large bins for dog-shit that are marked with a sticker displaying a happy pooch, and the words HUND LATRIN.
After flying to Denmark, it took me 25 train-hours to get up to Lappland. Here in the Arctic circle, the sun doesn’t rise above the ground for a couple of months in winter. In summer it doesn’t set for a couple of months. Last night, at midnight, the sun dipped low towards the horizon, but then hung there, red-pink-orange, soaking the mountains in its martian glow. Then it started rising again, like some disorientated spaceship, the light refracting back through orange to yellow. Towns here are empty grids of modernist angst set in concrete, with a single cafe selling burgers and coffee. The 24-hour daylight changes in such tiny increments that you lose all sense of time, with very little difference between 2 o’clock and 6 o’clock and 10 o’clock. Things seem spacy, suspended. I don’t understand how people live here.
I keep dwelling on the fact that where I am now is buried under snow for 10 months of the year. I look at the plants and I think I can see how happy they are, enjoying their little sliver of life. Everything that has flowers is in flower, since there will be no other chance to do so. But despite their bravest efforts, most of the plants here are spongy moss, or primitive little ferns. They have only had one sixth of the evolution time that has been enjoyed by lifeforms on the rest of the planet - fits and starts frustrated by months of frozen silence.
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