About masks, the New York Yankees and Easter witches… Strange to think that we’ve been here for more than a month now. Time sure flies when you’re avoiding Covid. #Winning. Not that we haven’t had plenty of opportunities to catch it. In fact, most of Sweden have been trying their hardest to give us Covid. Not intentionally, I don't think just… nobody in Sweden wears a mask. Nobody. Not one person. Man, woman or child. No. Body. Ingen. (That’s Swedish for “nobody.”) And when I say ingen, I mean nobody, and when I say nobody, I mean, OK, ALMOST nobody. You’d think that with the number of cases inching upward instead of down, people would see this thing isn’t going anywhere and the number of people wearing masks on the street and in bars and in the grocery stores and riding scooters (more on that later) would go up as well. But, nope. If there are 200 people walking on the streets, 99.786 percent of them will not be wearing a mask. Just walking all up into H&M and Louis Vuitton and Asian Post Office (a restaurant, not an actual post office), and K25 (a restaurant, not a mountain) like nothing’s been happening in the world, pandemically speaking, for the past year and a half. Just… la-dee-da, whistle whistle whistle, strolling down the avenue. Unlike in the U.S., they don’t NOT wear them because of some stupid, nonsensical, stick-it-to-the-libs political BS reason where death is apparently preferable to admitting that a scientist may know more than you. They don’t equate wearing a mask to censorship which, as a censoring device, a loose-fitting cloth mask is pretty shitty. Nope, they just don't wear them because…I don’t know why they don’t wear them. Either they’re arrogant enough to think they won’t catch it, or they think they’re already doing enough or they’re overly trusting of their fellow man (something I, most certainly, am not). It’s not like they were one of the first nations to respond to the pandemic and get it wrong.1 People here are willing to follow all the government rules regarding Covid. Nobody I’ve seen complains about the bars and restaurants closing at 8 p.m., or occasionally having to sit within a partition, or being told they can’t come in a place because they're at capacity. But the mask thing? No thank you, they say. There was a mini-protest a few weeks ago because the government merely MENTIONED they were considering a lockdown. While it didn’t draw a lot of people, it probably had some support. Social distancing is not a thing here. If there are seats right next to one another in a bar, they have no problem bellying up and standing within sneezing distance of someone else. And they ignore the government “mandate” to wear masks on public transportation. The few people who do wear masks are (from what I can determine just by looking at them) either foreigners like us who’ve read the newspaper recently, actual Swedes who’ve read the newspaper recently, or people who just like wearing masks. Because so many people are NOT wearing masks, you sometimes feel a little self-conscious when you walk down the street wearing yours. Like you’re being overly cautious. Seeing someone wearing a mask is like seeing walking down the street in an orange plaid suit. You just notice it and go… “Hmph.” It should be more than that, but that’s where we are here. A lost New York Yankees cap looking for its next owner. I’ve been looking it up on Google and I can’t find any evidence the New York Yankees ever played a game in Stockholm*, or anywhere in Sweden for that matter. I haven’t seen a New York Yankee fan bar where they (secretly) show the games at 4 a.m. And there are a few statues of old kings and whatnot that kinda look like Lou Gehrig or Paul O’Neill, but they most certainly are not. So, no, there’s no clear indication of a rabid New York Yankee fanbase here in Stockholm. So, I have no explanation of why so many people here in Stockholm wear New York Yankees caps. And by so many, I mean a lot more than you’d expect in a Scandinavian country with no dedicated baseball stadium. Enough people hear wearing New York Yankees caps that you’d stop, look around and say “Hey, why so many New York Yankees caps?” Further puzzling is that there are basically no other MLB team caps to be found on Swedish or Swedish-visiting heads. I did see one old guy inexplicably wearing a Cubs cap but, who cares?2 I don’t know if it’s considered some sort of status symbol – NYC being an international center of hipness and coolness and in the area we’re staying, one with high-end shops, being full of people who seemed to be concerned with hipness and coolness. But a lot of folks think that it gives them some sort of swag. Or maybe they are actually people in Stockholm who are right now debating if Mike Tauchman really is the answer at first base, or wondering if Trey Amburgey will ever get the call-up with such a packed outfield, or is he gonna stay in Triple A Scranton for another season. Which is yet another reason why I should try harder to learn Swedish. FUN FACT: Easter in Sweden3 is often celebrated by children painting their faces, dressing up as witches and going door to door looking for candy. Which, thinking about it, makes as much sense as a rabbit distributing eggs. 1. How Sweden first handled Covid.
2. The only connection I can find is that there’s a town called Stockholm in northern New York state, so the people here feel some sort of kinship because of that. But then, they just skipped right over the Mets… 3. Easter in Sweden.
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HallåBecause I'm married to a very smart woman who received a Fulbright Scholarship, we're spent six months living in Sweden and, in particular, Stockholm. Having never lived outside the U.S., I figured I better keep notes. These are those notes. Archives
July 2021
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