Blog assignment No 2, Academic English: What is a typical Swede?

When I was born, I had a lot of black hair, dark eyes and I actually looked kind of a small Chinese baby. Pretty soon the black hair was replaced by blond and I turned out to be a blond and blue-eyed child. What made me so dark? My sister and brothers had not been that dark when they were born.

Probably my darkness was due to the heritage of my mother. My mother was also very dark when she was born - so dark that people called her an exchange baby. In contrast to me, she remained dark, however. Her features witnessed about a heritage from Finnish and Valloon immigrants. Maybe that's typical - we Swedes are a mixture of immigrants.

The first ones came from the south, when the inland ice was melting down 10 000 years ago. The first tracks of a homogenous population however remain from raindeer holders, probably the Samish population that now populate the northern part of Norway, Sweden, Finland and Russia. Thus one could say that all others, that mainly came from the south, were immigrants, just the same way as all the Europeans that originally in the 16th century invaded South and North America, that for milleniums had been populated by Indians, were immigrants.

Still I think I'm a "typical" Swede, although my former chinese boyfriend once said that I was like a typical Chinese girl and my present Arabic thinks I am like an Arabic woman....So what does that indicate? That we have a lot in common, we people of the world?

Am I really a typical Swede, and what is that? Does the culture form us? Is there only one kind of Swede that is typical? What are the tracks that bring us together? Is it the understanding through a common language, the acceptance of the manifoldness and the comprehension of some common values?

Maybe it was easier to imagine a few years ago that one was a typical Swede? Or are there just many typical types of Swedes.....?

I lived in Uppsala for 26,5 years and I felt like a refugee, thrown out on a clay field. After my mother had died, I bought my old school (see top of this article) south of Kristinehamn, in the parish Södra Råda, municipality Gullspång, county Västra Götaland and in the province of Värmland.....where I was born and near the village where we used to rent a small, red cottage, 'stuga' in the summer, right by the lake during the first twelve years of my life.

I was back and I will not move to live anywhere else again, more than perhaps temporarily. Doesn't matter how much Sweden Uppsala was - I'm from Värmland and I don't know how typical that is. Probably not very typical, while it is one of the most sparsely populated provinces in Sweden and there are twentyfour more.

This is kind of a poem I wrote to my Chinese boyfriend once.....please judge : Do you think I seem to be something that could be called a typical Swede or not?

"I like the original Swedish

and I am, after all, a child of it -

Of the cold winter nights,

of the spring sun,

of the dew in the summer grass,

of bare feet

on forest paths,

of chilly summer nights

with the fog covering

the lake surface,

waiting for the sun to rise,

Of the big ice,

of hunters struggling for life,

of the mystery and isolation,

of the poor

and of the solid,

of straw

and of lumber"