A day in the life, Swedish style!

What a day we had yesterday!

When we started this trip one of our goals was to involve ourselves in the culture and customs of other countries. Yesterday we got the full on Sweden experience. Let me see if I can break it down into useable parts.

A lot of Swedes use the summer weekends to get away from their daily life and the best way to do this, they think, is to spend some time at their Stuga, or cabin. Most of them only travel a small distance and most Stugas are very simple and small. We joined Roland and some friends at a Stuga that they use yesterday for breakfast, a tour of the area, and then a BBQ. Let’s start with breakfast.

Breakfast

We sat down to a very traditional and challenging breakfast. Traditional in the sense that we were served anchovies, half boiled eggs, liver pate, and some caviar in a tube….a favorite of the Swedish. I managed to try a bit of everything, but Jen and Sara struggled a bit. Sara is a vegetarian and won’t eat fish, and Jen is a “don’t talk about my food as if it walked the earth” person. The worst part was the anchovies. I’m not a fish person either and having one raw and staring at me was tough. The caviar in a tube is one of those items that Swedes get very worked up about. They can’t get it in very many places and, like Americans and their peanut butter, miss it when they travel. I can’t figure out why. We didn’t tell Sam what the liver pate was, we just put it on some bread and handed it to him. Our hosts were very polite and didn’t seem to take offense at our struggles. Oh yes…I forgot about the yogurt and cereal. That was the saving dish for the girls as it kept them busy and made them look like they were eating.

“The tour”

Roland, the father of our home exchange family on the fathers side, never misses a chance to take us “around”. We have been on a couple of his tours previously and we now know that this tour can be long and sometimes, well, let’s just call it wide ranging. Yesterday the highlights were visiting the Pippi Longstocking playground, the beach, and berry picking along side of the road. I’ll save one of the other stops for further down the page. Here are some photos of “the tour”

 

I was skeptical when we stopped the car in the middle of the road. Roland has a habit of driving his car anywhere he pleases, so I was ready for him to turn into a field and start chasing cows. Turns out he wanted to let the kids pick some flowers and wild raspberries. We all got into the act. It was fun, the setting was beautiful, and my favorite part is that it included food. More pictures.

The tour consisted of at least 3 other interesting stories, but I’m saving them for later. I am also saving “Dinner” for later. Trust me there is a reason dinner is in quotes. Even if I can’t describe it in writing, or it isn’t as interesting to others as it was to us, it deserves its own entry. I’ll leave you with some additional pictures from the Stuga and our group. Come back later or check www.homeroamers.com later for more on yesterdays adventures.