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Post by π¨π°ππ₯π¦π― π΄πΆπ― on Feb 5, 2017 9:34:13 GMT -5
am I hopping on this bandwagon? you betcha.
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Post by Alpha on Feb 5, 2017 10:00:24 GMT -5
What do you traditionally eat?
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Post by π¨π°ππ₯π¦π― π΄πΆπ― on Feb 5, 2017 10:18:15 GMT -5
What do you traditionally eat? I'm going to split this into holiday food (which we still eat today) and traditional food that we'd eat on a day to day basis (which almost nobody eats anymore) and traditional food we still eat.
we eat the same exact food for all three of our major celebrations - Christmas, Easter and Midsummer. fermented herring, pickled herring, salmon, ham, meatballs, sausage, jansons's frestelse (potatoes and anchovies are prepared kinda like a gratain) and potatoes. if you want a truly traditional holiday buffet you'll also throw in some pig's feet and porridge.
traditional food that is really swedish but no longer eaten as we're no longer the poor neighbours to the north include palt (unboiled potatoes are mashed together and filled with pork then cooked), blodpalt (see before but with blood instead of pork), yellow pea soup, fiskbullar (minced white fish meat cooked in sauce), cabbage rolls and pΓΆlsa (haggis but without the casing).
traditional food we still eat today includes falukorv (a really fine sausage made from the dead oxen that died after working in the Falun silver mines) and a stroganoff we make around it, meatballs, pancakes (not the kind american's eat, they're very, very thin and serving them for breakfast is out of the question), raggmunk (a pancake made with potatoes) and, in the summer, crayfish. august is considered the crayfish month and everybody goes to so-called 'krΓ€ftkalas' or caryfish parties.
bonus round: deserts. semlor are enjoyed on fettisdagen, the start of lent. they're savoury buns that are hollowed out and filled with almond paste and cream. gingerbread and cinnamon buns are also really traditional, as are lussekatter which are saffron buns we make for christmas and princess cakes, which are sponges filled with jam and cream and topped with green marsipan.
a long answer, but whatever.
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Post by Saint Ambrosef on Feb 5, 2017 10:49:36 GMT -5
Biggest stereotype you hate? Most accurate? How big is the cultural rift between Sweden, Norway, and Finland?
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Post by π¨π°ππ₯π¦π― π΄πΆπ― on Feb 5, 2017 11:06:43 GMT -5
Biggest stereotype you hate? Most accurate? How big is the cultural rift between Sweden, Norway, and Finland? I hate the one about our accent, because it's so not true. I've actually had people ask me if I sound like swedish chef, and, surprise, no? he doesn't even speak swedish. when a swede speaks swedish it's soft and round, kind of? as for the one about our accents when we speak english, there's definitely one there but it's nothing like the one movies, tv shows, etc try to emulate.
the most accurate one is probably that we're really asocial. we avoid conflict at all costs and avoid each other even more. if you sit down next to someone on the bus when there are free seats that aren't right next to a person, you'll get some strange looks. if you've seen the 'waiting for the bus like a swede' meme, that sums it up pretty well.
between Norway and Sweden, there's barely a rift at all. our languages are even similar enough that we can hold complex conversations without pause to understand each other. the Swedish-Norwegian union was a thing between 1844 and 1905, and several centuries during the medieval times, so we grew next to each other. between Sweden and Finland it's a slightly different thing. Sweden occupied Finland for over 600 years until, in 1809 we lost the last war we even took part to the Russians and they took it. with Finland, we don't share the Scandinavian culture like we do with Norway because we were never a union, but the differences aren't exactly big, either given that they had our culture forced upon them and that a large amount of finish refugees came over during WWII. Norway and Finland have a larger rift though.
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Post by Deleted on Feb 5, 2017 11:15:31 GMT -5
I heard that a north-western Swede and a north-eastern Norwegian will have little difficulty speaking to each other, yet a north-western Swede and a southern Swede barely understand each other at all. Is that true?
Also, how do Swedes treat politics in their culture? Is it talked about frequently, is it taboo, or is it somewhere in between?
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Post by π¨π°ππ₯π¦π― π΄πΆπ― on Feb 5, 2017 11:24:55 GMT -5
I heard that a north-western Swede and a north-eastern Norwegian will have little difficulty speaking to each other, yet a north-western Swede and a southern Swede barely understand each other at all. Is that true? Also, how do Swedes treat politics in their culture? Is it talked about frequently, is it taboo, or is it somewhere in between? the former is definitely true, and it goes for most places in Sweden and Norway actually. the languages are so similar. we even have TV shows that star both Swedish and Norwegian actors acting among themselves in their own languages that air in both countries. the second isn't really. the southern Swedish accent is really distinct and quite different from any other here, but most people understand them just fine (though sometimes you'll get a grumpy old man writing in to complain that the southerners should speak 'proper Swedish'). the northern accent is distinct too, and both accents have different words for the same thing, but they shouldn't have much trouble understanding each other save for those words, which you're teased for more than anything. I have neither and both accents myself as I've moved around a lot and my parents come from different places, so a lot of words I use are different from those my friends do, but they know what they mean and just make fun of me instead of acting confused.
we talk about politics a lot. it's considered small talk by a lot of people, and nobody will think it weird if you bring it up. my friends and I talk about local, national and international politics on an almost daily basis, as does my parent's generation. the older generation has a little more difficulty with it having grown up during or right after WWII when politics was a sensitive subject, but I can sit down with my grandparents and talk politics for hours if I wanted to.
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Post by Felix on Feb 5, 2017 12:18:23 GMT -5
Awesomeness on a scale of 1 to 55?
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Post by π¨π°ππ₯π¦π― π΄πΆπ― on Feb 5, 2017 12:34:25 GMT -5
Awesomeness on a scale of 1 to 55? 36
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