Awesome Scandinavian Store in the U.S.A.

I was just trolling one of my favorite design blogs when I came across an advertisement for Huset, an online shop specializing in Scandinavian clothing, accessories and house stuff. Yippee! They've got clothes by Odd Molly, Dagmar, Hunkydory, Ivana Helsinki and more. Plus, all sorts of gorgeous furniture, lighting and wallpaper by emerging designers; really cute toys for kids, stylish tableware and lines, etc. It's like a Sunday afternoon stroll through the best shopping streets in Södermalm. This makes me really happy.

New Blog!

Hi, friends. Today I decided to start a new blog called "Megan Likes This." It's about stuff. Neato products, articles and ideas I find in my daily travels around the Web. I posted a few things to get started, and so far it looks a little girlie, but I'm hoping I won't alienate my male friends too much by occasionally posting about jewelry and kimonos. The idea is that it will be a fairly well-rounded selection of things I find interesting—like a delicio.us feed with a literary lean. My whole career has been in men's publications, so I have a pretty good handle on what guys like to read about—but hey, it's my blog. See, I've internalized the "men's magazine voice" so much that I often feel kind of like a dude... but I sure do like me some ruffles.

The World's Stinkiest Food

So, last Friday night we had a Swedish party. Perhaps it took me a week to blog about it because the experience was so traumatic my conscious mind tried to block it. Just kidding. But look at my expression in the photo above—that's not a happy camper. Why? Sturströmming. The rotten, revolting, ammonia/ass-scented edible practical joke. But we had to try it—we had to. John opened the container of fish very slowly at a 45-degree angle as per the instructions on the shrink-wrapped can (it needed to be shrink-wrapped to keep it from bulging and potentially bursting before consumption).

The contents of the can bubbled and fizzed and a pressurized spray of the foulest-smelling substance known to man erupted into the evening air. The cat ran away in panic. And when the cat runs away from fish, something is wrong. A few seconds passed and we all said things like "Oh, it's not that bad." And then, WHAM, the stench hit us like a brick. A brick made of rotting fish flesh. John decided to triple-bag and throw the stuff out immediately, but I thought we should taste it first. Imagine driving past Three Mile Island, smelling the putrid toxic waste fumes, and then saying, "wait, stop the car, we've gotta taste that." Yeah, that was me.

But, as promised by the dear Swedes who told me so much about their odiferous delicacy and then presented me with a can at my going-away party in Stockholm, it actually didn't taste that bad. It was just very, very salty and fishy. But the garden continued to reek of the fish juice that sprayed everywhere when John opened the can. Our guests wondered if something had died in our yard. Maybe our neighbors worried that we had murdered someone and buried him under the yucca plants. John hosed down the patio the next morning.

Anyway, in addition to the sturströmming, I made three kinds of pickled herring: tomato-caper, mustard, and red wine. I also made skagen using little shrimpies mixed with herb aoli, a spoonful of yogurt and a generous amount of fresh dill. And for desert I baked "nut tops," the delightful hazelnut cookies from the Rosendal Cafe. To drink, we served Carlsberg (Danish, but close enough?) and I made aquavit by infusing vodka with anise, cardamom and cumin. I'm not sure cumin belonged in there, though—or maybe I just added too much. My friends called the spirit "challenging." And they wondered why I was wearing a schlumpy blue and yellow t-shirt that said "Sverige" (because they didn't know what "Sverige" means).

But despite just being sort of confusing to most of the guests, the party was fun. I was surprised how hard it was to find basic ingredients for making Swedish food, though. I couldn't find fresh herring or even salted herring, so I started with pre-pickled herring and soaked it to get rid of the copious amount of sugar and vinegar in the store-bought marinade, and then started over with my own sauces. I couldn't find bleak roe (or any cheap fish roe) and I also couldn't find any Swedish cheeses. Luckily, it turns out herring tastes pretty good with sharp, white cheddar and fingerling potatoes.

I did find knackebröd at a European grocery, and that made me happy. But next time I'll probably just make Swedish meatballs and call it a day. Everyone likes Swedish meatballs!

Swedish Space Tourism!

Holy crap, it turns out I'm not the only connection between New Mexico and Sweden. The other connection is... space travel! See, New Mexico is building a spaceport, where Virgin Galactic will offer trips to suborbital space for about $200,000, beginning in 2011.

According to thelocal.se (Stockholm's English-language news Web site), the Ice Hotel in Kiruna, Sweden just started selling Virgin Galactic tickets as well. Spaceport Sweden is projected to open in Kiruna in 2012, and will be the main European hub for recreational space travel.

If you haven't heard about this whole space tourism thing, well, get ready to become obsessed, like me. I've been keeping an eagle-eye on the Spaceport New Mexico project since it was first announced in 2006. Virgin mega-mogul Richard Branson came up with the idea to make rich folks pay for a joy ride into space, and hundreds have already prepaid in the U.S. (before the economic meltdown, naturally). The idea is that within a few years of the space tourism launch, there could be really quick and awesome suborbital flights from, say, L.A. to Tokyo in a just a few hours. When you go way up into suborbital space, you massively cut down the time it would ordinarily take to slice through the atmosphere and get from point A to point B.

Anyway, this Sweden thing is a new and exciting development! Well, new to me, anyway. Thelocal.se has been on the case since January '07. Anyway, the reason for the Kiruna location in way northern Sweden? So space tourists can fly through the Northern Lights. Amazing!

Home Sweet

Hello! I am back in Santa Fe and feeling energized after two weeks of travel. I shot two Food Detectives segments in New York (that's me with Ted Allen, above), hung out with my girlfriends, ate oysters with the parents, and hung out with grandma—mormor in case any Swedes are reading...

The whole way home I carried a reindeer skin for my mother-in-law, which most onlookers were gracious enough to assume was a fur coat—probably because I'm so fancy. And I read the first two vampire novels in the Twilight series while in transit. Over 700 pages of pure adolescent nonsense. I was irritated at the end of both books because the writer kind of gave up and stopped forming sentences worth reading, but still, the plot is addictive, and I might buy the next book just to find out what happens. (Although if anyone wants to just tell me what happens in the comments, I'd be okay with saving $20 and a few precious hours of my life.)

The weirdest thing about the journey home has been the fact that I'm seeing Sweden-related stuff everywhere. I was walking down the street in Brooklyn and passed a store called "Tjej/Kvinna" (girl/woman). I passed a billboard on the highway that said "Bättre!" ("better"—it was an SAS ad).

And then a random guy came up to me and my rowdy friends at a wine bar in Manhattan and asked if we were having a special occasion. I told him not really, but I'd just returned from seven months in Stockholm, and he busted out and started speaking Swedish to me! What are the odds? Actually, I'll tell you the odds. According to Wikipedia, there are an estimated 14 million Swedish-speaking people in the world, with about 8 million in Sweden and 4.3 million in the U.S. (4.3 million! That's huge!) There are 306 million Americans, so that means one in 71 people in the U.S. speaks Swedish. That sounds completely impossible to me, but then again, I've never been to Minnesota, where they all apparently live.

Last night, however, John met a Swedish waitress at an obscure bar in Santa Fe, which suggests that Swedes are truly everywhere. In celebration of this fact, John and I are going to have a Swedish-themed party next Friday night. We'll drink Carlsberg beer and snaps (I'm going to infuse vodka with caraway and anise to get the right effect), and try our hand at making our own pickled herring, köttbullar and Swedish cookies. I don't know what they're called, but there's a kind of cookie served at Cafe Rosendal in Stockholm that was so delicious I bought a $50 cookbook just to learn how to make them. They're mostly hazelnuts, egg whites and sugar. Mmmmm.

So, how am I finding the U.S., after living abroad for a while? Well, it's great to be home, but it's easy to see why foreigners think we're funny. Americans are fat and we don't dress well. We talk to strangers in public all the time, which is weird, and a remarkable number of us are religious and/or right-wing nut jobs. We are constantly bombarded with media and advertisements (much more so than in Sweden) to the point that we're jaded and immune to them, and many people are bizarrely obsessed with security, ie, afraid of being bombed, robbed or raped at any moment, even if they live in bumfuck New Mexico. Especially if they live in bumfuck New Mexico. But you knew all that, right? Yes, this is an absurd place. However, it's my bizarre place. The upsides are that all my loved ones are here, the sun shines all the time, there's never a shortage of things to do, and everything is on sale. As Niklas would say: U.S.A.! U.S.A.!

Swedener in Helsinki

I just spent one of the weirdest weeks of my life in Finland. And I’ve changed my mind about the place completely. I was right about the grimness, but it’s also simultaneously quirky and hilarious. All around Helsinki, if you look closely, you start noticing strange details in everything. For instance, many buildings have faces in them. Not random face-like patterns in the stones that you can barely make out if you squint, but actual gargoyle faces, carved into the nooks and corners of even modern structures. And there are these silver balls everywhere, hundreds of them. They must be some sort of art installation, but it feels like God dropped a handful of oversized ball-bearings and they rolled into weird places, slightly tucked behind electrical boxes, on the edge of the harbor, on median strips, nestled up against bus stops. You’ll also notice. English signs say things like “We got beef,” “drinking district,” and “so many things of everything.” Finnish ones contain 29-character words like “rakennusautomaatiosuunnittelu.” An especially strange bathroom sign indicated stalls for both female and handicapped patrons with icons of a woman and a wheelchair-bound person peeing at the same time, their streams of urine crossing in midair!

The design here is fanciful and weird, too. In such an austere-looking city, it’s a little jarring to see colors and patterns as whimsical as those of Marimekko and Ivana Helsinki in the shop windows. My first impression of Helsinki was that it’s not like Stockholm AT ALL, in fact, it seems much more Slavic than Scandinavian. But after spending a few days exploring the city in the company of Finns, I actually think Finland has a unique character distinct from both. If I had to try to classify it (and keep in mind I’m just forming this theory based on intuition and a very small amount of input), I would say it’s a place where people are externally tough, enduring, uncomplaining and quiet, but there’s a really colorful internal world of imagination, stories, and myths. I feel like Finland is exactly the setting of all the slightly twisted fantasies of childhood: there are absolutely trolls and monsters in the woods, and they will either turn out to be friendly, or they will eat you. You can spell words any way you want—extra letters just make it more fun! And you can totally name your dolls (or your kids) things like Teemu and Tikki.

So what was I doing all week in the land of elves and psychadelia? Bonnier Publishing Program, of course. We visited an internet startup, Nokia, and a couple of Bonnier companies, and worked on our entrepreneurship projects. We have a lot of work to do before presenting our ideas in May.

I really enjoyed the visit to Nokia, but my favorite part of the trip was a dinner we had at a crazy Russian restaurant. The place was ornate with pleated satin tapestry, oriental rugs and old oil paintings, and we were served a feast that included strange specialties like pickles with honey and sour cream, bear salami, and a raspberry meringue pavlova. There was a “vodka button” on the wall, and when you pressed it, a waitress would appear with a platter of icy vodka shots for everyone. I want a vodka button in my house!

Foreign Finland

I feel like I've been abducted by aliens. I'm in this strange, bleak place where people speak in monosyllabic grunts, but the written language uses 20 characters for every word; where the architecture is a mixture of gray, Soviet cinderblocks and modern, glass confections. Where my "sea-view" hotel looks out over a harbor filled with shipping containers and cranes, and everything is closed on Sundays. Hmmm, Finland.

I think the Eastern block and I just don't really jibe. There's nowhere in the world where I feel more foreign. There are places that should feel much more foreign to me: the Middle East, Asia or Africa, where I look really different from the natives and I don't know the customs. But these places tend to be warm, colorful, crowded and loud, and I understand that. I don't get quiet, closed, cold and gray.

Finland is technically Scandinavian, but its Russian heritage gives it a feeling wholly different from Sweden, Denmark and Norway. I'm going to dig in a little over the next five days and see if I can get to know it, but for right now, I might as well be in outer space.

Dashing Through the Snow

How many of your colleagues do you think you could convince to enter a 56-mile cross-country ski race? One? None? Well, this week the Bonnier staff in Sweden entered a team of 25 in Vasaloppet, the country’s most prestigious winter endurance race—and they’re actually out to win.

Women's and youth races have been going on since Friday, but the main Vasaloppet event (which is open to all) began this morning, and I’ve been watching it on TV in the airport, as I wait for my flight to Helsinki. With some training, I think I'd like to enter a race like this. I’ve never actually cross-country skied in my life, but the idea appeals to me, and I think I’d pick it up pretty quickly. I’d much rather use skis as transportation than as a way to break my neck sliding downhill.

Anyway, back to the Vasaloppet. It’s actually redundant to say “the” Vasaloppet, because the “-et” at the end of Vasalopp means “the.” But in English it sounds weird to leave it out. Anyway, some members of the Bonnier team are Vasaloppet veterans. Jonas Eriksson, VP of Bonnier Entertainment and his boss Torsten Larsson, head of Bonnier Broadcasting, Entertainment, and the evening newspaper Expressen, are ski-racing experts, with years of events under their belts. For Larsson, Vasaloppet is just a training race—he’s using it to prepare for his annual crosscountry ski-traverse of Greenland.

But Vasaloppet is a pretty big deal: over 44,000 people entered this year, if you count the smaller races as well as the 56-mile event. That’s bigger than the New York Marathon, which limits entries to 37,000. (To be fair, it’s not really accurate to compare them, since Vasaloppet send competitors out in flights over the course of four days. But still, 44,000 people is five percent of the Swedish population.)

The first Vasaloppet happened in 1922, when a newspaper editor named Anders Pers decided it would be fun to put together a race that roughly followed king Gustav Vasa’s “flight on skis from Mora towards Norway in 1521” (quoting vasaloppet.se on that one—the description doesn't make it clear whether he was fleeing or rushing to attack, although I suspect it was the latter). The first race was sponsored by Dagens Nyheter, Sweden's biggest daily paper, owned by Bonnier, but these days it’s sponsored by deeper pockets like IBM and Volkswagen.

By tomorrow, we should know whether the Bonnier team won the race. I would be kind of surprised—even though we’ve got some experienced racers, it sounds like there’s a whole lot of competition. But, you never know!