Slut Farts

Twenty years ago my weary eyed best friend disembarked from her first flight to Sweden to visit me. Exhausted and waiting for her connecting flight she looked about for her favorite pick me up, diet coke. After finding a vending machine, she pushed the button for her anticipated beverage and a bright, red, light appeared across the top of the vending machine and read, "SLUT". Being a woman of impeccable standards she was immediately offended. How did the machine know so much about our pasts,?

After a heartfelt reunion at the airport, I drove her to my new home. The diet soda on an empty stomach has given her a little flatulance; best friends hold nothing back from one another. Just as we slow down to go over a speedbump, well, you can guess what happened. She looked at me stunned and asked, "What kind of language IS this?" Fart means speed, "farthinder" means literally, hinder your speed, or is it hinder your fart? When driving? Walking?

It's true, Swedish is full of hilarious translations to English speakers. The vocabulary lacks variety and many words are used repeatedly for completely different situations. The language also consists of curse words used by people of all ages and classes. The most callous word is devil. I can barely pronounce it in their forked tongue and truth be told, I can come up with some much more raunchy language in English than that if things get ugly.

They have Halloween and Easter confused. On Easter children show up at one's door dressed as little witches on brooms and ask for money. What? Get outta here heathens! Somehow the culture dangles between their roots in paganism, folklore and the Lutheran Church. Halloween. When is Halloween? October 31st. You get one day, just one and then you go out and knock on doors with costumes ranging from Buzz Lightyear to Frankenstein. In the states people are quite clever and dress as concepts now.

Back home, I had a young, college aged guy with a fig leaf show up at my door years ago. Adam? He replied dryly, "No, I am a minimalist."

In Sweden it's horror. Pure horror and gore. They never get the dates right, often show up for days at weird times and say in English "trick or treat." Trust me on this one. I have tried to straighten the entire country out on a variety of societal wrongs but they don't care, they really don't.

Watching children screech and run about unattended is normal while trying to enjoy a fine dinner out with my husband; kids being kids, right? No. My mother would have dislocated my shoulder yanking me back into my seat. The kids are literally unsupervised, running around naked until puberty and are a true menace. You remember Dennis the Menace? He was an angel. A God sent angel compared to Swedish kids.

The exception is Greta Thunberg, of course. Who knew you could skip school over the climate crisis without the school warrents chasing us down in 1970? I love dogs and was always an advocate for nuetering and spaying. Now, decades later I realise I could have stood with a sign demanding doggy birth control and gotten out of algebra and home economics.

Don't get me wrong, I love my adopted country and being a duel citizen has it's perks. As a Swede and having an EU passport I can slip in and out of European countries without being asked if I voted for Trump or if I own a weapon. As a US citizen I get to watch from afar as my home country embarrasses itself over the most trivial of news. Who cares about Elon Musk and his baby's weird numerical and morse code name, X Æ A-Xii. "X" for short. Seriously. Thankfully, in Sweden before you name your child it must be approved by the, I don't know, Socialists Naming Board or something. You can not be named avocado, dirt tree and luckily fart. That's a name you have to earn!

Until next lesson, SLUT!