Cafe Edenborg
I found a great cafe the other day...Cafe Edenborg. You have no idea how much I wish it was called Cafe Swedenborg and was possessed of all the mystical baggage. Anyway, it has big overstuffed leather chairs and couches. The music is pretty good and not so obtrusive that you notice it unless you want to. The coffee is ok.
Coffee here seems to be giving in small servings, not the Starbucks canteens of coffee in the largest version (I cannot remember if this is the "Grande" or "Venti" or something else even). This was obnoxious at first because it just means that I will spend more money getting the gallon of black coffee I drink a day. At Edenborg though (and at The World News Cafe, the other one I go to) the refills are free!
Stockholm has a good cafe culture. I was reading in the Time Out Stockholm, which I drop in to the bookstore once a day to thumb through, that besides Finland the Swedes drink more coffee than anyone else in Europe! A bit of a surprise to me...I thought the French or Italians would drink more. Swedes average 4.5 cups a day...mind you these cups are not what you are thinking of...it is a little more than a double expresso in quantity. But still...in Denmark I was convinced that the Danes stayed thin on the back of their 6 pack a day collective smoking habit, in Sweden it is the 5 cups of coffee a day I suppose.
In retrospect, I knew a Swedish girl in London that must have drank between 4 and 7 Starbucks coffees a day...that is intense. I imagine you could make this girl jump 10 feet in the air if you snuck up behind her and clapped.
It has gotten really cold here the last day or so...been snowing a lot. I am even considering putting the fleece liner back in my jacket. I would consider this a personal defeat (the people who surf with me know that I start testing the spring-suit the second the water gets above 62 degrees...same with the jacket here...I hate wearing it and I am looking for the earliest opportunity to get it off). I really do not mind the cold though anymore. It is a little frustrating that I feel like all the work I did suffering through the English winter is now set back 2-3 months simply by moving up here. You take the good with the bad.
I was wondering again today how much of day-to-day communication is anticipated. Like in a given situation you have a range of possible things you expect the other person to say, so you do not really listen...you give form to the noise coming out of their mouths in light of these expectations and when the noise seems to match one of them you respond properly. I am certain we do not listen purely and deeply in everyday conversation...partly because this is exhausting, and partly because we can never remove the anticipated aspect of our native tongue.
When you submerge in a new language though, with a very limited and early vocabulary, you find yourself capable of anticipated considerably less exchanges. In a classroom, I can anticipate nearly all of them because they are within a pre-arranged lesson plan and wholly contained in my limited vocabulary. Even when I am working in my limited vocabulary, but out of the classroom, I am accompanied by an intense anxiety...and on-edge feeling. You hope that something said will fit in the orbital of your limited expectations...but when it does not you have to listen very closely for a word you know, and at the same time you have to get a primitive understanding of the situation. Talking in a vacuum is basically impossible.
So when a lady in the cafe today asks me if she can take the seat opposite of me, that is no problem though I barely understood a word of it, because the circumstances made it clear and my possible responses were obvious...but later, when she apologized to me for her and her friends "invading my area" I had no idea what she was talking about. In fact, I was not even aware that I was being addressed. I think, even when you are not conversing, you maintain a range of possible expectations just below consciousness that allow you to recognize when you are being addressed...otherwise noise does not come to your attention unless it startles you to a greater or lesser degree. The kind of listening I have to do now is exhausting and frustrating.
I found a great cafe the other day...Cafe Edenborg. You have no idea how much I wish it was called Cafe Swedenborg and was possessed of all the mystical baggage. Anyway, it has big overstuffed leather chairs and couches. The music is pretty good and not so obtrusive that you notice it unless you want to. The coffee is ok.
Coffee here seems to be giving in small servings, not the Starbucks canteens of coffee in the largest version (I cannot remember if this is the "Grande" or "Venti" or something else even). This was obnoxious at first because it just means that I will spend more money getting the gallon of black coffee I drink a day. At Edenborg though (and at The World News Cafe, the other one I go to) the refills are free!
Stockholm has a good cafe culture. I was reading in the Time Out Stockholm, which I drop in to the bookstore once a day to thumb through, that besides Finland the Swedes drink more coffee than anyone else in Europe! A bit of a surprise to me...I thought the French or Italians would drink more. Swedes average 4.5 cups a day...mind you these cups are not what you are thinking of...it is a little more than a double expresso in quantity. But still...in Denmark I was convinced that the Danes stayed thin on the back of their 6 pack a day collective smoking habit, in Sweden it is the 5 cups of coffee a day I suppose.
In retrospect, I knew a Swedish girl in London that must have drank between 4 and 7 Starbucks coffees a day...that is intense. I imagine you could make this girl jump 10 feet in the air if you snuck up behind her and clapped.
It has gotten really cold here the last day or so...been snowing a lot. I am even considering putting the fleece liner back in my jacket. I would consider this a personal defeat (the people who surf with me know that I start testing the spring-suit the second the water gets above 62 degrees...same with the jacket here...I hate wearing it and I am looking for the earliest opportunity to get it off). I really do not mind the cold though anymore. It is a little frustrating that I feel like all the work I did suffering through the English winter is now set back 2-3 months simply by moving up here. You take the good with the bad.
I was wondering again today how much of day-to-day communication is anticipated. Like in a given situation you have a range of possible things you expect the other person to say, so you do not really listen...you give form to the noise coming out of their mouths in light of these expectations and when the noise seems to match one of them you respond properly. I am certain we do not listen purely and deeply in everyday conversation...partly because this is exhausting, and partly because we can never remove the anticipated aspect of our native tongue.
When you submerge in a new language though, with a very limited and early vocabulary, you find yourself capable of anticipated considerably less exchanges. In a classroom, I can anticipate nearly all of them because they are within a pre-arranged lesson plan and wholly contained in my limited vocabulary. Even when I am working in my limited vocabulary, but out of the classroom, I am accompanied by an intense anxiety...and on-edge feeling. You hope that something said will fit in the orbital of your limited expectations...but when it does not you have to listen very closely for a word you know, and at the same time you have to get a primitive understanding of the situation. Talking in a vacuum is basically impossible.
So when a lady in the cafe today asks me if she can take the seat opposite of me, that is no problem though I barely understood a word of it, because the circumstances made it clear and my possible responses were obvious...but later, when she apologized to me for her and her friends "invading my area" I had no idea what she was talking about. In fact, I was not even aware that I was being addressed. I think, even when you are not conversing, you maintain a range of possible expectations just below consciousness that allow you to recognize when you are being addressed...otherwise noise does not come to your attention unless it startles you to a greater or lesser degree. The kind of listening I have to do now is exhausting and frustrating.
posted by Lenin | 3:36 em
2 Comments:
Happy Birthday Tim! Dreadlocks huh! Look forward to seeing that show.
Aunt Tricia
Tim, Grandy wanted me to post this last evening, I had other plans! So, sorry her birthday wish is late. Her check will also be late, as I would not let her go out and mail it Saturday in the rain/sleet/snow of a typical NJ April. Maybe someday she will stop being such a luddite, and get back on the computer.
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