Looking in both directions

Greetings everyone! These past few days have been eventful, but since I don't have a ton of pictures from them I have been hesitant to write anything. However, as I said, we have been doing quite a bit here in Mora. Three days ago, I took another one of my long walks around town in order to get to know Mora better. There's actually a whole lot of town here, even if my initial impression was to say it was a little on the small side of 'city.' Outside of the main city center with the ski races, church, and shops there are interesting things to see, some more unusual than others. For instance, I found a goth club housed in the middle of an old brick building (didn't go in), lots of quintessentially Swedish houses (yellow or red-brown, wood houses with painted shudders and a stick fence) and this really out of place cement pagoda (at least, that's what I call it). I watched some of the racers come in, but I think I'll wait to post videos and pictures of that until the big Vasaloppet race on March 1st. There are other races going on this week, like the half-loppet, and tjejoppet (all-womens' vasaloppet), but the big one is the 90k vasaloppet race. Personally, the only skiing I will be doing is on long skates on the big lake next week, once the crowds leave.

Yesterday, the entire group took a trip to Mora Sjukhuset- the Mora hospital- to learn about the Swedish health care system. Outside of the introductory information given to us by the General Practitioner Doctor friend of our main contact here in Mora, we got to learn about the Atkins diet for an hour. Although it was interesting to learn that in Sweden doctors can now recommend this diet to patients without reprimand, it's not interesting to learn about a diet that we all learned about 6 years ago in the US as if it's a cure to all health problems, and has since been debunked by actual science. The view was nice from the 8th floor, and there was an odd mural depicting the path one takes in life from spinning the thread of life to facing life's demons to the cutting of the thread. After that, we went back to Anna's house (she's our main contact here) who lives in a little village just outside of Mora. The village is in the old Daralana Style; that is, the houses are arranged around one big street, and would have been one self-sustaining community. Anna's house is built right over the old steel smelting place, and still had a lot of the original wood construction and furnishings as it would have 100 years ago. She told us a lot about the area, served us some traditional Swedish cooking (a stew), had an impromptu Swedish lesson, and then we left back home via a Maxi store (which is like a super target, and not at all related to feminine hygiene products).

Today we had a trip to the Mora town hall, where we met a woman named Ulla Israelsson who was the director of education and quality control for primary school and preschool throughout the district. We learned a lot about the Swedish school system from preschool through 9th grade, and the philosophy behind it. Every 6-year old has the 'right' in Sweden to go to preschool, as well as 'play-school,' or after-school activity places while their parents are still working. Some of the more interesting points of the discussion was that basically it's impossible to home-school children in Sweden unless they have disabilities, and that unlike the USA, Sweden has a standardized ciricullum for preschools. Also, children don't being to recieve grades until 8th grade, although they are tested on a national system in 3rd, 5th, 7th, and 9th grade. Apparently who we would call the Secretary of Education has three words in his vocabulary right now: read, write, count. Ulla was telling us all the reasons why just these three standards have lowered achievement in Sweden; as many of my friends, advisors, and family who work in education would tell you, there needs to be some sort of meta-learning going on as well, that is, children also need to be able to relate one subject to another and ask questions like "what does zero mean?" and "Why does a one and a zero represent 10?" The philosophy major in me really enjoyed the conversation.

Afterwords, we went to the Zorn manor and museum, where we saw and learned a lot about Anders Zorn and his work. For those like me who are not familiar with Anders Zorn, I can tell you that he was a prolific artist during the beginning of the 20th and early 19th centuries who did the presidential portraits of Teddy Roosevelt, Taft, and Cleveland, as well as numerous watercolor paintings and bronze sculptures thought Europe, but predominately in Sweden. He established his estate in Mora (his hometown) after gaining fame in his 30s, and also founded the folk school I am staying at in the 1910s. His wife (not a looker by any standards, even with the 'artistic lisence' he was known to take with younger women models) dedicated the estate they built together to become a museum following her death (26 years after Anders; he was an avid smoker and alcoholic) and is still furnished with the same objects that occupied their house in 1946. Some of the most interesting objects in the house were the 'Gustavian' or Empire furnishings shipped in from Stockholm, as well as the rather large collection of Medieval stained glass and tapestries. Personally, I thought some of the best artwork on the manor was outside, which is why the pictures of the ice hanging down from the roofs are featured in this blog post. There were also stone sculptures from the Roman Empire and numerous gifts and paintings from the Renaissance that decorated the vaulted Viking-style rooms and hallways throughout the residence.

In the Museum, we were able to see more of Zorn's work (his house was filled with other artist's work he had collected in his lifetime) as well as get entertained by Anna, who, among her many professions and interests, is a very well accomplished folk musician. She played the cow horn, a long pine horn, a Darlana recorder-like instrument, and also fiddled with a colleague from her local folk group. They were all nice to her, and I was impressed by the wide sound of the cow horn she was able to produce, as well as the traditional folk styles of Mora. Traditionally the cow horn was used to call your cattle towards you, and many families had their own melodies that they taught to their cows. The long pine horn was used to scare animails like bears, elk, and wolves away from cattle, and the fiddle was used mostly for social dances. Unlike the Norwegian fiddle, there isn't a particular instrument or physically different playing style than the common violin, but the music itself is particular to every town. I noticed that music typically played in the 3-1 style, or that the music is played in 3/4 time, but that the 3rd and 1st beat gets the emphasis. Once they played their first song, I just wanted to hambo around the gallery, but I''m fairly sure I was they only one in the gallery that knew how to, so I had to confine myself to tapping my foot.

In other news, I have booked my spring break trip: London, here I come! With the Kronor hitting 9kr-1USD today, I decided to book all my flight and rooming information. I will be staying in a youth hostel that's also a castle for the first four days, then traveling north to Norwich to see Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellan in Waiting for Godot in Norwich, then staying the last 3 days of spring break in South Kensington in the heart of the Museum district in London. For anyone that is thinking about traveling, now is definitley the time to book flights to anywhere in Sweden or London because both the Pound and the Kronor have been falling like rocks and have just about hit 'ocean' bottom: my flight from Gothenburg to London cost me $82, and the return flight cost me $71. All in all, I expect this excursion to cost me less than $700, even after factoring in food, lodging, and travel through both London, Norwich, and Sweden during the spring break time, which is great considering that most people anticipate spending almost double that in their travels to places like Oslo, Norway. Hopefully I will update again soon- we're going to Falun tomorrow, and then the races really begin!