AN OUTSIDE VIEW

I am in Uppsala again, trying to learn Swedish. I am not quite sure why I want to do that, so if anyone asks me I say, "just for fun - bara för roligt". Anyhow, it is interesting and Uppsala is a very pleasant place to spend the summer in. Probably the winter too, though apparently it gets very cold and the days are short and often dark, which makes people depressed. The course is run by an organisation called Uppsala International Summer Sesssions (UISS). You can find out more about it on their web site in the unlikely event of your wanting to learn Swedish. Frankly, the language is not a lot of use, with only about 10 million people speaking it in Sweden and Finland. It is sufficiently similar to Danish and Norwegian to allow you to read the free newspapers like Metro and the magazines they give out on the trains, in those languages also. But if you want to be able to speak to as many people as possible, learn Spanish or Chinese instead, or even Portuguese. But for me, this...