How to learn Swedish in 1000 difficult lessons

A random passerby, looking up into a random window at Odengatan on Wednesday, might have been surprised to see a man playing a piano with a parrot on his shoulder.

That man would've been me.

The parrot would've been one Oliver, whose personal human slaves are the children's book author and his boyfriend the sea captain, who are on holiday in the Canary Islands. (Are there any Parrot Islands anywhere? That would've been a more appropriate place to vacation, I think. Although since they left the parrot behind, perhaps not.)

Things started out so well with Oliver.

But not an hour after the piano playing - he sang happily along to my Mompou Cançó i Dansa V with a sound like air escaping from a balloon - the situation had deteriorated. He was running along the back of the sofa in the TV room, free as a, um, bird, when for no reason I could discern, he jumped at me and bit my fingers.

Two days and three more nasty, bloody bites later (not to mention the chunk he took out of the husband), we have achieved a truce: Oliver stays in the cage, and we give him fresh water and food. We'll see how much things progress before his slaves arrive back to take him home.

The Swedish words for the day are papagoja and kris. They mean parrot and crisis. If you put them together into one word, you get papagojkrisen, which means the parrot crisis.

- by Francis S.