Oooh yeah, the summer of 1999 — a swirling vortex of euphoric chaos, riding high on a record-breaking IPO. The world’s talus teetered on the edge of a new millennium, and we hadn’t yet realized how deep the chasm we were about to fall into would be. In that blissful ignorance, I was shipped off to Stockholm with a mission, a per diem, and a suite booked at some swank design hotel in the heart of it all for the duration of my stay. I was ecstatic, seizing the opportunity just like my employer had swallowed a Nordic behemoth and I was there to glue together the pieces or perhaps just witness the carnage that was sure to ensue.
The old Lydmar Hotel on Sturegatan, with its jazz bar in the lobby and DJ in the lift, became my base of operations. Stureplan’s nightclubs, bars, restaurants, and private parties a few meters away turned into my nocturnal playground. The booze flowed like a river, and wealthy Swedes flaunted their riches with a peculiar Svensk ritual called ‘vaska’ buying two bottles of the most expensive champagne, drinking one while pouring the other out on the floor, creating a wasteful spectacle of excess and lunacy. My reality blurred into a drunken, sticky footed, tobacco smoke-filled neon haze.
My colleagues and I, a ragtag band of newly wealthy tech and design misfits, roamed the streets like marauding Vikings in khakis and sneakers, in search of our next thrill. One night, in a vodka-rhubarb-soda-soaked stupor, they decided to impart their native tongue upon me, a linguistic baptism by fire.
Krike, my linguistic sherpa in this drunken expedition, led the charge. As we emptied many a tumbler, we stumbled through the lexicon, him slowly pronouncing each word, sounding to my mind’s ear like the bastard offspring of Jeff Spicoli and The Swedish Chef: “bröd” for bread, “ost” for cheese, “skinka” for ham, “kycklingbröst” for chicken breast. Then, with a twinkle in his eye and a slurred chuckle, he introduced me to the pièce de résistance: “knullar” for sandwich. In our boozy delirium, we howled with laughter, bumbling into yet another establishment in our drunken Swinglish sojourn that would last months and cover half of the language.
For the rest of my stint in Stockholm, practically every lunchtime, I proudly marched up to sandwich counters, declaring, “Jag vill ha en ost och skinka knullar tack!” …And those Swedes, bless their diplomatic souls, served me with a smile, concealing their bewilderment behind a veneer of Nordic politeness enforced by Jante’s freaky Laws.
Fast forward nearly two years, my liver recovered and I’m back in the concrete jungle of New York, but this time living with my new bride, a Swedish beauty. We’re lounging on the couch, watching a DVD, when she pauses it and asks if I want anything from the kitchen. Seizing the moment to flex my linguistic prowess, in some deranged attempt to impress my lady with her own native language, I belt out my request for a sandwich.
She skids to a halt, her eyes wide with shock, and snaps, “You want a what?!” That was the moment the hammer dropped. My world tilted as she explained the word “knullar” and I quickly realized that I’d been strolling around Stockholm asking for a “ham and cheese fucker” every day for months without realizing it. Apparently, those mortified Swedes had been too polite to correct the babbling American lunatic.
And that, my friend, is the alcohol soaked tale of how I became a linguistic legend in Stockholm, forever etched in the annals of Swedish sandwich folklore earning me the nickname in Stockholm of “knullrufs”…
