One of the giddy joys of traveling through Europe is walking into supermarkets and basking in the glow of shelf after shelf of foods with completely foreign names.

And the occasional hilarious bit of English.

Mot doesn't seem convinced by its partiness.

In case you're wondering, think red creaming soda except a disturbing yellow colour instead of the usual red.

Each country also has its own peculiar packaging quirk and Sweden's clearly got a thing for what we dubbed Food In A Tube. They've taken the sausage-like plastic tube we know and filled it with a range of foods we don't. This ranged from (but wasn't by any means limited to) soup, stews, pre-cooked pasta and sauce, muffin mix to my personal favourite, jam.

Strawberry jam in a plastic tube is the supermarket equivalent of a lava lamp.

From memory it was also in Sweden that we saw biscuits sold in bulk. Not that unusual in itself, until you realise that they're sold in the form of a giant wheel-o-biscuits roughly the size and shape of a car tyre. Matt claims it was one giant über-biscuit, but I reserve judgement until we actually buy one and crack open the packaging.

I can't wait to offer someone a biscuit with their cup of tea, then pop open the car boot to grab the biscuit wheel from the spare tyre compartment.

Posted by Si at 2:57 PM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

Earlier on this trip* we discovered that yes, it appears that if you have a grass roof you do need to mow it. That's right: though it may look like we're just kicking back drinking sweet, sweet European beers, we've actually been doing investigative journalism.

Today's Hilarity investigation takes a more nerdy spin and relates to a symbol that should be instantly familiar to any Mac user (and I know there's plenty of you out there reading this). The icon to the right is known to Mac users as the "command" button, or that-weird-squiggle-that's-on-the-apple-key.

I remember reading some Apple folklore that Susan Kare, the designer who created most of the original Mac fonts and icons, borrowed the icon from a Norwegian sign.

Turns out that's true. All the way through our drive across Norway and Sweden, that familiar symbol indicated places of interest (museums, heritage sites) on road signs and maps.

So there you go — the folklore is true and that icon is indeed 'borrowed from the signposts of Scandinavia. You can read more on the history of the icon at Folklore.org.

Disclaimer: When I say earlier I may be pushing things: Trondheim came long after this particular signpost, though the icon was used throughout Norway and Sweden. Anyway, since when has chronology been a concern of ours? I'm not even sure what day it is today.

Posted by Si at 2:53 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Together Myles, one of my workmates at Bam, and I came up with a great driving game to keep everyone entertained during the longish drives across Sweden (which was a while ago now, I know, this post has been a long time coming).

As someone coming from Australia, where umlauts and agraves rarely see the light of day outside an Ikea catalogue, crazy all-caps words with funky characters has become somewhat synonymous with random Swedish homewares.

And so begins our driving game. While motoring along Sweden's highways, plenty of cool-sounding town names flash past as exits. The aim of the game is to decide what sort of product that town's name would be if it were sold at Ikea.

Read on for a sample round from our first day in Sweden...

Continue reading "The stereotypes live on" »

Posted by Si at 11:47 AM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

The back lights broke and we fixed that with speaker cable and terminal blocks. Then the exhaust broke in half and we fixed that with a bread knife, alfoil and lots of wire.

And then it started making strange sounds on the E14 in Sweden on the way to Stockholm and it's now, in the words of a Swedish mechanic, "very kaput."

So we're down one Townace, and catching the train to Stockholm.

We seemed to entertain the roadside assist guy, another roadside assist guy he called over, and a passing policeman. That's our job: to share the hilarity.

We'll let you know more once we work out what we're doing. In the meantime, we've got a train to catch.

Bonus quiz question: can you guess the Swedish word for Broken? We know it.

Posted by Matt at 12:56 PM | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBacks (0)

Speaking of milk (and we were) here's a handy diagram informing you of one key tip for buying milk from service stations late at night in Sweden.

Also it should be pointed out that unlike Norway, Sweden's shops don't have handy ten-by-ten grids showing all the different dairy products in all the main European languages, which is how we avoided this particular dilemma earlier in the trip.

Posted by Si at 12:55 PM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)