booth in Rockefeller Center stocked with books and pamphlets about labor relations, social insurance, public procurement, and the domestic chemical industry, half of them in Swedish. I gathered heaps of Swedish self-seriousness. One tome was called Love! You Can Really Feel It, You Know!, a title I can only hope lost something in translation. Love! is “a body of reference material produced by Skolverket (Sweden’s national agency for education) for use in Swedish schools . . . to provide an overview of how education in the arena of sexuality and human relationships works today.” The chapter headed “The Adolescent Years— Questions to the World” contains these “Questions from Boys”: “How big is the average dick?” and “How many holes does a girl have?” And under “Questions from Girls”: “When will my breasts stop growing?” When will my breasts stop growing? I heard that joke several times. But in Stockholm there’s a whole museum of not getting it. The Vasa was, as a guidebook put it, “the mightiest royal warship of her times.” The Vasa’s wreck was discovered in 1956, and she was raised almost intact after five years of work by diving crews. The hull was enclosed in a shed and sprayed with wood preservative for another seventeen years. Then restorations began, and finally, in 1990, the Vasamuseet opened, a noble, copper-sheathed, tent-shaped structure housing the ship and seven floors of displays and exhibits. Which is all well and good. However, the Vasa was launched on August 10, 1628, sailed 1,400 yards, and sank like a brick. “The mightiest royal warship of her times”—her times being August 10, 1628, from 4:30 until 5 in the afternoon. Not that the Swedes possess no sense of humor. “What does Norway have that Sweden doesn’t?” “ Good neighbors. ” The day after I visited the Vasamuseet, a crane was set up in front of my hotel. The crane was mounted on a truck bed and extended sixty or eighty feet. It was supposed to hoist some air-conditioning equipment onto the roof. The truck driver was maneuvering the crane in a slow, methodical Swedish manner. And the whole thing tipped over— Plopp (the name, incidentally, of a popular Swedish candy bar). The crane fell across four traffic lanes, through the roof of a shuttered kiosk, over a breakwater, and into the harbor. And I . . . I’m an American. I can’t help it. I laughed. The hotel manager was standing next to me in the lobby. She said,
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