Herr Åkerbär vs. Inner Moose

Years ago, on my first night in Sweden, I lay awake with a mystery on my mind. I’d just arrived from Canada as an exchange student and was staying with a host-family. The whole experience so far—landing down amidst a tidy landscape spotted with candy-red houses, the melodious gobbledygook of the language bandied about me, the snack put before me (cheese shavings on giant crackers called ‘hard-bread’)—had been surreal. Now, though exhausted from the long journey, I lay sleepless in the pale light of the near-midnight sun considering what my host had just told me in her excellent English. Don’t be scared if you hear noises in the night, she’d said, laughing, as I padded up the stairs to my new room. There are moose in the walls.
I smiled and nodded back, as if I had understood, then spent the next hour or two trying to determine what she’d meant. Was this a euphemism, perhaps, to warn me of some family member’s snoring? Or was it some untranslatable Swedish idiomatic expression for something—maybe the typically nervous energy one feels in foreign surroundings. For example—
Herr Andersson: You’re not enjoying Zanzibar, Herr Åkerbär?
Herr Åkerbär: I’m afraid not. To be honest, there are moose in the walls.
Nearly delusional in my jet-lagged state, half-dreams of a bull-moose antlering his way through the flowered wall-paper plagued my attempts to sleep. I’d seen too many images of majestic moose in connection to Sweden to dismiss the woman’s statement as a mere mispronunciation. And as my Swedish vocabulary consisted of Hej, smörgåsbord and ombudsman (the last two already adopted into the English language), it took a moronic amount of time to guess the real meaning of her comment. And all this trouble from something spoken in my own language.

That was the first misunderstanding in a year that would be characterized by rough guesstimates as to what was going on around me. Understanding Swedish conversations felt at first like being given four small cardboard puzzle-pieces (3 blue, 1 orange) and asked to describe the finished 9,000-piece puzzle they formed. During that year and the years since I’ve returned to Sweden for Graduate work, I’ve been metaphorically filling in sections of the puzzle.
Learning some Swedish helped of course, but misunderstandings aren’t only grounded in language. Long after being served a meal in a restaurant which matched approximately my idea of what I’d ordered, I still arrived an hour late for important meetings (‘halv tre’= 3:30 pm, n’est pas?), mistook silence for agreement while engaging in Swedish conversation, and rattled the bolted doors of ‘Systemet’ in vain on a late Saturday afternoon when I realized the guests might like some wine with their dinner.
In other words, even after the strings of sounds developed into meaningful messages, I’ve still been left clueless with regards to societal forms and norms. Living in a foreign country one does well to get comfortable operating with only a basic, half-understanding of one’s world—and making plenty of mistakes. This can be frustrating, but it’s not always a bad thing. For one thing, here in Sweden you can always score the last piece of strawberry cake (which your Swedish pals have been conditioned to believe is radioactive; watch them, they won’t take it). And while cultural misunderstandings and mistakes sometimes feel detrimental, most, like the moose in the walls, only ever turn out to be mice.

Gwendolyn Haevens, originally from Canada, is a Graduate Student studying North American Literature at the Uppsala University English Department.