study abroad

Why I Can’t Find My Pants in Swedish (Hint: It’s the Pandemic)

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Back when I was still teaching creative writing at Michigan State University, a senior colleague at Michigan State University’s English Department asked if I wanted to join him to start a summer abroad program in Sweden.  I didn’t hesitate.  I’d been watching Swedish movies and reading Swedish mysteries for years. 

The program was going to be housed at historic Lund University in the south of that country not far from Copenhagen, and I plunged into reading everything I could about the region, its culture, history, sites, and food.  More than that, I began studying Swedish, which would be my third foreign language after French and German. 

I fell in love with both the sound and sense of it.  Swedish has multiple stresses in it which makes it more musical than English and German; the grammar isn’t nearly as complicated as German; the spelling is much simpler.  Best of all for a beginner, in the present tense the verb form is identical in each position.  You can do a lot with just the present tense.

I immersed myself in all things Swedish and learned about Fika, their afternoon coffee break with something like a cinnamon bun, and better still, their concept of lagom: being contented with having just enough, which is so antithetical to the American hunger for more, more, more. 

I studied Swedish daily via Pimsleur or Babbel or Duolingo–to the point where a friend with Swedish relatives said my accent was really good.  “You sound like my uncle!”

Though I’d be teaching in English, and Sweden ranks very high in Europe for English language fluency, I wanted to be able to talk to Swedes when I traveled around the country in their own language.  I was busy, busy, busy.

On the academic front, I planned a creative writing course and a course in Swedish crime novels in translation.  We were fired up. But my colleague and I hit a massive roadblock.  Lund University insisted on having one of their professors do guest lectures at $1500 an hour and assigning us a student assistant for several thousand more.  Our budget couldn’t handle those expenses and they wouldn’t negotiate.   End of a dream.

When the pandemic hit and Michigan went into lock down, I found myself at loose ends and bored, since I wasn’t working on a book.  I looked around for ways to structure my time when everything seemed so uncertain, and Swedish seemed a natural choice.  Since March, I’ve been re-experiencing the joys and challenges of a language with some similarities to German but oh-so-many differences.  Like the articles tacked onto the ends of the nouns: Hus is Swedish for house, and the house is huset.

After breakfast very morning, I have a second cup of coffee and do 10-15 minutes of Swedish On Duoling and feel as calm as if I’m meditating.

When all this is over, I would still like to travel to the south of Sweden, which is beautiful and close to Copenhagen, and see the gorgeous old college town of Lund.  It’s apparently small enough to walk or bike across in less than half an hours. Lund is also close to where the Wallander mystery series was filmed as well as the larger cities of Gothenberg and Malmo. I’ve kept all my travel guides in the hope that it comes to pass.

My favorite Duolingo Swedish sentence is in the title of this blog: Jag kan inte hittar mina byxor.  I would love to have the occasion to use it there to see how people react.

Lev Raphael is the author of 26 books in many genres, most recently State University of Murder. 

 

Twitter photo credit: Jerker Andersson/imagebank.sweden.se

 

Surviving London/Loving London

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Four years this week I was just back from teaching a six week summer program in London.  It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.

I had injured my knee forty-eight hours before my flight from Detroit, and the surgeon said I’d be okay with a knee brace and Aleve, but would need surgery as soon as I got home.  So I went because I didn’t want to disappoint the students, or myself.  teaching abroad had been a dream of mine for a very long time.

Now, I’d never taken Aleve before and it kept me from sleeping.  Ditto the pain when the Aleve wore off and I couldn’t take more.  I was also besieged by the unexpected 90-degree heat in London, which didn’t feel any better no matter how many times people told me the weather was unusual.

To my horror, the flat that had been rented for me was a duplex, which meant I had to limp up and down the stairs there countless times a day, even though the surgeon advised me to avoid stairs.  My phone or tablet always seemed to be on whichever floor I wasn’t on.

My flat was at the top of the building and got so hot by late afternoon that it shut down my iPhone.  The classroom I taught in at Regent’s College wasn’t air conditioned and the inscrutable powers-that-be would only give us a fan for one day.  I had to teach while I was in pain, sleepless, and stressed by the heat.  It was brutal.

To truly add insult to injury, one night I tripped over the wild fringe on one rug, smacked my hand on an oak table on the way down.  It swelled up grotesquely and I was soon in an emergency room where I passed out because the pain in my hand was so bad.  I ended up with a cast which my students signed, hoping that I would survive till the end of the program.

But my students–!  They were amazing.  In my many years of teaching, I’d never had a group so dedicated, funny, talented, and compassionate.  No matter how I felt on any given day, spending time with them was joyful.  I felt as if everything I’d ever learned about how to work with student writing and how to approach reading literature was focused with the intensity of a laser beam.  Watching their writing blossom was one of the grandest experiences I’ve ever had as a teacher.  And unlike the regular classes I taught back home with twenty-five students, I had only fifteen in each one, which made getting to know them and their work much easier.

As I finally got my insomnia and pain  under control, I was able to fully enjoy museums, plays, and relish the good food and drink at local restaurants and  pubs.  A friend from Germany came to spend the weekend nearby and we had great, intimate, sometimes uproarious meals together.  I loved staying in Pimlico on a quiet square, and though London has never been my favorite city in Western Europe, right now, I miss being there.

Lev Raphael is the author of twenty-five books in many genres and teaches creative writing at www.writewithoutborders.com.