To keep in mind

Being handicapped in learning languages I have to remind myself about the following three Swedish verbs. I catch myself quite often interchanging them.

Jag förstör –> I destroy
Jag förstår –> I understand
Jag förstorar –> I magnify

Mr. No and Family Guy

Since our son was born we started to introduce to teach him what is good/allowed and what is bad/not allowed, by saying to him “good”, “gut”, “bra”, “aferim”, “masaAllah” etc. or “Nein” for the latter case. The latter is the most often word we are using since he started crawling. After friends have told us that he might think that his name is “Nein” we got worried and started to add “no”, “nej” and “hayir” to the word list. But somehow he still turns his head to us if we say “Nein” and then he starts smiling. Another thing he did or still does reminded me very much on Family Guy, namely that he gets shocked/scared if he himself farts or he even wakes ups and cries if he does it during his sleep. So the content of Family Guy isn’t always made up as you see here:

And only for people with Swedish humour the following:

Sorry for todays content, but for young parents these topics are daily business.

Getting compliments

Being in Sweden has changed my attitude towards compliments. In Germany, be it in school or university, I or we were quite used not to hear many compliments; except nerds (forget for a second that I am a nerd, actually I am not; just a wannabe nerd, so keep on) could get some German compliments, like “Gut! Sitz! . But being in Sweden, has changed everything. Here (not in Italy) everyone is doing bra (good), or more often mycket/jätte bra (very good) and equally often everything one does is bra jobbat (well done/performed). First it seemed strange to me, but with time it felt good, really good and I think it really animates students to do more. Here in Italy people are lazy to say it, but use instead their thumb to show that something is well done. But, whenever I go out with our son, I get a lot of compliments. I do not know why and for what, but it has something to do with our son. I just filter the words complimento, bambino and bellissimo out of a string of Italian words. It feels strange to get compliments for something one can’t control actively (appearance of an infant) and additionally as a Muslim you are supposed to read two prayers from the Quran (looking for the English term of it; German: Schutzsuren; Arabic: Mu’awwidhatayn; Turkish: Muavvezeteyn) each time you are getting excessive compliments; so you can imagine how much we murmur if we are outdoors in Italy.

So after all the years in Sweden I still haven’t learnt how do deal with compliments. Additionally I spend two years of my childhood in a special school were we got lots of compliments, but it all didn’t help much. (Keeping this in mind my old teachers might think that schools in Sweden are generally special schools) Maybe it is because I figured out that they complimented us without having accomplishing something, just to make us feel good or to motivate us. Now, some 20 years later, I still feel that compliments are not distributed with caution. For me it is the same with with food. If you didn’t accomplish your goals for the morning, why should your stomach get an reward? (Try to tell that to an Italian in respect of his coffee breaks; they even drink it if it is hot and the only thing I can see is icecream or cold water) I think, nowadays, many things are just said without reason or meaning, just for the sake of smalltalk.

That is also what I dislike in conversations with especially Turks (as already mentioned here and here) or Arabs (mainly males have this “disorder”). I suppose it is a cultural thing, and not meant to tease me. Imagine you meet a nice Turkish or an Arab guy and you start a conversation. Normally the question “How are you?” comes up. This would happen one time in a “normal” conversation (twice if we consider both parties). But almost all Turks or Arabs I have met (not all of course, but statistically it is the majority of those whom I have met so far) repeat this question or rephrased after 2-5 minutes. Until some years ago I always repeated my (same) answer and kindly asked them as well (like a while loop). But since few years I stoped answering the same question (no matter how smartly they rephrased it) and interestingly they don’t seem to notice or to react to this. But I still felt like loosing time in a conversation or felt even annoyed so I started telling those guys to stop asking me and even to ask me at all, because if I wasn’t in a good health or state they would either see it or I wouldn’t stand in front of them. I told the latter of course only to extreme ones, most others got only the request to stop asking me after the first time; but also those stopped asking me at all. The conversation in time has reduced a lot, much more than I thought. Imagine how much time one looses with repeated phrases, where the answer even doesn’t seem to have an impact. My behaviour wasn’t seen as a attempt to save us from empty talks, but as an insult. So I suppose it is an cultural thing and I have to be careful with things I say. Sometimes it would be useful i in real life to have the internet chat function “busy” or “appear offline”.

Linguistic similarities

Who thought there were any similarities between Italian and Swedish? The following is only for those of you who understand Swedish:

Italy, week DUE

Unfortunately we didn’t manage to find any Italian language courses in Forli for the summer. I am not so much concerned about that. I know how to get icecream and at the university my English is sufficient. We are still unsure what we are going to do over the weekend, but we are not renting a car this weekend, thats for sure. So it will be one of the following activities: Bologna with train, Predappio (where Mussolini is buried; I even didn’t know they had a mausoleum for him; recently also known among Turbulence researcher – at least those who are involved – for the new long pipe experiment) by bus, and Cesena by bus as well. We are not sure how much we can accomplish, it all depends on our son, who has a new hobby: screaming and carping (nörgeln?) like hell, not crying. Anyway, to make live more livable I bought a ventilator, a USB TV card for my laptop and a all-you-can-eat -icecream-card. The latter is of course only true in my dreams, so I still try to restrict my icecream consume. But I have to say it is really not easy to eat lots of icecream, because it is soo hot, that a not negligible amount of it will always land on your clothes. And for those who are planing to visit Italy. If you don’t have a baby, make or borrow one. It will help you a lot here if you don’t speak Italian . It would be even better if you bring your mother with you, so that you can let her do the dirty work, like looking after the baby when not needed for your own advantages. Beeing in Italy has one disadvantage, we have no holiday today, whereas Sweden celebrates its Midsummar (we all know how that is going NOT to be celebrated).

Discover our neighbourhood

As mentioned in the previous post my parents in law are here and they wanted to see where we live. So I was forced to explore places I never have seen before. I mean, I know the way to the closest shop and to the university and I have visited the shore just few minutes from our home. Today, however, we did something crazy, we went slightly farther (1 km in total) to see the Ulriksdal palace. I several time attempted to visit it, but never had the time to go farther, so today it was time.

It is not a big one or a beautiful one, compared to the other Royal Palaces, but it is nice to have one in front of your own home, so you don’t have to go so far if you have visitors On the way back I saw this sign, which was little bit disturbing. But see for your self:

The sign shows a smiling guy with the note “We are not allowed to play here!” next to him. Either this guy can’t read or is just stupid. Or why should he be happy, if he can’t play there? It reminds me on Tyler Dyrden:

Tyler Durden: [pointing at an emergency instruction manual on a plane] You know why they put oxygen masks on planes?
Narrator: So you can breath.
Tyler Durden: Oxygen gets you high. In a catastrophic emergency, you’re taking giant panicked breaths. Suddenly you become euphoric, docile. You accept your fate. It’s all right here. Emergency water landing – 600 miles an hour. Blank faces, calm as Hindu cows.
Narrator: That’s, um… That’s an interesting theory.

PS: Apropos Royal. I just mist the King few days ago, when he was inaugurating the Spiros Eco car. Luckily someone else took some pictures, which I indent to upload here very soon, not because I am a fan of royalty, but just for fun.