PAULS SVENSKA FAROR (THE SWEDISH PERILS OF PAUL)

CHRONOLOGY SO FAR: Catching You Up to Date

15 JUNE, SUNDAY - My nice South African neighbors drive me to Muscat airport for my Swiss International flight to Zurich, then Copenhagen. The flight leaves at 11:40 pm. I sit and chat in the airport with my Argentinian office mate, Carmela, who is leaving Oman for good. She's headed for the US, I for Sweden. I am whisked in the dark of night from the muggy, hazy, miserable Omani summer to the misty summer cool of Northern Europe. (No complaints!)

16 JUNE, MONDAY - I arrive at Kastrup airport, Copenhagen, around 9 am Monday morning. Cousin Lisbeth Serjun and her husband Cveto are there to meet me outside the baggage claim area. We take a very quick train across the Öresund separating Southern Sweden and Denmark to to a park-and-ride station near Malmö, Sweden, where their car is parked. We head north towards Småland to the town of Strömsnäsbruk, where they live. We head into 'downtown' Strömsnäsbruk for dinner. A one-street downdown with maybe two low-key restaurants. I stay overnight at Serjun's, where Lisbeth and I share notes about our genealogical research. She's also into this! Cveto, of Slovenian parents, is a full second-generation Swede, and he happily initiates me into the joys of "Gammal Dansk", a local schnapps, after dinner.

17 JUNE, TUESDAY - Lisbeth drives through narrow country roads to Glimåkra to take me to see the church cemetery where greatgrandparents Sven and Sissa Carlsson are buried along with three of my grandmother's brothers and sisters. We have a good convo with the cemetery warden. He is particularly intrigued by my photos of the cemetery in the late '40s and '50s, when grandma Selma had her picture taken by the family plot. That evening, middle daughter Inger Höglund and her two teenaged daughters drive down from Uddevala, near the Norwegian border, to take care of me at their mother Anna's home till she gets back from her tour guide duties in Blekinge. Lisbeth returns to Småland and all the rest of us stay over at Anna's. (Anna is one of my dad's first cousins, the daughter of grandma Selma's sister Alice, who stayed in Sweden.)

18 JUNE, WEDNESDAY- Vaxjö. The main immigrant museum in Sweden, Utvandrarnas Museum, is located in the capital of Småland, Växjö, and Inger and daughters kindly drive me up for the day. It is mainly for Swedes, it turns out. English translations are definitely secondary! But before we can get down to business, we attend to the important business in Skåne: having coffee and sweets! In the museum, we can listen to recordings of new immigrants speaking 'Svengelska': Ja, ge mig ett hus som jag kan cleana. (Give me a house where I can clean, says the newly arrived Swedish maid.) Lots of facts and figures: immigrants in the 1840s take about 100 days to cross the Atlantic by sail. By 1908, steam ships cut the trip to about a week. We walk around downtown and have late lunch at an Italian restaurant. (Southern Swedes believe in about five meals a day!) Then, back in Hässleholm, we have Chinese food downtown - a real downtown.

19 JUNE, THURSDAY - Family history day. Anna, Inger and her daughters and I head to Glimåkra from Hässleholm. Gullan, Uncle Sven's illegitimate daughter and the black sheep of the family, has allowed us to visit the outside areas of Gamlarp, the old family farmstead. Up the road, we also tour Villa California, also known as Gastabacka, a small house the grandparents had built in their old age. It is now owned by a neo-pagan 'natural medicine' woman, Ann Jönsson, who kindly offers us a tour of the house and ancient Bronze Age cemetery that happens to be on the property. After having 'coffee' with her mother, the present resident Inger Brita Jönsson, we move down the road to have another 'coffee' at Mölleröd farm, where Dad's other cousin Signe and her husband Ture Jönsson live. Bertil, their son, manages the farm. More coffee, more cookies, more cake. We don't get a real supper till we get home around 9 pm!

20 JUNE, FRIDAY - Inger & co. leave in the morning to head back to Uddevala. This Friday is Midsommardag, nearest to the longest day of the year and one of Sweden's biggest holidays. Anna and her platonic pal Knut have planned a very traditional day for me: folk dancing, including the Frog Dance, at a park in Sösdala, kaffe at Knut's brother's house, where I chat with their son Ulf, who teaches Swedish to immigrants and speaks decent English, then a quick tour of a 11th century Danish castle (Hovdala) and finally back to Anna's house for supper: sil (pickled herring), new potatoes and a glass of Polish vodka for toasts (skål!)

21 JUNE, SATURDAY - Knut drives Anna and me to Glimåkra, where there is a 10 o'clock church service for Midsommar. We meet Lisbeth and Berit, Signe's daughter. The priest is from Götland, Lars Fröjmark, and he and his E. German wife greet everyone after the service and talk me into buying five (!) church postcards, since they have no change. (Tough businessmen, these Lutherans!) Lisbeth drives me back to Strömsnäsbruk for some quick computer research on 19th century relatives and to pick up Cveto to take him back with us to Hässleholm. We have Anna's buller (sweet rolls) and kaffejök with the Polish vodka and look at old photo albums, including one with pictures of the devil incarnate, Gullan Persson and husband and two sons at Sven's funeral back in 1980. (Somehow they don't look as fearsome as the family lore makes them out to be.)

22 JUNE, SUNDAY - Anna's friend Knut will be dropping me off at Hässleholm Central station for a bullet train for Malmö around noon. I want part of a day there to check out the city and see where Selma and Frank might have sailed from a hundred years ago. Monday I can only catch a train to Denmark, since the ferries have all died out now since the Öresund Bridge was built connecting the two countries.

More soon!

AND HE’S OFF!

Just a quick update before I catch my Swiss International Airways flight from Muscat to Zurich and Copenhagen late tomorrow, June 15.

This has been about the most complicated vacation I’ve ever planned – recreating Grandma Sundberg’s 1908 emigration from Sweden to the US by all-surface transport. But the day before I leave, I am pleased to say I have my air tickets booked, my Denmark-UK ferry ticket, my trans-Atlantic freighter ship booked (the most complicated means of travel I’ve ever dealt with), and my 15-day America pass with Amtrak.

My dad’s Swedish cousin Anna’s daughter Lisbet and hubby Cveto Serjun will be picking me up at Copenhagen airport (their main international airport for Southern Sweden, too) and putting me up for a couple of nights. Lisbet and her sisters have very generously assigned a relative's household for me to stay in every day of my week there June 16-22, including Midsommar evening, one of Scandinavia’s biggest family holidays – the longest night of the year in a country where the nights in summer are already very long! I am apparently also to be given a tour of the old farm homestead near Glimåkra, which was bequeathed to old Uncle Carl’s out-of-wedlock daughter (really, no big deal in Sweden). And I hope to attend Sunday service at the old Lutheran parish church in Glimåkra before leaving to catch my ferry from Denmark to Harwich, England June 23.

Work here the last two months has been extremely stressful, even more so when I found out May 24 that the coveted slot on the textbook writers group I had competed for back in December would be taken away from me without either of my two finished units being used in the final book.

(Long story, but the complaint from my boss 5 months into things was that my units were too “inaccessible” for Level 4 students, although having taught that level, I don’t agree. If he had bothered to deal with the issue earlier in March, when my first unit was completed and reviewed, rather than timing out the clock the end of this May, I could have amended the unit in plenty of time. Indeed, even in late May I said I would be very happy to push myself revising my work in June before I left, but they refused to give me more time to fix things to their liking. A totally unnecessary pity, since that means about $15,000 of the university’s money is down the drain, and my two Level 4 colleagues will now have to work even harder to create two new units to replace the ones I leave behind.)

Anyway, going from a very prestigious project and career momentum to nothing for fall has made me look around for other job options for this fall at the earliest, and January at the latest. I have a few applications in the works (all outside Oman), and if nothing comes through on the work front, I will take some professional development courses starting in January, perhaps back at AUC in Cairo. Our contract requires six-months (!) notice, so the end of June is my last “legal” time to give notice - and I am definitely planning to do that. That would mean staying on teaching here until December but is perhaps the most sensible decision professionally. However, if a good alternative teaching job is offered me for September, I will have no hesitation picking up stakes in August and breaking contract, whether or not the university pays my way home or I have to.

Very sorry it has come to that, but sitting in a career backwater for another year in Oman seems like the least wise professional move to make at this late age in my life. If I’m not moving forward in my career, I should at least be moving sideways. And so far, my boss here has given me no attractive options to replace the writing project they took away. In any, case I have earned the 60 days paid leave they are giving me this summer, and I intend to use it to the fullest!

Wish me safety and a “bon voyage”!