My new lab here in Sweden had a celebration tonight for someone who had a first-author paper accepted. Side note: scientists are a good drinking bunch. Anytime a paper gets accepted--drinks!! Only the Swedes do it even better. We had one of those twice-normal sized bottles of champagne, beer (Sierra Nevada, random!), and cake (its own food group here, more on that some other time). Fancy. It was a fun evening and I actually got to know some of my coworkers a bit, which was nice, as I really haven't so far. My group's corridor is under construction, so we're spread out all over the building in spare rooms here and there, so I only ever see the people I share an office with, who aren't in my lab. I could tell I liked the people though, so tonight was good.
During the party, the TV was on to some kind of documentary channel. It was crazy--they were switching between Swedish, Norwegian, and Danish the whole time. Always Swedish subtitles, but all three languages were being used, to the point where the people in the room who understand the languages realized that in one interview segment, the interviewer was speaking Norwegian and the interviewee Swedish. The point of this story is that at some point it switched to a Finnish movie (I of course didn't know it was Finnish), and it was the most slow, nothing happening and yet still depressing thing I've seen in a while. This led someone to ask about Swedish stereotypes of Finns. They are:
1. Finns don't talk much (this almost made me laugh out loud, given the rather reticent nature of many Swedes, but at least my supervisor almost immediately made the joke that "yeah, this is of course coming from the most talkative group ever...")
2. They eat sausage.
3. They play games with knives.
So there you go. The conversation shifted and we never got any explanation of 2 and 3, but those are the basics.
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