Tajik youngsters on Rudaki Avenue.

“Tajikistan - why does that place even exist?” was among my last thoughts before embarking on a journey to Central Asia’s most anonymous nation. If Tajikistan is a country, why not Utah, too?

A memorial Afghan tank overlooks a Dushanbe motorway.

Dushanbe has all the highlights you’d expect from a post-Soviet backwater capital: poorly constructed classical administrative buildings, a memorial Afghan war tank, broken fountains and slow-moving trolleybuses. As poor as it is, little has changed since the good old days of subsidies from Moscow - even the statue of “Iron” Felix Dzerzhinsky, founder of what would become the KGB, still stands along a street bearing his name.

A statue of Felix Dzerzhinsky, known for putting the "Iron" in "Iron Curtain."

Most Felix statues in the region have been torn down, as a large majority of the countries decided they’d rather not relive the Soviet experience. But, like Transdnistria, Tajikistan apparently hasn’t made up its mind just yet. After all, independence hasn’t been so kind to this neglected son of the communist project; the place was plagued by electricity outages throughout bitter winters, food shortages, broken infrastructure and economic irrelevance even before a civil war killed 50,000 and displaced five times more in the 1990s.

Emomali Rahmon, Tajikistan's president.

A rarity for the region, I only found one photo of Tajik President Emomali Rahmon in the center of the city, covering a dozen windows of the state university, condemning the students to the dark and cold. He was reassuringly ever-present in the villages, however. Note of advice to aspiring megalomaniacs: when you rely on foreign aid to feed your citizens each winter, it’s advisable that you not deify yourself in their neighborhoods.

This place borders mountains to the east and north, a war zone in the south, and sworn enemies to the west. One feels oneself at the precipice of the Earth, in the same way that inspired Alexander to give up on the region and head for the coast some 2,300 years ago. He was not the last emperor to arrive here and see no reason to continue; Tajikistan has been the forgotten edge of empires through the centuries. As a result, post-independence nation-building has netted a hero-leader and a poet-laureate who never actually lived on the territory and haven’t been around for more 1,000 years. The egregiously kitsch new statue of the former is referred to by my colleagues as the “Husband of the Statue of Liberty.”

Statue of Isma'il Samani, father of the Tajiks.

This was the last prize in the Great Game for control of Eurasia between Britain and Russia, the last land retaken by the Soviets after the Revolution, and the last capital on a three-day train ride from Moscow. No one really wanted Tajikistan, but the Russians ended up with it. And, as we learned in South Ossetia, Russia is willing to conquer anything that’s available, regardless of its intrinsic value.

What economic activity there is in the capital is centered on the outskirts of the markets downtown, where, as in every other old Soviet creation, people sell whatever they can scrounge up for whatever income it can generate. Highlights included wheelbarrows full of cheap Chinese textiles, pulled up on the sidewalks. Half the façade of the market was still smoldering from a recent fire.

Statue memorializing the Red Army's campaign against the Basmachi resistance.

Lining the blocks around the bazaar were “tourist agencies” which promised young men freedom in the form of one-way tickets to Russia, where they will find immediate enslavement at 80-hour/week skyscraper building site gulags. Daily flights to Russia bring back 300 deported able-bodied men in black shoes, black pants, and black jackets, with almost no luggage. Ask anyone in the region to describe a Tajik guy, and they will sketch out someone who rushed to a funeral immediately following a street fight.

Statue memorializing the Red Army's campaign against the Basmachi resistance.

One interesting statue is of Red Army forces, united with locals, tracking down the last of the Basmachi resistance to communist rule in 1924. A nice piece of revisionist history, it shows the locals helping the Soviets, when most evidence from the time suggests the locals couldn’t have cared less. This was shortly before the deportations began.

Open drunkenness is a sign of Tajikistan's instability.

Drunkards passed out in the street and children openly beating the daylights out of each other belie the underlying instability of the country. It is desperately overpopulated. Almost all national income derives from remittances, trafficking Afghan heroin to Russia, or from producing aluminum in the cancer-inducing smelter nearby. Its cripplingly irrational jet ski-shaped borders were drawn by Stalin, in order to split the people from their power base in nearby Bukhoro while meeting the population requirements of republic status within the USSR.

Worse, a 700-meter deep lake hovers above the plains, a product of earthquake-induced landslides. Seismologists predict another earthquake would free the water, creating a deluge of biblical proportions which could sweep away one hundred years of civilization in an afternoon.

A public bus in front of Dushanbe's presidential palace.

Foreign aid organizations continue their work here, as if their efforts could reverse the geographical, historical, cultural, or political realities that are keeping the country off the globalization trolley - as if anything could.

It’s possible that the best favor the international community could do for Tajikistan would be to spring its people from Tajikistan itself - give them seven million visas and one-way tickets to anywhere. You’re closed, Tajikistan. In the modern world, some places simply aren’t cut out to be countries.

(Photos and story by Myles G. Smith)

Georgia’s headline-grabbing South Ossetia isn’t the only Russia-supported breakaway republic giving Europe and the rest of the world a hard time these days. Located in Moldova on the Ukraine border, the separatist region of Transdniestria boasts its own government, its own currency and about 540,000 residents - but it really doesn’t want independence as much as it wants membership in the long-dead Soviet Union.

Guarded by hammer and sickle flags, a modern-day KGB, prominent statues of beloved Vladimir Lenin and, oh yeah, Russian troops with automatic weapons at the “border” between it and Moldova, Transdniestria is like a return to the days before VCRs and the common knowledge that corruptly-run communist dictatorships tend to end badly.

When I was in the impoverished capital of Tiraspol this summer, my nervous guide told me not to take pictures of the police, the military, the big cuddly statue of Lenin in front of the parliament building (from across the street was OK) or the pedestrian bridge that links banks of the Dniester River. To make up for it she directed me to a museum to buy postcards but they were out, so we tried inside an “art exhibit” (featuring bizarre works by local high school students) and, after the cashier banged around in the dusty back room, entered my purchases by hand into an ancient logbook and delivered a speech in Russian about other pamphlets that had obviously been on display since the 1950s, she handed over my very own pack of 24 postcards.

Panning through the collection outside, I was horrified to examine shot after blurry, drab shot - it would be an especially cruel-hearted joke anywhere else in the world. How charming that this communist breakaway region is unaware of the irony of offering uninspiring, bland postcards of a communist breakaway region. At least they managed to convey the place’s bleakness.

Here is a selection of the better ones I purchased, mixed in with some new ones I went ahead and designed for those lovely Transdniestrians.

Beverage: Champis.
Purchased in: Uppsala, Sweden.
Product of: Spendrups Bryggeri AB.
Alcohol: None.
Review: Screwing around with soft drinks in foreign countries is a fun hobby of mine, but it can also be a tremendous hassle - more often than not I come away from trying something for the first time with a sneer and a bad case of stomach cramps.

It’s not like my threshold for pain isn’t high. Anybody who has kicked back on Clement Street in San Francisco to enjoy a casual “grass drink” should know I’m well-equipped to suffer. But some of Sweden’s contributions to the carbonated beverage industry - chocolate banana soda and Svagdricka come to mind - immediately stacked up against some of the worst drinks I’ve ever had. Seriously, they were the stuff of nightmares, doctor’s visits and repeated allegations of fraud.

But then I had a Champis.

The sun came out.

And all of Sweden’s multifaceted soft drink sins were washed away in an angelic tide of golden-tinted goodness.

Ah, Champis. My one and only. What you see here in this picture is worth fighting for, my friends. It’s the stuff cults are born of, the be-all-end-all, the Alpha and Omega. It’s what Buddha was trying to make in 2,000 B.C. when he was tinkering around in the woodshed and ended up creating water.

What do we know about this sweet, refreshing godsend? It was perfected in 1918 or 1910, we can’t be sure, by a man who may or may not have been named Robert Roberts. It was among the first wave of soft drinks. The rest, as they say, is a mixture of wild speculation, unforgivable rumor and idle legend.

And it doesn’t matter why or when or where, anyway. Just mentioning Champis in this lowly blog is almost sacrilegious - Champis should have its own blog. It should write each and every day about why it’s so superior to anything else you’ve ever tasted, wanted to taste or will taste. It should be given the Golden Globe, the Pulitzer and the Nobel Peace Prize, all on its way to a new luxury estate in Monaco with diamond-lined driveways and heaping portions of Lobster Newberg served by an army of Marilyn Monroe clones every day at 11 a.m. sharp.

Hands down, Champis is one of the best drinks I’ve ever had in my life, even rivaling golden ginger ale, that shining example of American ingenuity that was all but exterminated by liquor-fueled Prohibition-era Americans dead-set on exercising their own shining example of how they stomp on anything wonderful. (For more on the Murder of Golden Ginger Ale see here and here.) Golden ginger ale is great, but it’s difficult to put anything above Champis.

I’m drinking it now and giggling - actually giggling. I haven’t been so merry since Orbitz floated to the surface of the soft drink scene in 1996.

Champis, I crown you a “King of Sodas.”

Good with: Anything.

For those of you who haven’t read the news about the collapse of the Soviet empire, I’d like to take a minute and explain that 1) the country we all grew up calling “Czechoslovakia” is officially gone and dead, and 2) the two countries that were born from its demise – the Czech Republic and, you guessed it, Slovakia – are both absolutely worth seeing in their own right. Especially their capitals.

Now, I’m sure you’ve heard how wonderful Prague is and how cheap it is and all that bullshit. Many of us know somebody who knows somebody who went to live there and now teaches English whenever he’s not drinking too much Becherovka and swearing about Gypsies. And that guy’s right. The fucking place rocks. With the proper guidance, it can be cheap, exhilarating, fun and downright otherworldly.

The only problem is that, judging from the ten billion tourists taking pictures of the main square’s Astronomical Clock every hour on the hour, it can get a little crowded. The cat’s obviously out of the bag. Way out of the bag. So far out of the bag you wonder if it was ever really in the bag.

So here’s a little secret that may come in handy:

Bratislava rules too.

Why? So glad you asked.

Reason #1 Why Bratislava Rules: You can have the old town square to yourself at night. That’s right, I said it. The quaint old town square of a European capital, at about 11 o’clock in the evening, and it’s pretty much just yours. Hello romance! Hello bottle of beer in a paper bag! Hello beautiful old buildings with appropriate lighting! Try it.

Reason #2: They appreciate naked women and frolicking. Look at this statue. It’s naked women frolicking. FROLICKING. That kind of thing isn’t supposed to fly. I can’t figure out which part is worse, the nudity or the happiness. Statues are supposed to be sober, tense and ugly. Military battles and monuments to disaster, that kind of thing. To make matters soooo much worse, this isn’t even located in some counterculture park or bastion of liberal values, but on the grounds of the presidential palace. WHICH IS OPEN TO THE PUBLIC.

While we’re on the subject of statues, I’m going to point out that Bratislava really seems to dig bizarre ones. First there’s one for the paparazzi, then there’s one for what appears to be a Keebler elf, and finally, there’s a dirty old man emerging from the sewers. Have you bought your plane ticket yet? What more could you need?

Reason #3: How about cheap food and beer? I know you and your cheap-ass buddies have heard that Eastern Europe is the mecca for inexpensive wining and dining, but news flash, Prague is expensive if you don’t know somebody local, Budapest will probably be expensive even if you do, and the U.S. dollar is sinking like a bowling bowl in a pond of chocolate pudding. Yet, yet….once upon a time in Bratislava (2008) a mid-twenties couple (my girlfriend and I) sat down for dinner with appetizers and six or seven beers apiece (OK, eight) at a fairly trendy rock and roll bar and the tab at the end of the night came to…..about $40. Tickets!

What more do you want? How about a castle?

How about a massive Soviet bridge leading to housing tracts across the river?

How about the rare feeling (at least in Europe) that you’re somewhere that’s still a work in progress?

Reason #812 to go? It’s close to everything. Bratislava and Vienna are about an hour from each other by train and as such are the closet capitals in the entire world. Budapest is only about four hours way. The Czech Republic, Croatia, even Italy are all easily within a day’s distance. Do it!

1. By virtue of my bus trip from Belfast to Donegal Town this year, I got the chance to enjoy a four-hour layover in Derry, the island of Ireland’s fourth largest city. Entering from the River Foyle side, I entered the walkway atop the centuries-old walls and climbed toward the center, as seen here.

2. Derry is reportedly rare amongst European cities in that its defensive walls have never been breached. The grid design of the city, which leads to a central square called “the Diamond,” was much copied by the British colonies of North America. Here you see one of the historical cannons left on the walkway. I don’t think the Huns ever got anywhere near Derry.

3. The Bogside neighborhood of Derry was a hot spot during the Troubles, a period of confrontation between various nationalist and unionist movements and organizations which lasted from the late 1960s to the late 1990s. The conflict had a number of root causes, including, but not limited to, British rule of the six counties that are now considered Northern Ireland. Here a young Bogside nationalist readies a petrol bomb for the British troops.

4. The Bogside, a nationalist Roman Catholic community, is festooned with murals and monuments recounting important incidents in the violent past of both the neighborhood and nationalist movement. These murals are painted on the sides of regular apartment blocks where ordinary people live. Though these murals are painted by locals and serve the principles of locals, they are also designed to be tourist-friendly – many sights have small plaques explaining the significance of what you see.

5. The Museum of Free Derry is a small but very well designed center that focuses on the history of Derry and the first decade or two of the Troubles. It is located within sight of the “Bloody Sunday” marker. Here you see the bloodied shirt of a man killed by troops that day. The man’s brother was operating the museum on the day I visited, and spoke with me at length about the Troubles, violence in Ireland and how things have changed and stayed the same.

6. “Bloody Sunday” occurred in Derry on January 30, 1972, when British troops opened fire on crowds at a Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association march and reportedly shot 26 protesters, killing 13 instantly, 6 of whom were minors. Subsequent inquiries held few troops responsible (though the results of a second inquiry are still due later this year) and witnesses said none of those shot had been armed. Music fans might note that in addition to U2’s immortalizing the incident in “Sunday Bloody Sunday,” Paul McCartney recorded a song soon thereafter called “Give Ireland Back to the Irish,” which was promptly banned by the BBC.

7. One of the first confrontations during the Troubles, the Battle of the Bogside occurred in August 1969 when police forces tried to break up nationalist protests during a unionist parade and rioting ensued. It had already been a violent year. This sign marked the beginning of an autonomous section of Derry which, thanks to barricades and armed defense, had become off-limits to British troops and police after a civil-rights march was attacked in early January. The area repelled invasion for more than three years. Finally, in 1972, thousands of British troops were deployed to take back the area and effectively end Free Derry. The sign still stands.

8. What appear at first to be traffic signs on a side street are actually nationalist mementos of the Troubles. “RUC” stands for “Royal Ulster Constabulary,” the Northern Ireland police force loathed by the nationalists who accused it of widespread discrimination and brutality.

9. On the top is a “Sniper at Work” sign. During the Troubles, and especially in rural areas like South Armagh, this sign was posted by the IRA to reemphasize the danger posed to British troops along specific routes. The IRA used signs a lot, even sometimes using “Bomb Ahead” signs to divert locals before explosions. Trying to remove an intimidating “Sniper at Work” sign could have fatal consequences itself, as many were booby-trapped with explosives.

10. Although the violence of the Troubles has largely given way to political bargaining between nationalist and unionist organizations, the issue of a united Ireland is hardly a thing of the past, as graffiti throughout the Bogside attests. “RIRA” stands for “Real Irish Republican Army,” a splinter group from the Provisional Irish Republican Army that was formed in 1997 by members disenfranchised with brokered peace deals.

Beverage: Chocolate Banana Soda

Purchased in: Uppsala, Sweden.
Product of: Premier.
Alcohol: None.
Review: I can’t think of a better example of the kind of thing you must buy if you’re in a foreign grocery store. Chocolate banana soda? Hell yes. The fact that this is apparently a “Limited Edition” makes this drink awesome, but fact that the brand is billed as the “Original Taste of America” transforms it into something legendary. And yes, it tastes exactly like you’d imagine – a powerful but awkward union of chocolate, banana and carbonation (why is it green?). It’s just as nauseating as you’d expect – and worth every penny.
Good with: Maybe rum? I don’t know. Not much.

I have an inordinate affection for Helsinki. The last time I was there was only for a night and my girlfriend and I spent most of it drinking local beer in a little pub before retiring to our room at Omenahotellit, the Finnish hotel chain which relies entirely upon numeric codes and surveillance cameras because it has no regular staff. No clerks, no checking in, no front desk – it was great. I hope the idea catches on at every hotel, motel and hostel between St. Petersburg and St. Paul.

Anyways, something about the city really made an impression on me, which was unexpected since nobody treats Helsinki like a serious contender in a league where Stockholm ranks as heavyweight champ. Plan a trip to Northern Europe and you’ll get a lot of grief if you pass over Stockholm or Oslo, but odds are nobody’ll even mention Helsinki, and if they do it’ll be in a “If there’s enough time” sort of way. Face it, Finland – your capital has less than 600,000 people. It’s cold. It’s bleak.

And I absolutely love it.

Why? I really don’t know. I could say it’s because the people are attractive and well-dressed, but that could be said for all of Europe. I could point out that I like northern cities which feature ports integrated into the urban landscape, not blocked off and isolated like they always seem to be in the states, but Scandinavia is full of them. I guess what gets me is the little things. The quirky little bars around every corner. The massive set of stairs leading up to Tuomiokirkko in Senate Square. The unsettling appearance of so much of its architecture. It’s a pretty city, sure, but it’s got a strange type of good looks.

Don’t tell the Finns, but I guess the city also tugs at my heartstrings because its proximity to Mother Russia gives it an exotic taste my Cold War upbringing taught me to fear. I haven’t been to Russia yet, so most of my observations are probably still inextricably linked to stereotypes, but some of Helsinki’s streets seem like a primer course in Soviet architecture, many of its inhabitants look more Russian than Swedish, and the Finnish language sounds a hell of a lot more like East than West.

Our most recent trip to Finland lasted less than two days. We took Viking Line’s Mariella cruise ship from Stockholm to Helsinki (round-trip, including two nights’ quarters: $60 per person) and shared a cabin with a couple friends on the overnight voyage. I had never been on a cruise ship before and it was scandalously fun. I ate prime rib, drank Lapin Kulta and loitered around the blackjack table in the casino. I watched the sun set over the Baltic Sea from the very top of the ship, slept the night away in the very bottom and stumbled onto the deck in the morning just as the ship eased through the Kustaanmiekka strait into the island-dotted Helsinki harbor.

We only had about six hours in Helsinki, but we made good use of the time. We visited the Temppeliaukio Church, which is carved out of rock; we hiked to the bizarre Sibelius Monument; we snapped obligatory photographs of the stone men statues outside the central railway statues; we visited the postal museum.

On the way back we hit the duty free shops in the cruise ship, where I stocked up on Norrlands Guld, a sampler pack of Swedish Brännvin and some 120-proof vodka.

Back upstairs, all of the restaurants and pubs were decked out in a California theme – Anchor Steam was everywhere, as were American singers and photographs of San Francisco and other Golden State staples.

Later in the night the casino showcased a song-and-dance show. As the music began pumping and the crowd clapped along, an unseen announcer welcome us all to California, “Where dreams sometimes come true!”

Soon the stage was flooded with guys and gals dancing with tie-dyed boogie boards and singing along to The Beach Boys’ “Surfin’ USA.” After a while I noticed that the lyrics sounded English but weren’t comprised of real words. No matter, the crowd ate it up. I did too, until it was time for bed, the ship tugging me toward the Central European Time zone all the while.

When morning comes we’re somewhere above Skellefteå. A railroad employee breaks the night-long intercom silence to announce an upcoming stop and I slide sleepily back into the rhythmic sound of train against track. We’ve been plodding north for 12 hours. Outside our cabin window everything is very cold and very still and I see the first peak of light blue light creeping slowly up the side of the fishbowl.

The train slows to a stop. Another empty station. Some people get off for good and others only for a chance to smoke, the latter taking a gamble because the train could leave in 20 minutes or 30 seconds, no one knows. The night before my two fellow travelers and I spent nearly a half-hour drinking wine on the empty platform of an unknown city, joking about breaking a bottle over the engine car to christen our safari, but this morning I barely jump back up the stairwell before the train starts rolling again.

Long-distance trains in Finland have smoking cabs.

This isn’t Finland.

I go to the restaurant car for a coffee but they can’t break my bill and tell me to wait a half-hour. The clerks appear to be well-rested. They probably got on at the last stop. I’ve had four hours sleep and so I envy them. Outside at the next stop men in bright orange jumpsuits shovel snow off flatbeds with hand-held plows. I don’t envy them.

We get off at Murjek and are pleasantly surprised that the tiny cantina not only sells coffee, but offers it in real mugs you can take outside while you wait for the bus to bring you across the Arctic Circle.

On the bus something typically Swedish happens. In the middle of nowhere, without a house or building in sight, amidst snow drifts and frozen lakes, at a barely noticeable bus stop, somebody gets on. This happens all the time in Sweden. People get on the bus at the most isolated stops, inexplicably popping up miles from the nearest city or settlement as if they just climbed out of the ground to catch the bus. Stranger from a strange land in tow, we rush past the Polcirkeln sign and onto the top of the world.

Soon enough we’re in Jokkmokk, our destination, a small little frontier town in Swedish Lapland, a pastel outpost with a population of 3,000 or so. For more than 400 years the town has hosted the Jokkmokk Winter Market, an annual event which 1) provides opportunities to sell handicrafts and stock up on necessities for the Sami, the indigenous northerners whose territory stretches across Russia, Finland, Sweden and Norway, and 2) generates tax revenue for the Swedish government.

My girlfriend and I dump our gear at the apartment we’re renting while our friend heads over to the high school that’ll be his home for the weekend, then we meet up and hit the town. Finally here – I’d planned this trip for months because it afforded the only excuse I could find to see northern Sweden in the dead of winter short of skiing or stalking the Northern Lights, neither of which seemed to justify 15 hours of travel each way.

I’m not disappointed. The market is fantastic - where else can you stock up on bear sausage, elk salami and fox hats while perusing aisles of gorgeous homemade Sami knives and mounds of fox, mink and seal pelts? Where else do reindeer - with their meat, pelts and racing abilities - serve so many human needs?

Out-of-towners swig vodka and meat is cooking everywhere; vendors hawk country western CDs, concentrated juices and socks, gloves and slippers, while the Sami, festooned in their traditional Day-Glo colored garb, wander from stall to stall. Everybody comes with their best furs on. The market shuts down more or less when the sun sets.

Nights, we soon learn, are best spent in the complex of teepees that serve as downtown Jokkmokk’s drinking hub during the market weekend. Hundreds of people gather inside the tents to drink 55-crown Norrlands Gulds and sway to American rock and Sami tunes. There’s mud and ice underfoot and massive heaters that look like jet engines blow hot air around the clock.

The market is known to beckon tens of thousands of visitors to this rural community but the night festivities appear to be popular amongst the locals themselves; almost everybody I meet is from Jokkmokk.

Outside the teepees a Sami girl asks me for a cigarette in Swedish and gets halfway into conversation before I apologize and tell her I only speak English; another woman, a nurse actually, tells me the Sami are now proud but not too long ago – “like your Indians” – were heavily stomped upon by the powers that be, and that many only drink during this festival weekend; several people tell me how warm it is compared to usual; a guy about my age ridicules the overkill police presence (there were three cops outside a tent) and says there won’t be any fights – “If there is a fight, it takes place behind somebody’s home, where the police cannot see.”

At one point a young local blonde puts her hand up the back of my five layers of shirts and shakes her head adamantly in the Arctic air. “Really? You don’t mean Brad Pitt?” my girlfriend asks.

“No, I mean Steve Buscemi,” she says, pronouncing it BOOSHemy in her Swedish tilt and rubbing my back furiously as she does so. “He is much hotter than Brad Pitt.”

Her boyfriend, easily seven years my senior, nods from across the walkway but says little. All around us revelers are drinking and laughing over fire pits and lit cigarettes, and the queue to pass security and enter the teepees is snaking through the lot. “You should write him a letter,” my girlfriend offers. “He’d probably sponsor your American citizenship.”

Another friendly conversation begins as a group of teenagers encircles my girlfriend and peppers her with questions about covering Dropkick Murphys for a music magazine. They can’t believe they’ve found a kindred spirit, let alone one who has seen the band live and enjoyed special access at their shows. When they find out she’s seen Flogging Molly too, they all but fall to their knees in the snow.

“Why did you come here? How did you hear about Jokkmokk?”

The teenagers make us promise to meet them at a local drinking hole after the teepee nightlife dies down. But we don’t. It’s important to have your appetite whet.

The next afternoon we’re walking toward the market when a massive, low-set automobile eases into my peripheral vision and begins rumbling up the snowy street toward us, moving slowly like it’s stuck in a primitive stop-action movie.

We’re above the Arctic Circle.

We’re 16 hours by train from Stockholm, the only sincerely major Swedish city.

We’re in the cold middle of nowhere, in a part of the world only shared by eight countries, in a part of the world only two people I’ve ever met have been to, and coming right up the street toward me is an early 1970s Cadillac.

The windows are fogged up but I can tell it’s full of people. I stare as it rumbles past, forgetting to take a picture though my camera hangs about my neck. What the hell is a Cadillac doing here? As it passes we realize it’s not only an early 1970s Cadillac, it’s one with old-style plates from Oregon, United States of America.

We’re so far from the Pacific Northwest I don’t know which way is quicker – up through Alaska, across the Bering Strait and northern Russia, or across the states, onto a ferry and up through Europe to the Arctic. It turns out of view and we hit the market, where we buy bear meat, elk meat, reindeer pelts and Sami handkerchiefs. But for the rest of the night, I’m only thinking about the Cadillac. How is it here? What’s the story?

Later that night a Sami girl outside the teepees invites me to a traditional dance. For whatever reason, I’m absolutely certain that I’ll find out the story of the Cadillac if I go. So I don’t.

The idiosyncrasies of everyday life in a foreign country keep things fresh even when the experience of being there has become routine. Some of Sweden’s quirks can be aggravating, like the fact a 20-minute ride to downtown Uppsala on a public bus costs nearly $5 and finding a decent cheese burger takes an act of God. But more often than not, the funny little differences I find every day please me immensely and remind me that I’m a long ways from home.

Take this box of Swedish matches. This is undoubtedly the coolest box of matches I have ever seen, and having spent a fair amount of childhood living less than an hour away from one of the biggest match manufacturers in the United States, I’ve seen a lot. “Solstickan” is translated literally into “sun-splinter,” and the box emphasizes that Nordic sense of style that never ceases to delight me – look at the damn thing, it’s beautiful.

Putting its aesthetic appeal aside, I don’t think I’ve ever seen a child on a box of matches before, nonetheless a bumbling, slightly disheveled, blank-faced young zombie who appears to be marching directly toward the sun like a barefoot automaton sent to obliterate the universe. I mean really, what the hell is going on here?

Putting a kid on a book of matches back in the states would be like putting photos of car accidents on six-packs or dead dogs on bottles of antifreeze. Concerned parents would tell us it just shouldn’t be done and before you knew it Congress would be meeting after hours to enact legislation and people would be marching in the street and the courts would be clogged with lawsuits regarding children who burned down the house because they thought that what was what they were supposed to do.

Not the Swedes. None of the children appear to be burning down houses and most of the adults seem to have other things on their minds, like maintaining a prosperous economy, ensuring Sweden remains the most gender-equal country in the world and perfecting their world-renowned stance on peace and human rights.

Kids here appear to be loved and cared for, just without as much of the pomp and circumstance you’ll find back in the states and without as many of the restraints. Last time I checked, kids back home weren’t allowed to buy glue or spray-paint at Wal-Mart or go see No Country For Old Men without their parents until they hit age 18, which is when kids from Sweden and the rest of Europe begin hitting the clubs and pubs on Friday nights.

Which makes hiding the matches seem sensible, come to think of it.

Item Description: Foto Grafi magazine, September 1966.

Details of Acquisition: Some day I will have a dimly lit private parlor on the top floor of my estate where I will sit to ponder existence or gather friends together to debate the origins of mankind or trade war stories about European public transportation. I will adorn the inside of my parlor with red-leather couches, custom-made globes, trapdoors leading to bourbon fridges and handmade Iranian rugs. I will host rowdy blackjack games using arrowheads for currency and talk to my $10,000 stuffed Kodiak bear over homemade espresso drinks in the morning about the weather or crucial financial decisions. On the wall above my antique mohagany desk, where I will sit in my bathrobe on holidays smoking a pipe and surveying the condition of my lake, I will have three things framed: my Bachelor’s Degree in Journalism diploma, a certificate from the California unemployment office asserting I can type 72 words per minute, and the cover of this magazine.

Cost: 10 SEK ($1.60). Uppsala, Sweden.