Sälan

This weekend was the ski trip to Sälan. It was a four hour drive from Uppsala, mostly north I guess but a little towards Norway. We stayed for free at a friend of a friend’s cabin up there. We were crammed 5 mattresses to a room. Sweet. The first night not much happened. I did whip out my uke and played some tunes to a drunken crowd, to everyone’s amusement. Very nice to actually know songs well enough to play and entertain people.

The next day we got out bright and early to hit the slopes. I decided to snowboard because I am, in fact, a closet masochist. ACTUALLY I just wanted to be a ‘beginner’ just like many in the group were beginners to skiing. This was a nice but misguided idea, because learning to snowboard hurts like hell.

SNOWBOARDING
I don’t think I’ve ever fallen so many times in one morning. At first I literally could not even stand up on a little bunny hill for 3 seconds without falling. Making it down that hill, Pere (a moderately good skier) convinced me to go to the top of a red square hill. “Come on man, you’re never going to learn on the little hill. Go to the top of the big on and you must learn!” I could see no flaw in his reasoning, and went to the top. To his credit, by the time I go to the bottom I could manage without falling. But oh, the harsh learning curve.

After mastering the ‘first turn’ (breaking by turning the snowboard perpendicular to the down slope, facing downhill), I started to try the ‘second turn (same thing but facing uphill, with your back downhill). I took some pretty nasty falls. By lunchtime I decided to switch to skis.

Pere and I then went all over the hill. I had forgotten just how fun it is to ski. Towards the end of the day we met up with the others to head back to the van. We were at the other end of the mountain, but Olla said there was a path that kinda cut across the middle of the slopes that we could take. It started out find, cutting across slopes and taking little paths through the woods to the next slope. Then the wood paths became less and less defined, until we finally admitted that we were just skiing thought the woods, off path and sorta kinda lost. Sweet. We got down to the bottom of the hill and realized we had overshot the edge of the park by a lot. Weird how that can happen.

The next day I slept in while the others went snowmobiling. Toni (pronounced toe-nye), from Columbia, also stayed in. We had a lazy morning and I taught him to play the card game “Once Upon a Time”. I think playing that with a non native English speaker brings a whole new element. Very interesting.

ALL EUROPEANS MAKE UNFAIR GENERALIZATIONS
One theme of the weekend which I did not like were the nationality based jokes. Humor, in general, is tricky and something said in one context can be funny while in another it is offensive. But at the risk of sounding too PC, I have to say that repeated utterances of ethnic stereotypes falls more into the ‘sublet racism’ category than into the humor category.

To illustrate- If the last person going somewhere is Italian or Spanish, someone invariably said ‘Oh those Spanish are always late’ or ‘Italians have no concept of time’. Other stereotypes employed were French are rude, Swedes are punctual, love waiting in lines, and are unfriendly, and Italians get lost while driving. This also took the form of mocking differences in others in habits. For example, Olla the Swede was made fun of for cutting his spaghetti. And of course, Americans (ie, me) were stereotyped. Sometimes this took bizarre forms. When we were cleaning up the cabin before we left, Olla ask somebody to go around and make sure all the windows were closed. I volunteered. Then somebody says “of course the American will be in charge of security”. I’m not even quite sure what the joke is there, but regardless I was offended.

The WORST (for me) was during the van ride home. People are bored so I organized a game of 20 questions. They have it narrowed down to a male in Europe who lived before the year 1900. They discount many choices because I am American, and therefore don’t know anything about European history. First off, this is just stupid racism. Secondly, it was clear from their speculation and questions to each other that I knew far more about European history than anyone else playing the game (I can see not knowing which French King was “the big one” (it was Louis XIV), but they were wondering whether Stalin was alive before or after 1900, for God’s sake). BTW, the answer was Napoleon and they did not get it. (I picked him specifically because he was European and pretty easy.)

What is bad about this is that such topics are difficult to broach. Any attempt to call people on their bad taste and one is merely dismissed as having no sense of humor (or, worse yet and equally likely, being dismissed as a fruity American with silly PC morality). And of course these people are actually my friends and are actually good people, so I can’t just forget them and walk away. Ugghh, frustration. My tendons are getting all tense as I type this just thinking about it.

Not to myself fall in the stereotype trap, but this kind of thing seems more common among Europeans than at least among my peer group back home. And as long as I’m ranting on this subject, Europeans seem more misogynistic. (My previous attempt to engage people on that also went nowhere.) Uh…wtf? I know, I know, it is best not to let such frustration stew. I will talk to those involved and express myself. But for today I sit with my sore muscles and frazzeled nerves and read a book in my room.

IN OTHER NEWS
I have started the book ‘Frankenstein’. I hear the law school musical this year was called ‘Frankenlaw’. I wonder how that went. Test on Friday. Mom comes in two weeks.

-TWN-