There’s more to Sweden than Legolas and Linnaeus.** For example:
- Swedish cakes
- The cake itself plays only supporting parts–the star of the show is Swedish marzipan frosting. Don’t be put off by pale greens and purples evoking a witch’s tricky sticky gingerbread–it’s really MMMMMmmmmmarzipan.
- Swedish road signs
- Sweden marks major highways with simple, clear signs. Even better, when you’re lost in a city and longing to find a highway, clear simple signs are there to show you the way.
- Swedish design in general
- Elegant, minimal, clever ways to solve ordinary problems. For example, about 9 million ways to lock a restroom door–and make sure you figure out which kind each restroom uses, unless you feel like showing off your bare bottom.
- Swedish pedestrians
- Outside of Sweden, I’ve seen two kinds of pedestrians. One kind waits robotically for a “Walk” sign–even at 2 a.m. on an empty street. The other kind mostly plays chicken with passing cars. Swedish pedestrians will cross at “Don’t Walk” sign–but they try hard not to inconvenience drivers. Just try not to faint when you see them doing it. And that’s just one small example of how nice the Swedes are…
*But do look in your guidebook for the Falun copper mine, the Vasa Museum, the Nobel Museum, and Linnaeus’s summer house at Hammarby.
** Linnaeus’s theories about plant sexuality stunned his contemporaries.
“Who would have thought that bluebells and lillies and onions could be up to such immorality?” demanded one of Linnaeus’s critics, who went on to claim that such “loathsome harlotry as several males with one female would not be permitted in the vegetable kingdom by the Creator!”
Another critic protested: “A literal translation of the first principles of Linnaean botany is enough to shock female modesty. It is possible that many virtuous students might not be able to make out the similitude of Clitoria.”
Linnaeus himself was incredibly interesting–I loved Wilfrid Blunt’s charming biography of him.
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1 Betsy Devine: Now with even more funny ha-ha and peculiar » Limitations of Linnaeus (and Homo sapiens) noted by Joho // Jun 3, 2007 at 1:53 pm
[…] Carolus Linnaeus (1707 – 1778) invented our double-barreled scientific naming (and shocked his contemporaries with his scandalous way of classifying plants: “Who would have thought that bluebells and lillies and onions could be up to such immorality?&…). […]