Fancy restaurant!

Found in Uppsala. Restaurang Alexander. One of the KITCHIEST, most tasteless, ugly, revolting restaurants ever! Take a look at the photos and experience the ultimate lack of taste by yourself! In particular, look at the last photo.

Yes, this is supposed to be Venus of Milo!

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!

Arlanda airport

One of the most expensive and at the same time most ugly airports in Europe. Admire:

All photos are taken from here.

Stockholm Arlanda Airport has fallen nine places to 60th in a global ranking of major airports, over 40 places behind Helsinki-Vantaa - the leading airport in the Nordic region. 

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!

High fashion in Sweden

Swedes are well-known for being fashionable. Well, in their own sense. Which is very different from other European countries. They pay a lot of money for used clothes, or for clothes that look old and used. Also, young people like to dress like their grandfathers and old people like to dress like their granddaughters. I showed you what kind of underwear they like. Now I want to show you a typical women's fashion store:

 Notice how elegant they are and how graceful the design of this window is. Let us focus on some details. At the bottom of the blue dress, you see a collection of belts, in Swedish colors (blue and yellow), of course. This is surely the perfect place to display belts.

 Look at the white dress next to the mannequin. Pretty, isn't it? In fact, there is a mask attached to it. Let me explain its use. Swedish women of any age, from 10 to 90, will wear this dress easily. Non-Swedish women may have a problem with it. They may think that it's old-fashioned. (Clearly, they are not that advanced, yet.) This is why the mask is provided. It is given for free and it can be used by non-Swedish women who wear this dress; they can cover their face.

Last but not least, look at the faded picture of Marilyn Monroe. An excellent addition to the artistic window design.

Yves Saint Laurent had never visited Sweden. This is why his designs remained so primitive.

The fanciest patisserie in Upssala

Its name is Güntherska Hovkonditoriet and it's usually packed because it's one of the very few places where they make sandwiches with real bread (of course, they charge a fortune). But take a look at its entrance:

Yes, this dirty entrance, decorated with the filthy carpet and a broom is the entrance to the fanciest, most expensive cafe in Uppsala. Despite the fact that you are asked to pay 15 USD for a small soup or 12 USD for a loaf of bread, they can't find the money to keep it clean. In Sweden, we don't complain. We act ourselves. This is why the broom is there. Customers use it to clean the entrance while waiting in line!

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].

Lingerie shop

Swedish women are known for their beauty. We have the best blondes in the world. Blondes that know how do dress inside and outside. They shop their underwear in fashionable places like the one below. I would like to point out a few details below each photo

Here you see a delicate pair of underwear, for women with taste. They are displayed next to a fake rose probably picked up from a funeral shop decoration. Do not judge the size of Swedish buttocks by this display.

Same shop, different style, for slightly more delicate body types.

And here is the whole window. Notice, in particular, the red cloth. It's an old faded curtain which found a use in this window display. We surely like to reuse and recycle.

Do you think there is a resemblance to the grandmother's knickers below?

Windows of Sweden, an introduction

Anyone living in Sweden who has traveled abroad to, e.g., the UK, France, Germany, Italy, will surely have noticed that Sweden is stuck in some kind of time warp. Somewhere in the 60s, or 70s, and, sometimes in the 40s. Not bad, you'd say, for the nostalgic ones. This is true, except that the kind of things from the past they choose to show are things you'd rather not see again. Is there anyone who liked the 70s' shopping mall luncheonettes? Well, we, in Sweden, still do. We queue up for self-service, grab a plastic tray, go through a selection of jellies, pour coffee in a mug which has been bought at the local antikvariat, and have fun.

And then we go out for a walk and enjoy window gazing and shopping. Windows, in Sweden, are something else. We decorate our shops' windows with the most peculiar, most uninteresting, often dirty, items, collected at random from some backyard, go through our mormors drawers for old underwear which we think would make our windows cute, ask our neighbor to give us his grandson's teddy bears (his grandson is 53 years old now) which we can display as a novelty item on our window, or, if, say, we are running a travel office, we go down the lake, collect some sand, shells, pieces of rotten wood, and a few nails and create (so we think) an artistic window display. Imagine running a hairdresser's salong, charging a few hundred kronor for a haircut, and having the brilliant idea to decorate the window with white cloths, used in the past as towels, but, having developed several holes, are not useable any longer--except for window displays; and, to top it up, you toss in customer's clipped hair. Sounds unreal? Well, we do it, and we think it's cute, novel, playful, artistic, unique. No! I'm joking. Actually, we don't think at all. We just do it because we have to do something and never think about it again.

The great thing in Sweden is that people are not critical at all. We learn to be lagom, to be quiet, to never criticize our neighbors, friends, or enemies. Why, are we better than them? Certainly not. So, even if we do something stupid, like displaying teddy bears wearing our grandfather's knickers as decoration for our funeral business, nobody will make any negative remarks. At best, people will look (oh we certainly are curious), develop a negative thought, and then immediately suppress it.

Things are the way they are and will remain so. But it's nice to make some remarks, from time to time, to keep up with our European neighbors. We certainly think we're the best country in Europe (perhaps in the world?) and do not think that Paris has anything better to offer, shopping-wise at least, than Kiruna.

The purpose of this blog is to show the beauty of shops in Sweden. And, hopefully, it will expand to cover other images. And then we can let our European neighbors, inferior as they might be, judge how better we are. We will not, actually, admit openly that we are better, because we are lagom. But, tacitly, we know we are. Everybody knows that.

Most of the time, I live in Uppsala, and so I will have images from Uppsala. But later, hopefully, I will add to the collection. 

So, welcome to the Windows of Sweden. I hope you enjoy it.