Swedish trains

Swedish trains are some of the filthiest in Europe. We complain when we travel to India but we should keep in mind that our trains too are dirty. In contrast to India, we pay a lot of money for a ticket--it's one of the most expensive railway tickets in the world--but we do not mind that nobody cleans the trains. Take a look at what typical seats in Swedish trains look like:

Stains everywhere. Stains from food, from vomit, from feces, ... Disgusting!

You might think that the situation is better in FIRST CLASS. No, it isn't! Judge for yourself:

How about toilets? If you make the mistake to go to the toilet in a Swedish train, you may end up with a disease. Look what they look like:

Sometimes, first class sleepers lack water and the toilets are dirty with feces from the previous passenger.

And as for the restaurant, it looks like napkins are cleaned in the toilet bowl:

We employ immigrant wo
rkers to clean the shit, and we can always blame them for the state of the toilets. But who is to blame for the general state of cleanliness of our expensive trains?

Swedish trains are not like trains in a European country. They are like trains in the third world in all aspects, except the price. And we like that. Indeed, we never complain!

Now take a look at a Swedish train station:

Sweden is an expensive third world country in the north of Europe. We complain about the africans, the arabs, the indians, etc., those immigrants who we don't like and the reason we do so is because they remind us of ourselves!

Acknowledgments: this blog!

Toilet lids covered with feces? Solution is simple!

Continuing with the toilets issue, as I mentioned before, a newspaper article reported that

toilet lids in Old Uppsala School's girls' toilet are  

covered with traces of feces.

But there is a solution,  and the solution was found by the famous Konditori Fågelsången in Uppsala. Here it is:

 Can you see how simple it is? No toilet lids at all! Removed. And so, no feces on them either. This way, the cafe can focus on preparing coffee without having to take any time to clean the toilet lids. What a great solution!

Hairdresser

I love hair salons windows here. They are amazingly elegant, delicately designed, conveying the graceful feel of the job, prevailing in current fashion of window displaying, artful, luxurious, ornately crafted, graceful, offering the sense of majestic, and, most of all, paying attention to the last detail. I will give you an example from the following shop:

The thing that caught my attention is the sumptuous cloth used in the display, a very simple, indeed, display, obeying the rules of minimalistic design. Love at first sight:

Let us zoom in at the lonely candle, brilliantly placed in the middle (click on the photo to zoom in):

We discover

1. Hair thrown all over, hair recently cut from human heads. What a brilliant idea to decorate the window with hair!
2. A dead fly at the bottom left hand corner of the photo.

One wonders if these additions are done by mistake or if they were part of a design scheme, so let us turn the camera to other parts of the window. Look closely in the middle, between the hairstyling products, and you will see more hair:

Look at the sides of the window and you see even more hair:

And finally look at another part of the window to see a used bag of very fine Swedish snus bag.

No hairdressers in the world would have had the brilliant idea of decorating their windows with flies, snus and human hair, lots and lots of hair, hair everywhere. But in Sweden we love to be original! We offer decorations which are a pleasure to the eye and food for the soul and spirit. People think that hairdressers' prices are very high in Sweden. But they have to take into account that they pay both for great haircuts and for the design experience, the pleasure of being in a clean, artfully-decorated environment. The particular hairdresser charges 340 SEK (about 51 US dollars) for a simple haircut, but offers a generous discount for children and retired people: 320 SEK (48 US dollars), a whole 5% discount!

A friend of mine did not like the decoration, so she told the shop, Salong de Två, to change it. Again, they applied a minimalistic approach. Rather than getting rid of the hair, they took down a purple curtain and tossed it on top:

Toilets

A slight deviation from windows shopping, or, rather, an alert that "windows" will often be interpreted metaphorically, is what this posting offers: a tiny glimpse at our toilets. I will spare you and not show you many images (at least for the time being). Here is a first, not uncommon, example:

The photo is from an article from a newspaper (UNT), reporting that

Dirty toilets and sinks. Floors flooded with water. There is no toilet paper. No soap either. It is perhaps not surprising that more than 70% of Uppsala middle school students avoid going to the bathroom. It smells like urine in Old Uppsala School's girls' toilet this Thursday afternoon. Student OF and her friends pull up the toilet lids covered with traces of feces. 

We think that countries somewhere south have dirty toilets but we, up in the civilized north, have fixed the cleanliness problems. Wrong. We have not.

If you think that dirty toilets exist only in public places, then you are wrong. Even in cafes and, sometimes, in restaurants, you will find dirty toilets, where bins are overflown with (used, of course) paper and maybe some feminine products. We don't like to admit it, but, sometimes, our newspapers look at the situation and report on it.

When we go to some southern country for vacation, however, and find a dirty toilet then we triumphantly announce: This doesn't exist in Sweden!

Ofvandahl's

There is a famous cafe in Uppsala, called "Ofvandahl". According to the Lonely Planet review,

 it’s endorsed by no less a personage than the king [of Sweden]

But let's see what this famous place looks like. Here are some window views. Take a look at the curtains, the latest of Swedish design:

 Next look at the delicious pastries on display. If they look dirty and full of dust, then this is because they are precisely so. In fact, it is not uncommon to see various species of insects lying on the windows and on the actual pastries themselves. Why, protein is included for free.

Now take a look at the design of the lamp shades. All bought at the second-hand store next door, and never cleaned. They remain in the pristine condition of the day they were bought.

But what is best of all, is the cleanliness of the shop. Take a look at the spoon I was given alongside with the coffee I ordered. They didn't even bother to clean it.

Ofvandahl's is a famous place endorsed by no less a personage than the king [of Sweden].