Campeones del mundo

In case you didn't hear, Spain won the World Cup. 

I come from a family that did not watch sports, of any kind. In middle school, my father once turned on the Super Bowl just so we could see what a halftime show was, and that´s all I remember about sports in my childhood. So I've never really watched sports on television nor attended many games in person. But when I came to Spain, I decided I wanted to experience it as part of the culture. I have limited myself to the all-Spain teams, which means I saw a few of the women's World Cup games, men´s Euro Cup games, and now the men's World Cup. And it just so happens that the Spanish teens did very well in all of those competitions.

Starting early on Sunday morning, the day of the World Cup final, you could see people dressed and ready for the party. In Spain, it's typical that the local governments put up large screens in each community so that everybody can watch together outside. That's probably pretty amazing, but the idea of standing outside in the heat for 3 hours sounded rather unpleasant. Instead, a friend invited me to watch with her and her daughter and we had a very civilized dinner while doing so.

Our TV feed was oddly delayed by two seconds, which meant every time Spain did something important, we'd hear a huge roar from outside several seconds before we'd find out why. It was a nail-biting match with almost no scoring, but in the end Spain did it! Afterwards, I soaked in the fireworks and roars of joy from the streets. On my way home, I watched two boys, young teens, sprint down the sidewalk, but then stop to join hands with a random guy on the street and dance around for a minute.

It felt really nice to be part of a nation-wide experience (even though I didn´t end up joining the two-million people who went to watch the victory parade the following day*). I can´t think of something similar in the US. The biggest event on our calendar is the Super Bowl, but people are rooting for different sides. The Olympics are national, but there are so many different competitions, it doesn´t feel like you are participating in the same moment as everyone else around you, feeling the same feelings. Iam glad I got to experience it. 

The metro train that took me home. I even joined in the singing for a few moments.

 *Note that twice as many people showed up for the national fútbol team as the Pope. Their true passions are revealed.

Stolpersteine, aka "Stumbling blocks"

In 1992, the German artist Gunter Demnig started the Stolperstein project, an initiative to commemorate victims of Nazi persecution. Stolperstein means "stumbling block” in German, and it is a 10 cm brass plaque that bears the name, birthdate, and ultimate fate of the person who used to live in that location. They are installed in place of one of the stones that make up the pavement. Although there is a directory to find them, you usually just “stumble” across them in your everyday life. It is a very powerful memorial, and tragically moving when you find 8 or 10 blocks together, commemorating an entire family, most of whom perished. Each Stolperstein is placed at the last location where someone worked or studied. They are registered in a large public database where biographical detail of each person commemorated person can be found.

These also exist in Spain - the ones I have seen were people who fled Franco´s regime to France, then were persecuted when it became occupied. A friend of mine recently spoke at a ceremony in Hamburg to commemorate his father´s memorial- his father was a pacifist who was imprisoned very early in the Nazi era but was able to flee Germany after his release. The picture I have above is not from his family, but from others we saw on our trip this spring.

The project has been opposed by some, who find the idea of stepping on the names of departed people to be disrespectful. Personally, I find it a moving commemoration and a fitting way to remember that the people who died were individual people with lives embedded in their community. I would love to see something like this in the US that would better commemorate the individual lives of enslaved people and how their labor was exploited in so many ways to make the country I grew up in.

Summertime is the time for SMART goals

While I was in Malmö, I decided I needed to achieve some things. Perhaps I was inspired by my cousins making summer buckets lists, perhaps I was just giving structure to two weeks of wide-open time. But I´m actually quite pleased with the not-very-important things that I achieved.

The most important was the garden - my cousins´ house came with a garden, and they are not (to put it mildly) avid gardeners. My advice in the spring was to let things grow and we could just see if there were things worth keeping as they got bigger. When I arrived, I discovered they basically had a meadow of an invasive species called goutweed. There is a long tradition of people from poorer, southern countries coming to richer, northern countries to do the menial labor. Thus, it was most fitting that this Spanish laborer spent two weeks weeding and raking to clear the Swedish garden.

Before: a meadow of invasive species.

After: weeds conquered.

I also managed to eat lots of incredible ice cream flavors: A´s  homemade rhubarb custard, along with mango pistachio and fig. 

One day I ended up in a beautiful city garden and decided I was going to take the best bee photos I could.

Malmo borders the Orsund Strait, but I thought it sounded more romantic to bathe in the Baltic, so we took a bus just far enough south that we were officially at the Baltic Sea.

Malmö - the cool, green city of my dreams

Even with a heat wave and a drought, Sweden´s summer weather is still heaps better than Spain's.

Sweden, land of IKEA and pickled herring. And, more importantly for me, it is the land where my beloved cousins live. Cousins who not only put up with my biannual visits, but provide me with a very comfy guest bedroom and my own coffee pot. (Conveniently, I also really like the whole family.)

This year, they suggested an experiment where I stayed for longer, but my trip would be less of a visit and more as a member of a family. This means we get to spend time together and time apart, plus I got to spend two glorious weeks away from the heat of a Spanish summer.

By all reports, the experiment was a success and we hope to repeat it next summer. The pictures below highlight the family-bonding side of things, but I also took a lot of long, solo bike rides and met locals at meetups.

Midsommer´s Eve is one of the most Swedish of holidays. We danced around the Maypole at an event aimed at kids, so as far as I could tell from the few words I knew and the hand gestures, we sang of barnyard animals and musical instruments.

A requested a belated birthday cake, specifically an almond cake with cherry filling and coconut filling. I did the baking, but L and N did a bang-up job with the decorating. I need to use more gold dust in my baking, that´s one thing I learned from them.

We built and successfully flew a kite, an item on N´s bucket list. 

All those years of studying physics finally paid off!