The last few weeks I’ve noticed that I look differently at the trip to school, at doing shopping, at walking in the city. I finally start to see this as normal. Before it was still my study abroad. Now this way to school has become my way to school, this city became my city. I feel at home, I think.

On the right is a part of that life. On my way to school the air was on fire. Oh, btw, another fire that was part of the life here, was Valborg. The Swedish helgdagar (holiday) on the 30th of April.

From one of the first books about intercultural interactions:

Strangeness is no longer a temporary condition to be overcome, but a way of life.
Harman

Two weekends ago I went to Stockholm, there was a Russian film festival where I went together with Maaike (‘nr 2′, the one who stays in Stockholm) and Niklas (a Swede/Belgium guy she knew). We went to Closed Spaces, a bit weird film, expected though because I chose to see this movie because it was a bit weird :) And also pretty funny, and nice arty because it left us with the feeling not fully understanding it yet.. Now I read the website and the director’s comment it gets even better (read: try to see this, with subtitles :)):

The idea is that all origins of our psychological problems, our victories and defeats, all happiness and unhappiness are in our past, in the family. The key of all “doors” of adult life is in the childhood. It seems to be obvious, but on the verbal level this thesis does not make people act. Every psychological book contains the story that children repeat their parent’s mistakes. The model of their behaviour turns children into hostages. And it repeats from generation to generation. How is it possible to stop this repetition? Emotional influence that exists in films is in need. “Closed spaces” is about that. The film shows what key we have to choose and what door could be opened with it.

And last weekend I went for another hike along the Mälardalen lake. It was planned by the hiking club, but I went alone in the end. First I was somewhat later because I had another train and couldn’t reach them to ask to wait for me. But, as I found out yesterday, they went to another place anyway :) So I went with my map of the Eskilstuna commun (the county here) at which the part I was walking stretched for about 10cm.. I guess I didn’t really follow the normal path, but that didn’t made it any worse, I think it was way better actually. Mostly I just took some path. Paths here by the way are only paths because people or animals have walked there before, no path is made with wood, stones or seals, no marks along the path eighter.

The forests change pretty quick, at one point you only see long bare trees and then suddenly you’re in the middle of a green coniferous forest. It looks more beautiful than forests in the Netherlands, you can notice that the places here are visited by less people, nature still is a bit nature. Just listening to the birds and the water.

See some more photos in the hiking album.

Again, in Dutch. I’ll keep on doing that because there are some people who want to hear my ‘native’ voice. But some English subtitles can be found at dotSub (oh, what a horrible website..).

I’ve restarted Inbox Zero – a technique to process your email faster and ‘spend less time in your inbox’ – and I’ve been able to continue it for about two weeks now, feels very good. At the same time clean out all those blogs I’ve been following, the snail mail, the photos and other files on my computer. Cleanes up a lot, more than just the things themselves, also my head.

Now only to do something useful with the time I ‘created’.

It was good to be in a project again. Very different from the project at the HKU. First of all because we had a group of four ‘leaders’. But also because we had a week for the whole project and it was hard to make a good separation of the tasks. Then it becomes more of a problem that we’re all leaders, because we were for example all responsible for the documentation, all responsible for the presentation, all responsible for the research.. Good learning moments. Also I finally experimented with putting together a presentation with my knowledge from the last years of interaction design. Thinking about every step, what to do, what effect it has, what do I want this step to lead to, etc.

Since my time experiments of the last weeks I’ve been trying to slow down more. But interesting enough my frustration inside the group came from me going to fast. Though I thought that this friction with other people’s time might be the hardest, it was not the first problem I encountered. The first difficult thing was that – much more than I thought – time was enclosed in my personal culture. How this striving for being in time is in every task I preformed. Wanting to finish something instead of going for quality. Going for quality also suits me way more, but actually doing it is step two.

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Well, we thought it was less social. During the experiment we held at our presentation the observing group noted that the group with the large bags was more social because they ate less. Of course not counting for the right environment and group differences, but still.

For my last course – which I finished with a ‘pass with distinction’ grade, the highest possible – I had to write a book review and I reviewed ‘A Geography of Time‘ by Robert Levine. Levine describes very interesting differences between our experience of time amongst different people / cultures. How our experience of time influences our whole structure of life and how not every culture lives with the calendar as we know it. Not only starting the counting of the year at another point in time, but also having different week, month and year lengths.

The most interesting point he makes about time I think is the difference between clock time and event time. People living on clock time let events start when the clock ‘tells’ them to do, whereas people living on event time let the events themselves tell this, also more feeling when the time is right to start something else. An excerpt from my paper:

Take the example of being in a conversation with someone. In a clock-time culture you would keep an eye on the time and try to work towards an end in the conversation when the clock tells you you have something else to do. If this doesn’t work as good as you want, you need to abruptly end the conversation to be in time for the next.

In an event-time culture you wouldn’t mind what the clock says. The conversation continues until both parties have the idea that it is over. This is more likely when a goal has been reached, when you feel that there is nothing more to say. After ending the conversation in this way you still don’t look at your watch. Instead, you’ll see what comes on your path next. This then, is the next event.

This example gives a bit extreme view on clock- and event-time though. Not all conversations will be ended abruptly because time is up and after a conversation in event-time you can take a look on the calendar to see what to do next. Nevertheless, the tendency is towards these examples.

Further Levine gives some lessons you should learn when you’re ‘time traveling’, traveling to a culture with another experience of time. I added a part in which I tell how to change your behavior if you’re staying in the same culture but want to adjust to another time anyway :)

One part of that is ‘learning to appreciate doing nothing’. In clock time cultures ‘doing nothing’ is mostly seen as a waste of time, time in which you could have been doing something else. In event time cultures ‘doing nothing’ is more an event on its own, as good as other events. You spend time looking around you, thinking, not thinking, talking, eating, waiting, feeling. As you see, you still do things, the difference lies in doing things without a direct goal. ‘Doing nothing’ is more about not having a direct goal and just feel what you’ll do and not feeling awkward about it!

So that is what I’ve been doing a lot lately. I spend a weekend with Frida just doing nothing. Talking, looking, listening to music, eating, thinking, laughing, healing. Later this week I saw an older couple in the IKEA restaurant, they already finished their meal and were doing nothing. Looking around, at each other, digesting, thinking, talking a bit. Very cool to see.

I was a bit anxious (a thing we needed to learn for the exam) for this. In the Netherlands I normally have 1 to 2 hours, and 3 hours is for something like a graduation exam. Here 5 hours is very normal.

And actually it was really nice. First I spent 1,5 hour on writing the answers in a short form and then I spent the rest of the time rewriting it and making nice sentences. Also good because you go over the questions and your answers once more and you correct things. This is really different from what I’m used to. Usally I always go through the questions and answers one more time, but as it is already writing down, you hardly look at it in another way, and it thus won’t help much. This time it did. And I think it went very well. Also not that much of a problem as it was about how you understood things instead of knowing facts.

The only thing that was not so nice is the pain in my hand from all the writing. Though it is less when there is no direct pressure, like when you have say 5 hours ;)

Below the mindmap that I created when I was learning. This covers only I think about half or 1/3 of the information we got..

For the people with FreeMind (the software ;)), you can download my mindmap.

At the station I bought a Balder (a sandwich with the same name as my brother) as I didn’t had breadfast yet. Than the guides which would take us into the old part of the city came, almost excusing for the fog. When we started walking it was clear what she meant, you could hardly see any building which was further than 100m away :)

But this actually gave pretty nice views of the city. At some places it made me remember of Paris, for example this picture on the right, but also this square and this passage next to the train. Maybe all old cities look alike?

Often, we had to imagine the great view which we would have gotten if there hadn’t been such a heavy fog. But it also gave views for some great photo’s; such as the fairy tail castle on one of the bigger islands, also hosting a lot of museums; our own clothings collecting dew; and the photo below near the royal castle which got me interested on taking photo’s of the people of Stockholm.

Not all creatures in Stockholm are people though, they also have animals there, sitting on lanterns and by the river. And statues, but they’ll get their own story. As well as the interaction design in Stockholm :)

After lunch a we went with four people to the Moderna Museet. Where I finally saw Duchamp’s urinoir after talking about it so often in the Interaction Design lecutres! One artwork was about birth and time. Pictures of a rising belly with poems, one read:

One is born into time. And in time, introduced to language…
Or rather – One is born. And through language, introduced to time…
Perhaps even – One is born, in time, through language.

Further they had a nice tree. Really strange. It was like a tree, cut inside another tree. When I saw the bottom I thought that the outer tree was actually made of two parts.

But upon viewing the other side that was clearly not the case, this made the mystery even bigger.. There you could see how a tree’s branches are branches inside the tree too. Not that strange when you think of it, but that is it with these unconsiousness things, you never think of it.

Or wasn’t it the reality?

After the museum of Modern Art we went to the attached Architectural museum where they had some nice examples of how to build a city. Explaining and showing the different ways of housing and patterns to make the city accessible, explorable, interesting, efficient, quiet or cozy.

As the evening fell I went for some diner for which – after some search – I ended up in a standard Chinese restaurant. It was pretty hard to find something ‘local’, or maybe I was just in thew wrong neighborhood. But maybe you need to be a local – or have one with you – to find the better Swedish restaurants. Well, I want to go to Stockholm again for a few days, so than I’ll go to some more Stockholmish places :)

Stockholm at night

The example of the Indian word kal was soon resolved after talking to the Indian students, the word always has a clear meaning because the verb in the sentence, like ‘I went to the shop kal‘ or ‘I’m going to the shop kal‘.

Further it interests me as I like to live more without the current thinking of time. I don’t use a watch or phone since long to keep track of time, I removed the hands from a clock I had in my room and I like to think about being somewhere in time but rather take enough time. It was really nice talking to Frida, a girl I met at the diner of the Indians, which had similar ideas about getting rid of this time altogether :)

But it is far from easy. Other people continue to expect you to be somewhere in time. For example the trains here run only once per hour even with a few gaps in that schedule, in the weekends in only goes like 3 to 5 times and not until late. You have to catch it. Especially since the Swedes like to be on time, 6 o’clock ís 6 o’clock, also for informal meetings.

So I found a book about time experience and leadership. What I’ve read until now is about different orientations towards time. Which in turn influences the way you experience time lines, time duration and how you manage groups. People have a time orientation towards the past, the present or the future. You’ll recognize the patterns;

• People creating plans for the future, getting people with them on their idea of what the future should become, but also surprised when problems suddenly arise that they didn’t expected.
• Other people like day-to-day activities, always know what is going on, continuously check what people are doing and fix problems instead of investing in new things.
• And there are people who remember good all the things, acknowledge peoples attributions, but also like to skip planning meetings and fail to see changes in other people.

And then people mix these aspects, but in general (the books says) you more like one than the other. Immediately I noticed that I fit in all tree groups, although that might because you always like to be different from John Doe :)

More to come as I learn more..

What I particularly liked was that it came clear that stereotypes are not always negative, in fact stereotypes are mostly positive when your talking about your own country, or, as I mentioned, about the country you’d like to be a part of..

And Jonas (the teacher) told about turn taking in conversations. When a French speaks with a Swede the French will be talking all the time as she waits for the Swede to interrupt, which they would never do. Ending up with a repeating French because she will think the Swede didn’t understood and a irritated Swede because he thinks the French won’t let him speak.

As the book I’m reading (Communicating with strangers) says:

In a familiar world, people life through the day by responding to daily routine without questioning or reflection. To strangers, however, every situation is new and is therefore experienced as a crisis.

Parrillo (1980) about Schuetz.

This has the same reason as the dark video I made of the apartment; I haven’t been home a lot during daytime.

I live in a very multicultural neighborhood as you can see, good for my study :)

Today I went to people from Sri Lanka. A mother and two (två) boys. The older boy translated a lot for us, he could speak English very well, he learned that in India. But he is better in Swedish he said, he’s following classes since they came here 8 months ago.

I got good noodles, chai tea and biscuits from them :) With the mother I spend some time looking at her Swedish lesson books. Very interesting to learn a few more words this way. Some basic things like jag, du, han, hon, det, de, vi, oss (I, you, he, she, it, they, we, us). And I always fall in love with the Tamil script :)

And I’ve been on the phone with friends from the Netherlands for over an hour, haha. It is hard to leave those friends in the Netherlands who I also only know for a few months or even weeks but who are so close. Homesickness? No, I don’t think it is in a sad way, but just thinking about them.

He told a story about a Japanese exchange student at Mälardalen who went on the bus. The bus was empty except for the driver and one other person. She went to sit next to the other person and later at school described how the person next to her was rather scared of her. Just as in the Netherlands – and many other countries I guess – the Swedes will pick the chair most far away from the other people. And here it might be more a case of ‘lagom’.

A new word he learned us was ‘lagom’. Swedish don’t take too much of it, but also not to less. Just about enough. Lagom means that you don’t take the space of someone else, don’t take up too much space for yourself, don’t eat to much at a party, just enough.

Yesterday afternoon we also got our first – well, mine at least – fika. Swedish coffee with a bisquit. I gave the coffee a fair try (I never drink it actually), but quickly switched back to tea again. But the fika itself is nice as it is more than only coffee (/ tea). It is a source for new ideas one said. I compare it a bit with the ‘retreat’ I do as an (interaction) designer; when you start doing something else – take the train, walk at the beach – thén, the ideas get born. And the fika is then also about meeting people, which get your mind thinking about things you normally didn’t thought of.

The first day at the university was nice. Although the presentations were not that interesting when you had read some documents of the universities web site before. The air is rather expensive here and they have a very nice interactive story of images on the wall here, which always ends with death though.

The academic system is really like the Montessori and the system of the HKU I know; a lot of responsibility is laid at the student with max. 10 contact hours per week, the rest is self study. By the way, I saw a Montessori (high)school here yesterday!

The Swedes are on time. Actually it is really funny to notice that this is the first time ever that at a school or conference we haven’t got a delay in the schedule. Instead, we’re ahead of the schedule!

The train trip from Eskilstuna (apartment) to Västerås (university) is very nice. I’m very happy with my choise of staying in Eskilstuna while studying in Västerås. Especially as I have much extra time after the train arrives and before the course starts.