Lära sig genom att läsa

I'm still on my Swedish kick, by the way, which I expect to continue at least until I finish Let the right one in. (Not sure when that will be, since I was forced to abandon my chapter-on-a-day approach when they suddenly exploded in length.) I made it all the way through Colloquial Swedish sometime last week and lack a good intermediate text.

To fill the gap, I have the curious Nordisk Språksekretariat publication Språken i Norden (a.k.a. Sprogene i Norden, Språkene i Norden). It's trilingual, with the chapters on Swedish, Finland-Swedish, Finnish, Sami, and (surprisingly) Icelandic written in Swedish. The bit on Norwegian is in Norwegian and everything else is in Danish. The level is about right; the individual language descriptions don't go into much more in depth than a Wikipedia article, but given the familiarity of the subject and most of the terminology, I can pretty much read them without resorting to dictionary. (The chapter on Finlandssvenska was an exception; several of the more technical passages kicked my ass.)

I have a friendly Swede helping me with specific questions. When I asked for suggestions for reading material, he came up with newspapers, but I've found I don't really enjoy those. Most of the articles don't make sense unless you're already familiar with local current events, and they all assume a fairly sophisticated knowledge of cultural assumptions. I need something which explains those to me. What I'd like most is to find a Swedish Ralf König, but I'd be satisfied with a decent volume of contemporary short stories.

New on the block

You know what they say, that God never shuts a drive-thru except that He opens a hot dog stand. Or something. Anyway, my disappointment at the replacements for Pita Pete's and JK Sweets has been mitigated somewhat by the appearance of two new eateries: Cafe 527 and Hummingbird Kitchen. The former is an Asian-fusion café and the latter an honest-to-goddess food truck. I know! In Cook County! I almost walked right past it thinking it was just another workmen's vehicle.

So how are they? I DON'T KNOW! Unfortunately, I was with a co-worker who apparently had set her heart on the Szechuan broccoli at Joy Yee. And though she gamely checked out both alternatives, she couldn't be convinced to buy in. To be fair, she doesn't eat meat and neither was exactly crazy with vegetarian choices. All I remember seeing at the café was single vegetable sandwich, and the featured offerings at Hummingbird were caesar salad, steak tacos, and chicken breast.

What's wrong with that list? Seems majorly uninspired, though with quality ingredients all those things would be worth eating. Cafe 527, however, is jumping on the Korean taco bandwagon, which has taken long enough to reach this far. I find their choice of location curious, however: they are literally next door to Joy Yee. Is their cooking good enough to overcome the small size of their menu--especially when the place next to them hands you a laminated Book of Mormon-length list of dishes? Something tells me I'd better make a return trip soon if I intend to find out.