My first weeks of Swedish class at Lunds Universitet have been good in spite of the challenges. I went in search of easy audiobooks to listen to while I walk. Using the library app I searched Easy and filtered for audio. Here’s a photo is what came up! I thought it was an extremely strange coincidence (or maybe using my name somehow in the search?)
We’ve been hearing about the 1980’s punk band “Noice” since we arrived in Sweden. A few friends and one of Bryant’s colleagues sent us photos of posters advertising their new show in Stockholm and Malmö, but we couldn’t find anything more about them.
So we’ve been wondering if Noice means something in Swedish, or if it’s the name of a band member, or something like that. Most people I asked said it is just a cool spelling of Noise, because they were a Noise band (a particular style of punk rock, apparently)
I decided it was time to find out more about Noice so I asked my Swedish teacher, who is very into music, and he sent the reply (pictured below) in Swedish, which I ran through Google translate. He keeps insisting that we Kan Prata Svenska…I would not be taking this class if I could prata svenska, so that’s rather annoying. Especially when he writes by hand and the translation app can’t read his writing. Anyway, in this case he was replying by email.
Yikes! I’m really glad we didn’t go out and buy Noice tee-shirts or posters. I had been thinking that would make a good gift for Bryant. My teacher misunderstood my question about why Noice albums were the only result when I searched the word “Easy”… I didn’t think there was any connection to MN. Now I’m concerned that every time someone sees our unusual last name, it makes them think of white supremacists! Bad enough that we can’t enjoy using the norse runes alphabet since they’ve been co-opted by white nationalists and neo nazis. The teacher said wearing any kind of norse symbol in Sweden, like Thor’s hammar, is automatically associated with nationalist and extremist ideology. The class is made up mostly of immigrants to Sweden, so he tries to include helpful cultural information.
I guess we’re stuck with the Brooklyn Nine-Nine version of NOICE, which is NICE enough!
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