“Are you here for business or personal?”
“Business,” I replied.
“Sekula . . . is that Finnish?”
“Lithuanian,” I said, “Sekulavich”.
“Oh ya, that makes sense.”
And with that, the passport control officer at Swedish customs waved me through. I found it interesting that my time in Sweden began with a linguistic question from the control officer, and after 15 hours of planes and airports this language quiz was a welcome break. If stating the origin of my name for a rather friendly officer is the price for entering Sweden, I’ll pay it double.
I slept only an hour on the plane ride from San Francisco. Sitting in seat 36J, a middle seat on the right side of the plane, I got a terrible neck cramp that kept from sleeping more than an hour. I spent the rest of the time trying to stay awake, working on my talk, reading, or listening to podcasts on my Pocket PC. I had a very nice breakfast of bacon and eggs at a cafe in Heathrow airport, sent some e-mails, and then rounded out my trip to Sweden with a short plane ride and a linguistics test.
Sweden has so far proved a remarkably easy country to . . . well, show up in knowing almost nothing of the language and customs. A bus was required to get me from Stockholm to Uppsala, but it was easy to get a ticket and easier to get to Uppsala (40 minutes and the last stop). The short walk to my hotel gave me a chance to see the very nice and bright downtown area, and the hotel room is great (a real contrast with Moscow). Every Swede I’ve met speaks both Swedish and English, making me ashamed that in America we have a debate about making English the official language. The bilingual life here in Uppsala, and in Stockholm, is seamless for all the residents I’ve met. Why did I bother with Latin?!
The workshop has so far been excellent, and my talk was well received. One person in particular was thrilled with the measurements of B → τ ν from Belle and BaBar, and couldn’t contain her enthusiasm for this rare decay. The workshop is being held in the Museum Gustavianum on the campus of the Universitet Uppsala, the oldest university in Scandanavia. This is evidenced by the “new” main university building, which is a mere 140 years old. The Museum is the original primary university building, retired from its role when the new one was built. Across from the Gustavianum is the Domkyrkan, an immense church cathedral-like in its design (although the Catholics themselves got a rude awakening when they were kicked out of Sweden long ago, a division that’s clearly since been largely healed). You can see some pictures in my web album, “http://steve.cooleysekula.net/photos/Uppsala/index.html”:http://steve.cooleysekula.net/photos/Uppsala/index.html.
There’s still plenty of workshop left (it runs until noon on Saturday) and plenty of sights to see. Uppsala is the home of Linne’, the father of taxonomy – his naming system was a critical ingredient (genus and species) in the foundation of evolutionary biology, especially in tracing the common threads of biological organisms. In addition, Angstrom hails from here, and the physics building is the Angstrom Laboratory. Of course, Sweden is home to the Nobel Prize, for good or for ill a driving force for innovation and novelty in physics research.
