Diversity in Swedish

I’ve been pretty busy lately so I’ve fallen behind in blogging. I was going to take it easy tonight (and possibly blog). But, then we lost electricity, for no apparent reason – and my computer battery is fully charged. So, here we go - this is the first of the catch-up posts.

Tuesday night a big group of people from my department went to an event that was suppose to be celebrating diversity at the KI. They advertised a talent show, dinner, drinks, and live music for 100 kronor (which is about $15) – a bargain.

The event was at a place called Cirkus (celebrate diversity at the circus – hehe!). When we arrived, we were given a hotdog and juice box outside the place – which was kind of funny but we were also worried that was the extent of the dinner and drinks.

Then, onto the show. There were several acts that we’d expect to see – flamenco dancers, a capella groups, singer and pianist pairs, a street dance group, a guy who swallowed a sword etc. Unfortunately, that made up only about 20% of the show. The rest of the three hours was all talk (panels on diversity, politicians, etc) – in Swedish! Now, I understand that I’m in Sweden and I don’t expect everything to be in English. But, the invitation was in English and it’s about diversity! Only 10 million people in the entire world speak Swedish. Only 2 of our group of 15 or so understood what was going on. They were bored too so we all scooted out early.

Luckily, they were serving dinner and drinks already so we were rewarded with no lines and plenty of places to sit. The after party was a lot of fun. Alexandros (one of the grad students in my department) was the DJ for the evening. There was also a live band. We had fun dancing for the rest of the night.