Gothenburg, Sweden

First of all, sadly there is no dwarf/elf/gnome/fairy guarding all Swedish kitchens during the day who create mischief at night.  Second, beautiful bread is not a common day thing unless there is a bakery competition going on. Third, Swedes have no Swedish fish gummies and have absolutely no idea what you are talking about if you ask

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In Sweden it is only proper to eat candy and drink soda on Saturdays because they did a study where they gave a group of unlucky people only soda and candy to drink and eat and all of their teeth fell out! Oh dear! So, only Saturdays people, lesson learned.

The family I stayed with were obsessed with Borat-haha!

I bought a t-shirt with this logo. Sweden has a "knot violence" campaign going on currently.

Kelly and I arrived in Gothenburg rather late Friday night. The family we were staying with picked us up from the airport which was a relief because after a day of traveling it was nice to be chauffeured around.  That night, we ate salmon with a delicious pesto breading and then collapsed into our couch beds. The next morning, Mattias showed us the ropes with the tram system and then directed us to the tourist office where we loaded ourselves with brochures and maps. The first stop was of course to a candy stop where we stocked up. Next we headed up the main street window shopping but popping inside a store every fifteen feet or so to escape from the bitter cold. To my great delight, but to the displeasure of my already frozen body, it began to snow:

Walking up the street, Kelly pointed out a restaurant with the name Royal Kitchen. Well, of course I had to take a picture, and as I was doing so I noticed underneath the restaurant’s name was an elephant named Babar. Babar the elephants is a stuffed animal that my cousin Dan and I both received from Santa one year when we were probably five or six years old. I loved that elephant and felt even greater meaning when I took this picture:

Not the trolls I was expecting to find in a Swedish home haha!

Finally we made it to our original destination: the Museum of Modern Culture. This was a wonderful museum, granted a small one, with a wonderful section about world travelers, pilgrims, refuges, tourists, etc. One display was a pile of books and amongst the pile I found a travel journal with stories written in from visitors to the museum from all over the world in all different languages. One person wrote:

Midenhol jo de messce a legjobb.    :    Everywhere is good, but far away is best.

 Flip flop tree!

 Where will your next trip be?

I like it!

One Swedish tradition which I unfortunately did not have the time to experience (oh shucks!) was the traditional food consisting of a rotten fish sealed in a jar of liquid. The locals warned to never open this can inside of a building because the stench would last for weeks and everyone would hate you. Noted. For whatever reason this fish is apparently a huge delicacy and you just eat it right out of the can. Yuck!

If you don’t feel like eating them, they apparently make for a great trick on your friends as Daniel (Daniel and his girlfriend Matilda helped us to order a pizza when we had no idea what anything was) informed us. He put one of these jars out in the sun for a couple of days, opened it, and then put it into the ventilation system in the building he was working in. Pee-yew! Lucky he didn’t get fired!

Another interesting story Daniel and Matilda told us was how the Russians are obsessed with Swedish moose. Not only do they cut down the moose warning signs that line the roadways, but they also buy moose droppings! Weird! What they do with those droppings, I didn’t feel like asking as we were just about to eat our pizza.

 

In the afternoon, we made our way to IKEA. I have never been in such a huge store before. The first half consists of a warehouse where you pick up all of the items that you have decided you would like to purchase after viewing them on display on the second floor. The first floor has a small café but the second has a huge restaurant where Kelly and I had our very first Swedish cinnamon rolls (which are very popular). Walking through the displays I was tempted to buy everything, but of course I resisted. Besides, hardly any of it would have fit into my one suitcase coming home.

When we were in the mall we stumbled upon this exhibit of Swedish breads--apparently there was a bakery competition taking place. Gorgeous!

We tried to go on a tour of the Volvo factory, but one needs a reservation practically a month in advance to do so. Mattias still drove us to the factory (which is the size of Modesto I would say) and happily took a picture of us in front of the Volvo logo.

Before we parted I made sure I got the cinnamon roll recipe from Mattias and made his wife, who is Polish, promise to email me some of her recipes.

I was not looking forward to the return flight—not because we would be sleeping in the Rome airport when we landed—but because on the flight in I had thought my eardrum was going to burst because of the cold I was suffering from. I made sure to take some painkillers before I even reached the airport gates, but in the end my ears were fine. Yet, I of course had to have some kind of incident (after all if it’s not trenitalia, then it’s something else) in the airport. I was stopped in security and they completely emptied my incredibly over packed backpack until they found what they were looking for: my Swiss army knife. How that made it through the Roman security on my flight to Sweden I don’t know, but now I had to either surrender it, pay a huge fee to check my backpack, or mail it. I opted to mail it back to Italy. It would seem silly to go through so much trouble for an army knife, but you have no idea just how handy that little guy can be! So, I had to go back out through security to the little shop where I bought a very, very thin envelope and stamp. It should be very interesting to see whether or not that envelop will make it all the way here.

As I told my family, who were not too excited for me to sleep in an airport, the entire time I felt like I was back in high school on our band trip to Denver sleeping in the local high school’s gym. I was just waiting for Andy Merill to make some wisecrack joke about his empty sleeping bag, or for the loud snoring sounds of one of our chaperones who was conked out after herding 300 teenagers around for the day.

A bus, metro, and train ride later I was finally back in Viterbo, ready to sleep for the rest of time. I didn’t have much time because I needed to unpack and then repack for the following week in Southern Italy.