by Elizabeth R Mormer
This week I ran my first participant and learned some things about the Swedish IRB. Here it is common practice to give movie ticket vouchers (which are equivalent to almost $20!) as compensation for experiments, and participants are not used to filling out all of the paperwork for permission that us Americans seem to encounter on a daily basis. This is making it pretty easy to get participants scheduled–however getting them to actually show up for their appointments seems to be a bit more difficult. Originally I thought that Sweden would be a very timely, orderly place, however it is not common for meetings to begin a full 15 minutes after they were scheduled, which can be a bit frustrating. I suppose this leisurely pace goes along with the typical leisurely long European lunch.
Speaking of lunch–I can’t say that my vegetarian self was especially excited about Swedish meatballs and sausage, but Sweden has a lot to offer in terms of my favorite food group–carbs! There are cinnamon rolls EVERYWHERE, three different kinds of bread (“bröd“) are served with lunch at the university and every bakery and grocery store serves every kind of bröd a girl could imagine–from olive bread to “dense” bread to all sorts of things we have yet to put into google translate…It doesn’t stop there either– there are pastries that are gourmet by US standards in the 7-11s here–It’s dangerous, but awesome. The Swedes are also obsessed with lingonberries–which makes finding strawberry jam at the grocery store REALLY hard (especially when at first you don’t know how to say “strawberry jam”–it’s “jordgubbe” if you ever get stranded in Sweden), but they put these lingonberries in their bread (“lingonbrod” or something) and as jam, and I’m pretty sure they also use it as salad dressing…and may or may not use it as some type of gravy, as in on meat or potatoes. It is a frontier that has yet to be explored–Of course I’ll keep you posted on how it goes!