Monday June 9, 2014 – Mora, Minnesota

Monday 9th we visited Mora, Minnesota. Mora is a small town with some 3,500 inhabitants and everywhere you turn, you notice the Swedish inheritance. Wikipedia.com and Princeton.edu says that Mora got its dalecarlian name in 1872 from a suggestion made by  a man called Israel Israelson who had come from Mora, Sweden one year earlier with his family.

Giant dala horse in Mora, MN

In Mora, we reunited with three wonderful language consultants from our recordings of 2011. We met at Freddy's restaurant (Do have a look att the "Välkommen"-sign at the web site!) where we could make your interviews in a separate room, while the restaurant was filling up with guests.

School buses by the Mora water tower

One of the most important aims of our 2014 trip has been to record some dialogues, that is Swedish Americans speaking Swedish to each other. You often change the way you speak when you talk to a stranger, like for instance a Swedish guest, than when you speak to a friend. Since the Swedish speaking American Swedes are "few and far apart" – as we are often told – this is not very easy to achieve.

In Mora we got to record two childhood friends talking about food, traditions and Swedish holidays. Thank you guys!

Of course there has to be a Dala clock in Mora, MN!

After the interviews, we got to taste the delicious food att Freddie's before we left for a good night's sleep at Brainerd Lakes on our way north.

/Maia Andréasson

On the road again

So... yesterday Henrietta Adamsson Eryd, Sofia Tingsell and I hit the road. Or maybe we hit the air. From Göteborgs Landvetter Airport via Schiphol Amsterdam to Minneapolis St Paul, we had some quite turbulent hours with Delta Airlines, and now we are back in Minnesota.

Henrietta and Sofia 

And Henrietta and Sofia once more

Our first trip to Minnesota was in 2011, and then we were five. It was Ida Larsson, Jenny Nilsson, Ben Lyngfelt, Sofia and I who made the very first field trip of the project Svenskan i Amerika (SVAM). On that trip we spent ten wonderful, but also literally exhausting, days meeting with so many nice and friendly American Swedes all over Minnesota that we did not have time to interview them all.

Ida, Jenny and Sofia went to Karlstad in the north of the state in 2011, and we decided to return there this year for a quick trip to see if we could meet with some of the guys that we didn't have time to interview when we were there last. And this time we have brought Henrietta, the first PhD student that is going to work with the new Swedish American material.

"Colleagues? Hm... How long have you known each-other?"

We spent a lot of time waiting in line yesterday. In Sweden things were easy enough, but when leaving Europe there's a lot of questions to be answered. For instance did we get the question how long we had known each-other on several occasions during the same interview. That's a tough question when you are not prepared.

And then there was the security check. We brought out all the electronic devices, videocameras, sound recording devices, computers, iPads, cameras, phones, liquids, hair bands, jewelry and stuff, and I even presented my ongoing knitting to the security people to make sure that the pins did not look funny and dangerous in the screening. There was some discussion, but they decided they weren't a threat.

We experienced a bit of sea legs after all the turbulence.

At Minneapolis StPaul we got a really nice rental car with only some scratches. With our GPS and some maps we are ready to hit the road!

Henrietta checking for scratches

/Maia Andréasson