kareina

Yesterday was the julfest for the local folk music and folk dance group, and it was much fun. They had an afternoon of crafts projects, followed by the party in the evening. They had supplies and instructions for a variety of projects, or people were welcome to bring whatever project they wanted to work on. That was scheduled for 12:30-16:30, and the party was to start at 17:00. I originally thought to spend the whole day, but during the morning I felt more like curling up on the couch re-reading The Mystic Marriage, and didn't actually get out there till nearly 15:00.

When I arrived there was a small group of people happily working on projects, and another small group in the kitchen cooking for the party. I joined the crafts people, and made progress on finishing the new, improved pocket on my winter coat till it was time to clean up and set up the tables for the party. We managed to get the last of the tables up and decorated (when did they start making such cute strings of tiny battery-operated Christmas lights? they looked great twined with strings of tinsel on the tables) about the time the musicians started getting out their instruments, and I happily spent the rest of the time till it was time to sit and eat dancing to the Christmas music they were playing (many of which are Swedish song only, others exist in Swedish translation but were originally in other languages). There wasn't much room between the musicians and the tables, but since I was the only one dancing just then, it wasn't a problem.

One of my friends commented that I am always dancing, and I pointed out that I was planning to eat lots of risgrynsgröt, so it was important to dance as much as possible. There were 26 of us for the party itself, so we had four tables with three seats on each side, and at two tables there was an extra chair at the end. I took one of the extra chairs, and the only other child (a 12 year old) took the other.

The meal was traditional, but simple--thinly sliced ham and other toppings for open faced sandwichs plus the above mentioned rice porridge. I never really liked ham back when I was eating meat, and the other sandwich toppings weren't to my taste either, but that didn't worry me, as I love rice porridge. I stopped at seconds. However, when the evening was over I noticed that there was a large pot of porridge left over, so I borrowed a large soup bowl from the hall and took home some porridge. Then I went past a grocery store and bought a small thing of cream, and this morning I whipped the cream and blended it with the porridge to make risalamalta, or as I like to call it, the food of the gods. (This is good, as this means that I have only a relatively small amount of it in the house. If I had decided to make some myself, I would have made a large batch of porridge, and thus would have made a large batch of risalamalta, and I don't need to be eating lots of it, and with no one in the house to help me with it...

On every table when we sat down there were several copies of a booklet of Christmas songs (all in Swedish, but some are translations of ones that were first written in English). We sang several before eating a few more after eating the first bit, but before going back for seconds, sang even more after eating seconds and before the games begun, and yet more between the rounds of the games.

After everyone had had a chance to finish eating they turned on the overhead lights again, and divided us up into teams of three (we had no choice as to who would be in our team). Then we played games in rounds--the first round they gave us a piece of paper and asked up to provide the names of 21 different birds based on the word-play clues they provided. My team was the only team of four, the above mentioned 12 year old, his mom, and one of the musicians. Luckily both the mom and the musician was good at bird names, as neither the 12 year old or I were able to help at all with that one.

The next round the paper had a list of a bunch of English phrases, and a bunch of Korean phrases, and we were to match them up. The Korean phrases were all things that if read out loud would sound like an English phrase, so it was pretty easy to match them up with the actual English phrase with a similar meaning. The 12 year old wandered off for this one, too, but the other three of us kept grabbing the pencil and writing down answers--we were all three quite fast at it, and we all were looking at different phrases, so we were the first group done with that part, but I did go through and check all of our work to be certain we got them all before turning it in.

The final round was a musical crossword. They provided a blank crossword puzzle, then they would ask out loud a question and then sing a tune, and we needed to write down the answer from the song, which meant needing to be able to recognise the song, and know the lyrics well enough to answer the question. Needless to say, I wasn't able to help with that one, either. My teammates were able to fill in answers for most of them though, and every group in the room filled in enough of the answers that we were all able to shout in unison when asked that the phrase in the pink highlighted row (formed by alignment of the other words, which were all on a Christmas theme) was gott nytt år

After the games and coffee and desert (which was served between rounds) we packed up the tables, turned off the overhead lights again, and the musicians started playing Swedish folk music. I danced, of course, every dance. They stopped playing a bit after 21:00 and we packed up and went home. I was ok with that, as it gave me a chance to swing by the closest store to the house before they closed at 22:00 to get that cream I mentioned above.

All in all a lovely evening. I remember a time when my only social outlet was the SCA (which is still my primary social outlet), but one of the best things about living in Luleå is that there are other groups which fill a similar niche as the SCA in my life--providing me an opportunity to do crafts, sing, and dance, with good friends (we even wear costumes, but not yesterday).

As a bonus, here is an entry for my long-neglected "Learn Swedish One Song at a Time" series. One of the songs we sang last night was:

Jag såg mamma kyssa tomten


Jag såg mamma kyssa tomten ja
Tänk om våran pappa kommit då

Jag hade gömt mig i en vrå, för att titta lite på
Ett konstigt stort paket som någon av oss skulle få
Och då fick tomten mammas klapp och kyss,
sedan sa hon "Å vad du är bra
nej ingen ser att det är du",
men jag såg att det var
tomten mamma kysste igår kväll

Which literally translates to:

I saw mommy kiss Santa, yes
Think if our daddy had come then

I had hidden myself in a corner, to look a little at
a strange large packet which one of us would get
and then Santa received mommy's touch and kiss,
after which she said "Oh you are good
no, no one can see that it is you"
but I saw that it was
Santa that mommy kissed yesterday evening

This morning was our traditional Luicatåg, for which our Choir has been preparing since October. Even though the choir numbers had been up this year compared to recent years, we still only had ten of us for today's performance, 4 altos, and two each of the other voices. (I am not certain what happened to the other 10 people who had been coming to practice as recently as a few weeks back.) Luckily, some of us are quite good, so it still sounded ok. As we did last year, I brought my hammer dulcimer and played along for three of the songs. However, this time we didn't have a microphone, and my friends in the audience, who sat well in the back, tell me they couldn't really hear the instrument. Unlike last year lord_kjar didn't play his nyckleharpa, which, I think, would have been heard throughout the hall.

One of the songs we learned new this year has a fair bit of imagery that I really like, even though I don't care for the religious overtones in other sections of the song. However, I think that it is one that katerit would really like (and not just because she doesn't have my issues with religion). Come to think of it learnteach might also appreciate it. Therefore I will share it with all of you, because they may not be the only ones. There are a number of versions of it on Youtube, here is one for your convenience, if you want to hear it.

Koppången

Här är stillhet och tystnad nu när marken färgats vit.
. (Here is stillness and quietness now that the ground is coloured white)
Från den trygga gamla kyrkan klingar sången ända hit.
. (yet the song rings here from the safe old church)
Jag har stannat vid vägen för att vila mig ett tag
. (I have paused by the wall for to rest for a bit)
och blev fångad i det gränsland som förenar natt och dag.
. (and was captured by the borderlands that joins night and day)
Och ett sken i från ljusen bakom fönstrets välvda ram
. (and a glow coming from the candles behind the vaulted frame of the windows)
har förenat dom själar som finns med oss har i tiden.
. (has united the souls which exist with us here in time)
Och jag vet att dom som har lämnat oss har förstått att vi är
. (and I know that those who have left us here understand that we are)
liksom fladdrande lågor så länge vi är här.
. (like flickering flames so long as we are here)


Och där bland gnistrande stjärnor som förbleknar en och en,
. (and there among the sparkling stars which fade one by one)
kommer livet väldigt nära som en skymt av sanningen.
. (comes life rather near to a glimpse of truth)
Vi är fångar i tiden som ett avtryck av en hand
. (we are prisoners in time like a hand-print)
på ett frostigt gammalt fönster som fått nåd av tidens tand.
. (upon a frosty old window which has been spared the passage of time)
En sekund är jag evig och sen vet jag inget mer,
. (one second I am dizzy, and then I know nothing more)
bara ett att jag lever lika fullt som någon annan.
. (only that I live just as fully as any other)
Jag är här och mitt på en frusen väg finns det värme ändå,
. (I am here, and in the middle of a frozen road there is nonetheless a warmth)
fastän snön börjat falla och himmelen blir grå.
. (even though the snow has begun to fall and the sky is becoming grey)


Här är stillhet och tystnad nu när psalmen tonat ut,
. (here is stillness and quietness now that the psalm fades away)
men jag bär dom gamla orden i mitt hjärta som förut.
. (but I carry those old words in my heart as before)
Och jag sjunger för himlen, kanske någon mer hör på
. (and I sing for the heavens, perhaps someone else listens)
"Hosianna i höjden", sen så börjar jag att gå.
. ("Hosianna in the highest", then I began to walk)
Och jag går till dom andra, jag vill känna jullens frid.
. (and I walk to the others, I wish to feel the peace of Yule)
Jag vill tro att han föddes och finns med oss här i tiden.
. (I wish to believe that he was born and exists with us here in time)
Det är jul och det finns ett bar in mig som vill tro att det hänt,
. (It is Yule and there exists a child in me which wants to believe that it has happened)
och som tänder ett ljus varje söndag i advent
. (and who lights a candle every Sunday during Advent)

Choir this semester is even more fun than usual. Our director has decided to spice things up by adding in a fair few simple songs wherein the parts are mixed "groups" rather than the traditional "soprano, alto, tenor, and bass". So each group is likely to have some male, some female, some high, and some low voices in them. One group will have the melody, another a different melody, another will sing only a fraction of the words in an interesting counter-rhythm, and another might have an interesting clapping pattern.

Today's new song counts as a "learn Swedish one song at a time" entry, even though it is largely nonsense:

Svamp!

Jag vill bo i en svamp
annars får jag kramp
det finns hopp för min kropp
i en mullig sopp
Kom en kväll ah var snäll
till min kantarell
Titta in å ta ton
i min champinjon

Meanwhile group two sings:

Svamp, svaaaaaaaamp, en svamp, en svamp, en…

While the other group just shouts out: Svamp! at the end of each of the main phrases above.

The above (kind of) means:

I want to live in a mushroom
or else I will have a cramp
there is hope for my body
in a chubby mushroom
Come one night, oh be kind
to my mushroom
Come by and start singing (take a tone)
in my mushroom.

(ok, as a non-mushroom eater, I didn't bother to translate the various types of mushrooms and fungi, since I couldn't tell them apart, anyway…)

One can listen to it here.

Note: bethchm, mom is having enough fun singing with us in choir that if you happen to hear of a "just for fun" choir in your area you might encourage her to join it...

My sister, A, just sent me a facebook introduction to some friends of hers who have moved to Sweden from the US, and suggested that we chat about being an American in Sweden. I promptly thought of lots of things I wanted to say, and then realized that it wouldn’t be polite to do an info dump into a FB chat window, so I thought I would type it all here and just give them a link instead. (L & H, if you happen to have an LJ account leave me a comment here; otherwise I will see you over on FB.)

This is all written with the assumption that you actually want to learn Swedish. If you happen to be one of those people with no interest in learning another language you have come to the right place—nearly everyone in Sweden between 15 and 50 (an many more older and younger than that) is fluent in English, so you can get by without ever learning more than “tack”, “hejdå”, and “precis” and you needn’t bother reading further.

My sister tells me that you are an avid reader; I am too, and I think this was the thing that helped me the most when I moved to Sweden. When I arrived I decided that I wasn’t going to read fiction in English, only in Sweden, and I got my hands on Swedish translations of books I had read many times before in English. By reading books I knew and loved I was free to just read without having to bother with a dictionary to look words up, since I knew what the words had to mean before I read them. (Ok, sometimes I had to look things up, but it was like once or twice a chapter rather than several times a paragraph like it was when reading things in the Swedish textbook.) After reading a few old favourite books I started adding Swedish children’s books into the mix, and found that my vocabulary was already up for the job.

My written vocabulary. It actually took me several years before I could listen to a conversation in Swedish and follow most of it. Why? Because all of the words I knew and understood to look at turn out to have a drastically different pronunciation than I expected from the letters in them. What I am doing now, and what I wish I had started doing years ago is to listen to audio books at the same time as I read the text. Why didn’t I start this sooner? Because I have never cared for audio books—I grew up with a hearing problem, and depend on reading lips to help supplement the sounds I hear when people speak, and even then I don’t always catch what is said. I don’t listen to audio books in English if there is any way to avoid it (besides, human speech is so slow! I could read three English books in the time it would take to listen to one being read out loud). However, I find that I am enjoying listening and reading the text at the same time, and it has made a huge difference in my own ability to pronounce things in Swedish, and in my ability to recognize words when I hear them in conversation.

The other thing I wish I had known from the beginning is the difference between the “svensk för nybörjar” class offered at the local university, which is aimed at exchange students, and the “svensk för invandringar” class offered by the government. I took the former soon after I arrived, because it was easy to find out when and where it met and how to sign up for it. I had problems finding info for the sfi course, so didn’t bother. Until, after three years of living here, when I finally had enough Swedish to carry on a reasonable conversation one-on-one, but still had major problems following rapid Swedish conversations between a bunch of native speakers, when I asked a friend who has been living here 15 years how long it had taken him to get to the point where he could follow conversations in Swedish. “Six months.” I expressed my shock and disbelief, and he replied that the sfi course meets four hours a day, so of course one gets there quickly. My Swedish for beginners course had met only 2 hours a week, and I only took the first year before I was traveling too much for work to be able to continue. Therefore I tried again and this time found out how to enrol in sfi, and managed to do well enough on the entrance exam (which, of course, is primarily reading/writing, which is my strength) to get placed in the highest level class. That was in February, and since then I have made huge progress on my ability to speak and understand spoken Swedish (and I started that whole audio book while reading thing). I have just left day one of the national exam to be done with the Swedish for immigrants course, and think I did fine on it (was done with the reading part in 30 minutes of the 80 allotted, and only had to guess on some of the questions for the hearing part).

My other advice is to sing songs in Swedish! Join a choir or other singing group, or just click on my "learn Swedish one song at a time" button in the list of tags on the right side of this page and you can learn the songs I have worked on in the past several years (or at least the ones I took the time to post here).

I hope you like living in Sweden as much as I have; it is a delightful place to live.

As regular readers will remember, I sing with the student choir at the University here in Luleå. For the past couple of years we have been heavily recruiting exchange students and have maintained a good mix of people from all over the world, though, of course, the faces change each year and, for many of them, each semester. The new semester started last week, and already we have our first gig of the season: performing at the banquet welcoming the newest crop of Exchange Students to Sweden. However, most of the choir isn't available for this performance (even lord_kjar is out of town this weekend. There are only four of us who are able to participate--one soprano, me (alt), and two tenors. One of the tenors is Swedish and the president of the choir, the other two are exchange students themselves. Therefore, given the limited number of people for this gig, rather than actually doing full choir arrangement we have opted on a simpler set:

The president and I will be introduced as ambassadors for the student choir, come to invite them all to come participate with us on Tuesdays, and we will welcome them to Sweden with a traditional Swedish drinking song. As soon as we start with "Helan går!", the choir exchange students will stand up at their place and sing the reply, and then walk up to join us on the stage, where we will give the full song another run through, in unison. Then after we sing that one our president will announce that he understand that the dinner has a theme for the evening of Cartoons/comics, and will point out that our choir has a new mascot, the spider pig (which one of the exchange students will be wearing as a placard on his chest). Then we will sing the Spider Pig song (which I had never heard of before Tuesday--I am so out of touch with popular culture, I didn't even know there was a movie for that cartoon family). After we sing the line "can he swing from a web?", I will snatch away the spider pig, turn him back right side up, and sing a solo "No he can't! He's a pig!", before the soprano snatches the pig back from me to turn it back into a spider pig for the song finale. Then we will tell the crowd that if they join us on Tuesday they can hear this song done in full four-part choir arrangement, and take our leave.

I think it will be fun, and I can't believe that I, whom my friends used to tell me not to sing with them because I sang in a monotone "and it throws the rest of us off", will be singing a solo! I have come a very, very long way. With luck it will get even better soon. Another of our choir members teaches voice lessons, so we will be meeting up on Sunday afternoon to trade a singing lesson for a massage.

The drinking song we will be singing is extremely well known throughout Sweden, and in a fair few other places as well:

Helan går
Sjung hopp faderallan lallan lej
Helan går
Sjung hopp faderallan lej
Och den som inte helan tar*
Han heller inte halvan får
Helan går
(Drink)
Sjung hopp faderallan lej


Which roughly translates to:

The whole goes (down the hatch)
sing fa la la...
The whole goes (down the hatch)
sing fa la la...
and those who don't take the whole (drink in one go)
he cannot have half of it either
sing fa la la...


As our president was teaching us the words tonight I commented that "I need to remember that 'får' rhymes with 'går', and not 'tar' so that I pronounce it correctly". Therefore I was highly amused to come home and read on the Wikipedia page for this song that "*In the classic version, "trår" is used instead of "tar". "Tar" is modernized, and doesn't rhyme." Edited to add: Our Choir president replies "Well, in this one case I'd argue the modernization is an improvement anyway. "Trår" means "yearn", which doesn't really makes as much sense as "tar"." I argue that he is mistaken--I think "those who don't yearn (to drink) the whole (glass in one go) can't have half of it either." works just fine.

I have been gearing up to working longer and more enthusiastically as some major deadlines approach (which was severely interrupted by the Double Wars trip and recovery thereof), and that really showed this week. Yesterday I put in a 14 hour work day, but much of that was fun time spent hanging out with loved ones as they helped me with a ( project for work )
We were all having so much fun working on the project that we were still at work after midnight. She was sensible and hung up to go to sleep soon after midnight, but he and I kept going till nearly 02:00. I love it when work projects hold my attention so long!

Unsurprisingly, I woke up this morning thinking of databases, and wondering if I want to actually try to develop a database to hold all of my data,rather than the series of spreadsheets I am using now. I considered that back at the start of the project, but the list of all the different data types is so long and so complexly organized I gave up on the idea. Perhaps if I get that grant approved and the project goes on after November it will be worth the effort to do a conversion from spreadsheets to database.

Now it is time to head to the last choir performance of the semester: the farewell dinner for the exchange students, and we are the entertainment. This makes sense, since about half of our choir is exchange students this term. I hope we draw as many new exchange students next year, or our numbers will be sadly diminished. Luckily the slogan "learn Swedish, one song at a time" is a good one.

This weekend, while many of my friends across the Known World attended 12th Night Coronations in one Kingdom or another I attended a very different sort of event: Trettonhelgskurser (which Google Translate says means "Twelfth Night Courses", even though "tretton" is 13), a weekend of classes sponsored by the Svenska Folkdansringen (Swedish Folk Dance Ring). Unlike many SCA events which are based around attending many different classes in many different subjects, these courses were each designed to run the full weekend. One could either take the class in dance, or in singing folk songs, or in playing music, or in woodworking, or in costumes for folk dance. However, even though most of us would have been interested in more than one class, each class ran for the full weekend, so we could only take one.

lord_kjar and I decided to go with the folk song class, in part because I need more help with singing than with dance, and in part because of my quest to learn Swedish, one song at a time. I think this class helped with that.

Two full days of class time was enough for us to learn eight songs. Now, when I say "learn eight songs", I mean that for each song we learned the words and melody plus one, or more often several, alternate tunes for the song. Not like in a choir, where people are grouped according to which range they sing in, and each group learns a tune that combine nicely. Nope, in Swedish folk singing *everyone* learns each tune for a given song, and then we divide up and sing multiple parts at once, and then we may switch which groups sing which version of the tune, or, perhaps, some individuals will switch groups.

With luck I will make time to translate each of these songs and share them here, since it has been quite a while since I did an entry for the "learn Swedish one song at a time" series.

I will share one of them now, because the translation is easy:

( Vi ska dansa med Sara )
Hopefully I will have a link to the tune up soon--when that happens I will edit it. If you want to hear it before that happens poke me.

How else was this event different from the SCA events I have attended? ( Well, the best way to answer that is with a description. )
Oops, I just looked at the clock, it is later than I had hoped--I still need to read my 1000 and do my yoga, and I have to drive to Boliden for work in the morning (1.5 hour drive). I will be there till Thursday evening, when I return home so that I can attend my exam to get new hearing aids on Friday. Then next week I will head back there for the first half of the week, then home to pack and get ready for the Scotland trip.

I haven't posted the recent songs I've been learning in Swedish because they are a bit more complicated that the lullabies that archinonlive started me with. I joined the choir (kör in Swedish) that he sings with at the university, and some of the songs we sing are in Swedish. The first of these I have been working on is song number nine in my list of Swedish songs. It is a a song that was written in Swedish to a previously existing piece of classical music. The author must have had a sense of humor because the song speaks of standing in line. Appernetly, so far as the author of the song was conserned Swedes spend far too much of their lives standing in line, and this was worth singing about. here is a link to some other choir singing the song, as you can tell, while the topic is odd, the effect of the different voices is rather pretty.

( here are the lyrics to the song, and a very rough translation )

I've been busy and didn't post the final verses for song #8. Granted, I don't have the final couple completely committed to memory yet, either, though they are getting close.

( song 8, verses 3, 4 & 5 )

I have just started learning my seventh song in my quest to learn Swedish, one song at a time. This bring my total Swedish vocabulary to 121 words, of which there are 65 nouns, 50 verbs, 3 proper names, 2 articles, 4 conjunction, 2 interjection, 20 numbers, 6 nonsense words, 9 prepositions, 23 adjectives, 20 adverbs, and 17 pronouns. It will be some time before I can actually use these words, but I will find out next week when I get to Sweden if I can recognize these words use in conversation, or if I only know them in the context of their songs.
( words for first verse of song #8 )