December 2017 – Tales from Abroad

By Lauren Thompson

On a whim, I applied to a conference in Gothenburg, Sweden to encourage myself to write more of my thesis. Shockingly I was accepted and began to plan my trip to Scandinavia. Since my partner, Sam, would be visiting at the time and we had both never been to Sweden, we decided to visit Stockholm first before making our way southwest to Gothenburg.

Our trip was the last week of November, so the weather had begun to get chilly, the days shorter, and the Christmas season was beginning in Europe. We even managed to hit one Christmas market in my town, Harburg, before flying to Stockholm.

Stockholm is wonderful and for our first two evenings we stayed at the AF Chapman hostel. The most unusual feature of the hostel is that a good portion of it is located on a steel sailing ship moored in central Stockholm, on the island (islet? That is what Wikipedia calls it) of Skeppsholmen. The ship, the AF Chapman, is the hostel’s namesake and was surprisingly cozy for staying belowdecks, though many doorways (and ceilings) were too short for Sam, who is 6’6”.

View from our Porthole in the AF Chapman and on the Deck.

Our trip back in time also proved to be quite an adventure in short ceilings. One of our first tourist sites was Skansen, an open-air museum located on Djurgården island – also home to the Vasa Museum (the ship that sailed for less than 30 minutes before sinking off the shores of Stockholm) and the Nordic Museum among other attractions. Open air museums typically aim to show typical life how it used to be by allowing visitors to explore buildings from that time (often transported to the museum from their original location), talking to employee-actors, and seeing the manner in which people lived and the types of items that were created (machinery, trades and crafts are featured). Skansen has a wide variety of eras from Swedish history as well as displays of Sami culture and construction.

We arrived on the first weekend of Jul på Skansen, “Christmas at Skansen”. Alongside Swedish Christmas traditions and the foods and music showcased at the variety of farmhouses and estates, there was a Christmas market – one of my favourite parts of winter in Europe.

The Christmas market featured a wide variety of foods, drinks, and crafts. Although I am typically vegetarian, I tried a reindeer sausage to get into the spirit and we drank Glögg, Swedish-style mulled wine. We purchased large, hand-made knäckebröd (like Wasa crackers), some smoked fish, and also some presents. I bought a number of decorations as gifts and for myself, these included the traditional Swedish horse, mushroom ornaments, and Tomte – the Christmas gnomes or elves. Sam purchased a beautiful three-wick candle that resembles a trident which he managed to transfer back to Canada with only a minor crack! The Christmas music, the cold air (it was between 0-1°C that day), the fires that were lit when it started to get dark at 2:30pm, and all the smells and sights were delightful and festive.

Skansen Christmas market and Skansen purchasesSkansen has a number of different eras and regions represented in the buildings it has on the property. I won’t go through all of them but choose some highlights that were open when we were there (parts are closed in the winter).

Farmsteads make up many of the buildings at Skansen. Since they come from different areas and from farms of different wealth, they have unique features. You can visit the interior of many of the buildings (entering through low doors where Sam would have to duck generously). Many of the rooms would have an actor or two dressed in traditional clothing that would have been typical for the inhabitants of that region, time, and stature. You can interact with them and they would talk about how their character would live. During our time at Skansen, they showed the traditional Christmas meals as well. Below is an image from a mural in the Delsbo farmstead originally from Hälsingland.

There is also a town within Skansen that contains all kinds of trades – an engineer, glassworks, furniture-maker, bakery, comb-maker, goldsmith, printer, etc. etc. etc. Since Sam is a carpenter, we spent a fair while in the furniture-makers. My favourite machine had to be the pedal-powered scroll saw – if I should ever start a collection, I will buy one. Those working in the town were also practicing those trades – so there were people blowing glass ornaments, baking Lussekatter (traditional Swedish Christmas treats), making shoes, and creating prints. It took all of my will-power not to buy some beautiful glass Christmas ornaments that would have broken just on the trip back to Hamburg.There is also a Sami (Laplander) camp that shows architecture from the indigenous Sami people in Sweden. Sami have a unique language and way of life that was earlier connected to reindeer herding. Since many Sami were semi-nomadic, some of the buildings in the camp were seasonal buildings only used in the summer.

Finally – Skansen also has a zoo and aquarium. The aquarium costs extra but you could still see many of the zoo animals (kept in generously large areas with lots of variety) on one side of the museum. These included owls, reindeer, seals, wolves, and my favourite – Otters, among a few others. Some animals were also in hibernation since it was winter, but it was fun to see the otters playing and the reindeer being very chill.

Unfortunately, the otters were moving too fast for me to get a good picture.

One thing that was a bit shocking and causing restraint throughout Sweden was the prices. I am currently used to German prices for food which are comparable, if not sometimes less, than in Canada. But in Sweden it is often 5-25% more for products than in Canada – I definitely at one point paid the equivalent of $14 for one beer at a restaurant. The prices at Skansen weren’t different, but we were still able to enjoy ourselves and find some decent deals there – not to mention some free flat-bread snacks at the bakehouse.

There is so much more at Skansen that I haven’t been able to mention. Including the beautiful views that you get of Stockholm from the top of the hill there. We only went for one day, but I feel like I will return in the future to experience more of the expansive museum! It is definitely to be recommended if you find yourself in Stockholm.

Best Holiday wishes from Northern Europe! Until next time, friends.
Lauren

Posted by Irina Gavrilova on behalf of
Lauren Thompson

English Language Assistant in Hamburg, Germany
On leave from the Germanic Studies Master’s program at UVic

In spring of this year, I found out that I would yet again be going to Germany to work at a school as an English assistant through the Pedagogical Exchange Service (Pedagogischer Austauschdienst or PAD). This would be my second time doing so and I was excited for the opportunity to live in Germany again and work with young people there. However, I was shocked to find that I would be sent to the opposite side of the country this time. Whereas my first time was in a “city” of 6000 on the border with Austria near Salzburg – deepest Bavaria – this time I was being sent to the northern city of Hamburg, the second largest city in Germany! I thus had to acclimatize myself to living in the Hafenstadt, the harbour city.

View of the River Elbe and the Port in Hamburg.

Now, I don’t actually live and work in central Hamburg, but rather in Harburg, a smaller city to the south of Hamburg. Although it is considered part of Hamburg, many staunchly claim that “Harburg is not Hamburg”. It is not unlike when people from Vancouver say that “Burnaby isn’t Vancouver” or, for Victoria, say that “Sidney isn’t Victoria”. For me, the jury is still out and I still easily travel to and from central Hamburg.

Moving 

Moving to Germany involved a lot of ups and downs. Apartment hunting in Hamburg is not too easy – it is one of the more expensive cities in Germany and most people want to meet you in person – something that is difficult if you are searching from Canada. I had a sublet for my first three weeks and, during that time, I found an excellent room in an apartment with an awesome roommate.

Once on the ground, it was a bit of a struggle to figure out the bureaucracy that is involved with moving – it had changed since my last time here. When you move to Germany you are obligated to register yourself at city hall, find a bank, and, if you are a non-EU citizen like me, you have to then apply for a residency permit. Thankfully the PAD provides documents to help with this process and, if you’re lucky like I am, contacts from the school you work at help out. My struggle this year was with banks and changes in policy. For registration city hall required an extra form that was not necessary my last time here and Hamburg is so busy that you need to book an appointment way before time – this made registering a little more chaotic than I’d even expected. For banks, every one that I went to requested a residency permit even though I was already legally in Germany (Canadians can stay 90 days without a residency permit). It would also take a while to receive my residency permit* so I kept trying and finally got an account almost three months after arriving in Germany – talk about stress! I was lucky that I had a bit saved up.

My Work!

My school is a Stadtteilschule, something that only exists in Hamburg. They are a kind of combined school (Gesamtschule) that runs parallel to the traditional three-tiered German school system. Here it gets altered a bit. My school only teaches until the tenth grade and some students leave after the ninth grade. If students do well on their tenth grade exams, they continue on at another school to complete exams that allow them to go to university.

Diagram of the German school system. My school lines up best with a Gesamtschule but only offers the Realschule and Hauptschule exams. (Image from http://toridykes.com/blog/2014/2/18/an-overview-of-the-german-educational-system)

English is a part of the exams that the students take in the 9th and 10th grade, so I am here to help them practice speaking with a native English speaker and just generally assist with English classes. I read with them, chat with them, facilitate discussion and take part in other aspects of their school life like presentation and exam preparation. We also decided to have a non-credit challenge “course” for those who are doing particularly well, this is meant to introduce them to language and themes that don’t come up in their normal classes and further their English knowledge. I’m including a fair amount of Canadian content to, hopefully, make it more interesting. In addition to all this, I hope to help a bit with some social studies courses as they learn parts of Second World War and Holocaust history. The topic is part of my specialization at UVic and so hopefully I can help to communicate it to our students.

The Hansestadt

Hamburg is a Hansestadt or a “Hanseatic City”, meaning it used to be part of the Hanseatic League that dominated trading in Northern Europe. Many of the places included in the Hanseatic League were port cities, like Hamburg. Because of this, the letters on the license plates here are “HH” or Hansestadt Hamburg. A lot of the sights in Hamburg relate to the trading and maritime history in Hamburg and it remains a major port. South of the Elbe but Northwest of me in Harburg, you can see the massive cranes that load containers on and off of the ships. Since it is so flat here, they stand out along the horizon.

There are, of course, many things to too in Hamburg and currently the many Christmas markets and the snow (!) make the city delightful and festive. Hopefully I’ll get around to sharing some of the sights from Hamburg, more about my daily life, and detail some of my trips throughout Europe!

Until my next post,

Lauren

* I do, as of early December, have a residency permit.