Olofsbo

We kicked off our summer vacation last week by spending eight days at Amanda’s family’s cabin on the west coast. The house is 150 meters from the Kattegat sea, which separates Sweden and Denmark.



The house is 220 kilometers — only about 140 miles — southwest of Falköping in a tiny summer community called Olofsbo, which is a few minutes north of Falkenberg, a town of 25,000.







Olofsbo is home to around 1,000 houses, most of which are small summer cabins, and two campsites. Houses in the front row, like Amanda’s family’s, look out onto a long, sandy beach.



Below is an aerial view I found through Google Images, with our cabin’s location indicated by the red dot:



This was my second time at the cabin and first since moving to Sweden. We spent a few days there in January 2010 when I first visited the country but that was in the middle of one of the worst winters on record.

Everything obviously looked very different 18 months later in warmer weather.





















Falkenberg is a much nicer town in the summer, too.









Tonight we’re celebrating midsummer with family out on the farm and the rest of the weekend will be devoted to packing for our U.S. visit. We look forward to seeing all of you back home very soon.

High School Graduation

Falköping’s high school graduated the class of 2011 on Friday.

For whatever reason or combination of reasons, high school graduation is a monumental event in Sweden and our town is no exception.

It started with a lunch for students and their teachers on Thursday, followed by a student breakfast Friday morning before a graduation ceremony. After the ceremony, students paraded through town while embarrassing their teachers in creative ways.



The woodshop kids showed off their carpentry skills.



The parade ended in the town square, where students celebrated some more with family and friends…





… before loading onto flatbeds to be driven around town while they got drunk.







Much to the chagrin of local police.



Then there was a student ball on Sunday, where many classmates partied together for the last time. Some move out of the area to pursue higher education but a large number enter the workforce immediately — high school in Sweden is divided into programs of emphasis and while some programs are college preparatory, around two-thirds are vocational.

National Day

Sweden celebrated its National Day yesterday, although maybe “celebrate” isn’t the most appropriate word.

Swedes save all rowdiness for Midsummer later this month. According to a survey conducted by SVT, the country’s national television broadcaster, roughly 80 percent of Swedes don’t do anything special on National Day.

While many countries, like the United States and our Scandinavian neighbor Norway, celebrate independence on their National Day, Sweden doesn’t have any such history to commemorate.

June 6 is the day Gustav Vasa was elected king in 1523, and also the day Sweden adopted new constitutions in both 1809 and 1974. The date became Swedish Flag Day in 1916 and the government first officially recognized it as National Day in 1983, though it’s only been a public holiday for six years. If it falls during the workweek it’s viewed by most Swedes simply as a bonus day off as the weather is starting to warm up.

The weather couldn’t have been any better yesterday in Falköping. The town organized a day of music, performances and free mini golf in the park.

I’ve never seen so many people out and about here.

SOS Causes Distress

I hope I never need an urgent emergency response in Sweden, because the system here is frighteningly flawed. I’d literally be scared for my life if I ever need immediate medical assistance.

Last night around 11, I heard what sounded like someone trying to open our kitchen door. I went to check it out and sure enough, the handle moved a few times while I stood there. I tried to open the door but couldn’t.

We had heard a big group of people leave a party on the floor above us a short time before, and we soon ascertained that someone had passed out in our stairwell.

Amanda went out our front door, walked around the building and back in through the rear entrance to find an unresponsive woman slumped against our door. She tried to talk to the woman but she was incoherent. Amanda went upstairs to see if anyone was still at the party, but evidently everyone had gone to the bars and left this woman on our doorstep. By the time Amanda got back downstairs the woman had lost consciousness, but was still breathing.

Our other upstairs neighbor Ida came down to help and we called multiple friends of the people who threw the party to see if anybody knew who the woman was or who she had come to the party with, but to no avail. The woman’s cell phone had a pin code and she couldn’t give it to us.

I’ve heard too many horror stories about people choking on their own vomit and dying because their friends left them to pass out, and I knew this woman could be in danger, so we decided we had no choice but to call for an ambulance.

The emergency number in Sweden — and the 26 other member countries of the European Union — is 112. Children are taught to memorize it by “1 mouth, 1 nose and 2 eyes,” which has always been somewhat confusing to me because people also have two ears, and sound can be a very useful sense in detecting certain emergency situations, too, right? But I digress.

For almost 40 years, a private for-profit company called SOS Alarm has been responsible for operating 112 in Sweden. When you dial the number, you reach an operator in one of 18 regional offices.



You explain your emergency situation and the operator makes a critical determination of which services — police, ambulance and/or fire — you need dispatched to your location. They then transfer you to who they feel is the most appropriate authority in your local area and you repeat your situation to them before coordinating the details of the response.

I might be missing something here, but it sure seems like one of those situations where the middleman can be cut from the equation.

In the 15 minutes between our call to 112 and the arrival of two policemen, the woman had regained some consciousness. Also during that time, one of the partygoers returned and tried to help the woman sit up. Another partygoer showed up shortly after the police and saved the woman from arrest by convincing the police that they should just let her and the first partygoer drive the woman home.

What upset me the most wasn’t that the police spent most of their short time in our building laughing as the woman tried to put words together. It wasn’t that they didn’t ask any questions or do any investigation, like trying to find out if she had combined drugs with alcohol and maybe really needed serious medical attention. It wasn’t even that they didn’t blink an eye as the second partygoer, who also appeared drunk, offered to drive the woman home in a country with a virtual zero-tolerance policy for driving while intoxicated.

It was the fact that contrary to the ambulance response that Ida, Amanda and I were recommending based on having observed the woman first-hand, the SOS Alarm operator concluded that only police should be sent. If the police had then found the woman in as serious trouble as she appeared to be when we called, I suppose it would have probably taken another 15 minutes for an ambulance.

The company’s money-saving measure worked out last night, but it often doesn’t. SOS Alarm and the 112 system have come under serious fire recently, and with good reason.

• Earlier this year, a 23-year-old man in Stockholm had difficulty breathing. The on-call nurse at SOS Alarm refused to send an ambulance despite the man’s repeated “help me” pleas (read the sickening transcript here). The man died of a ruptured spleen.
  

• Last year, a woman in Gothenburg was also denied an ambulance and died from renal failure and pneumonia.
  

• A few years ago in Eastern Sweden during a wild street party, a man was found unconscious. The SOS operator passed the information along to police, assuming it was just a drunk passed out, when in fact the man had choked on food. He was eventually taken to a hospital, where he died.

• In 2008, a 34-year-old man died despite his mom’s five calls to SOS while she thought he was having a heart attack. The ambulance took two hours to arrive, and when it finally did the man dropped dead. SOS blamed the huge delay on icy roads.

It doesn’t always end fatally.

• Just this month, friends of a Green Party politician who was stabbed outside a Stockholm subway station accused SOS Alarm of a negligent reaction and slow ambulance response. SOS contests that the 17 minutes between call and ambulance arrival is adequate, which shocks me.

• Earlier this year, the wife of a man who complained of chest pains was told by an SOS operator that they should just go to the pharmacy and buy cough medicine, since it was cold season. The wife persisted and when an ambulance was eventually dispatched, it was determined that the man had suffered a heart attack.

• Two years ago, a young boy who spilled a cup of hot tea on himself. An SOS operator told his mom she should drive him to the hospital herself. The drive took 40 minutes, and when they arrived the boy was taken by ambulance to another hospital based on his critical burns.

SOS Alarm’s defense is pathetic. The company usually claims these unfortunate situations occur during times of high demand for emergency services, but I think it has much more to do with money. In this article from just a week ago, the troubled company’s owners are demanding profit hikes.

I can practically count on both hands the number of times I’ve heard emergency sirens since I moved here last August. Service demand can’t be that high, and it’s so sad that lives have been lost because SOS is too profit-oriented to operate under a “better safe than sorry” mentality. If any company should take such precautions, they’re it.

Four Swedish counties already plan to ditch SOS Alarm in favor of another company this fall and others should follow suit. SOS has a track record of incompetence and that’s just unacceptable when human lives are at stake.

A Televised Taste of Humboldt

It still surprises me how many Swedish television channels show subtitled American programs.

When they’re on we might watch CSI, Scrubs and my personal favorite, Two and a Half Men, but tonight TV6 was showing an old episode of Speeders on which a Eureka Police officer stops a Ferndale woman for flooring it on Harris St.



According to this Times-Standard story, truTV’s cameras followed officer Greg Hill for a few days in 2008. In addition to some outrageous traffic stops, the cameras also caught a heroin bust that didn’t make the episode, according to this article.

Boy, would that have shocked viewers in Sweden.

Kubb

The calendar still says April but the weather over the holiday weekend was so perfect that we had to pull a summer classic out of storage a little early.



Kubb, which originated here in Sweden, is one of those games of skill many players will tell you they somehow drastically improve at with each drink they take. Similar correlations have been known to occur with darts and Guitar Hero, but I digress. If there’s an explanation it’s probably because kubb goes hand-in-hand with grilling which, of course, goes hand-in-hand with beer.

You basically take turns throwing six wooden batons at your opponent’s five wooden knights, also called “kubbs,” to knock them over from a distance of about eight to 10 meters. After you’ve taken care of the knights, you knock down one wooden king in the middle of the pitch to win the game.



From that description it might not sound as thrilling as your first roller coaster ride but trust me, kubb is no ordinary “lawn game.” And you don’t need to be drinking to experience full enjoyment. In fact, when it gets as competitive as it probably does at the World Championship on the Swedish island of Gotland in the Baltic Sea (where the game is said to have originated), it’s undoubtedly best to be sober.

Here’s a comprehensive YouTube tutorial with some visuals and cheesy music:



Kubb shares elements with several different games. Some people draw the obvious comparisons to bowling and horseshoes and others call kubb “Viking’s chess.”

I think it’s also similar to pool in a major respect, in that if you knock over the king before you’ve downed all your opponent’s knights you automatically lose, same as pocketing the eight-ball before sinking all the stripes or solids in a game of billiards.

As many similarities as kubb has to other games, there’s really nothing like it. I suggest you navigate directly to eBay and purchase a set.

You Can't Sleep In On Your Birthday

I was introduced to one of my least favorite Swedish traditions long before I moved here.

On my 23rd birthday last spring, when Amanda and I lived in downtown Sacramento, she woke me up ridiculously early with presents and a breakfast tray in bed. It couldn’t have been 6 a.m. Whatever the time, it was much earlier than I wanted to be awake, especially on my birthday. I’m a night owl. Always have been.

I soon learned that all Swedish birthday celebrations start at the crack of dawn, and that’s just the way it is. I was going to have to accept it.

I went to bed a little earlier than usual Wednesday night in anticipation of another early wakeup, but it did little to lessen my crankiness. I opened my eyes halfway and devoured my French toast.



On Thursday evening we took advantage of the nice weather to grill and I got this spirited rendition of “Ja, må du leva,” our “Happy Birthday” song.



“Ja, må han leva, Ja, må han leva,
Ja, må han leva uti hundrade år.
Ja, visst ska han leva, Ja, visst ska han leva,
Ja, visst ska han leva uti hundrade år.”

“Yes, may he live, Yes, may he live,
Yes, may he live for a hundred years.
Oh sure, he will live, Oh sure, he will live,
Oh sure, he will live for a hundred years.”

After two long trips back to California in the last couple months it was nice to spend a low-key birthday back home in Falköping.