There is nothing quite like getting a text message 12 hours before your flight notifying you that your flight has been cancelled. Just that, nothing else. Cancelled and… nada. Then, you spend 20 minutes trying to get onto the airlines website (it keeps crashing (likely due to the amount of sudden desperate traffic) and finding out that there is a depending airline strike affecting multiple Scandinavian airlines, and also, online rebooking is down. Also, online customer support is down. Also, apparently you can be charged for calling customer service in this country – BECAUSE WTF? So, I spent 20 minutes on hold waiting to talk to the airline, 30 minutes on chat with the car service and another 6 stomping my feet and contemplating why I ever try to leave my house, before delaying my flight by one day and being fairly assured that if I didn’t hear from the airline by 8am the next day, then I would probably be able to fly out the day after… And, luckily, I was.
One other note, the 40 minutes on chat were for nothing. I still got a 3:30 am wake-up call from my driver who was 30 minutes outside of London (and 30 minutes away from picking me up) confirming that I was ready to go for my originally scheduled car service pickup. I still feel pretty bad about that part. I doubt anybody reimbursed him for his time or gas on that day… But, oh well. Moving on.
I arrived in Sweden to find a beautiful woman awaiting me just outside security. It was just like Love Actually. Complete with hugging. Or something like that. Karyn and David were awaiting me at the smallish and therefore lovely Gothenburg (Göteborg) airport, which reminds me a lot of PDX. Smallish, easy loading/parking, and excellent outdoor statuary, and only a short drive from your nearest McDonalds? Yeah, it’s weird when those pop up over here, but they do. Sweden actually reminded me a bit of Oregon a few times throughout the visit. It’s very green and foresty. Not flat, but not exactly rolling hills, lots of fields and grey cloud cover and the houses have something of that blocky, big windowed, certain styles of siding, coastal Oregon style. Although more candy colored; Karyn says the houses there remind her of Lego houses, because they like the bold and the primary colors, but there’s a fair amount of the bright pastels as well.
We started the trip with about a dozen roundabouts on the way home and amazing gyro pizza. The pizza was wonderful, the roundabouts might be safer and more environmentally friendly, but damn they are nauseating, especially when there is one almost every block!
It was a long trip, so I’m not going to get overly precious about chronology here, but as follows are some highlights.
We took a wander through downtown Gothenburg and saw gorgeous and/or nifty buildings, including an opera house designed to look like a ship, another called the ‘lipstick’ building (red top floors, white middle, red lower) (yes, it was weird) and a gorgeous old factory with an aged copper roof and shutters. The copper roofs are a big thing in Sweden and I am a HUGE FAN. The green color is vibrant without being garish and is usually in such wonderful contrast to the buildings, whether they be light stone/paint, or brick. Gothenburg feels much more modern than the UK, partially because it is, but also because of the scale. It’s just not – cramped – like so much of England has felt. It’s also very clean, there is that tidy, moneyed feeling that some places have.
There is no Karyn and David without pinball, so of course the requisite time was spent in the pinball arcade, but also watching the world championships on a live streaming service. J Despite how silly that may sound, it was actually kind of fun to watch that way – they had a camera on the player, another on the play field and a third on the score board, so you actually got a lot more information about how it was going then I can ever manage to gather while watching it live. Naturally, Karyn won everything… Or something like that, accuracy be damned. Also to be noted, from the food shack next door, I bravely tried the Halv Special (half a special)’ – a hot dog in bun buried under huge amounts of mashed potato and something called shrimp salad, with fried onions, and a drizzle each of ketchup and mustard. I try to always be game for embracing the local food style, bu yeah, I wouldn’t have been sorry to miss this one, although I bet Matt would have loved it. Eew. However, I felt very differently about the Swedish meatballs, fries and lingonberry sauce I had there a few days later. MUCH YUM.
Ullared. How to describe Ullared? Ullared was described to me as a sort of Disneyland of discount shopping, a Walmart mecca (please don’t strike me dead for that one)… It’s a compound of shopping all by itself in the-middle-of-nowhere-Sweden and people actually take vacations to visit this place. However, I didn’t think it was that nuts. We went, largely for my own amusement, but also so Karyn could stock up on some new house to fill/furnish necessities. This place was probably double the size of a Walmart or a Costco. And, it had some of everything. Mostly at wonderful discounts. And, was as crammed with people as a Costco on a holiday weekend Saturday. It was by no means terrible, but it was definitely a bit zoo-y. The store also features its own salad bar restaurant, its own sports bar restaurant. And, is then surrounded by a bunch of other outlet stores around it: crafting, sporting, gardening, adult, book, and a couple others I don’t remember. As much as I’d like to pull something salient out of the experience, I’ll just say, I got some of the best bobby pins I’ve ever used in my life here and it was a fun day out, if not culturally educational in any way. Oh, and I got build-them-yourself Tomte Dolls which I will assemble before Christmas. *Note: I’m gradually accruing us small things that will someday make our Christmas tree an impressively multicultural experience, and this makes me incredibly happy. On our drive there we stopped to see a beautiful country church that was perched on a bit of hill and surrounded on three sides by fields of sheep. It was adorable, painted lots of pretty colors and with lots of tall pointy turret-y roof elements and I like to think that makes up for the lack of culture having discount shopping outing.
Last but not least…
Matt arrived from his conference on Friday evening, and we were scheduled to leave mid-day on Sunday, so Saturday was our one big tourist it up day. And, Karyn and David totally picked us a winner. Marstrand is a beautiful little island in southern Sweden, a short drive from Gothenburg and featuring ridiculous amounts of charm and scenery. We walked along the coast, including through the ‘eye of the needle’ (a very narrow walkway between very tall rocks) and through some little foresty paths… And, then COAST. Not like beach coast, instead like giant, prehistoric, fall off the edge of the world, rock coast. It was just gorgeous. And, it felt like the edge of the world, though this isolated, desolated look was totally interrupted by a huge sailing race going on just a short way from shore and so the view was peppered with lots of brightly colored sails. We continued our walk along the coast, seeing a deserted nudie beach (way too cold for that yet), and the fort on the hill, which dates back to the 1800s or something. We had some fish and chips and ice cream, we saw some really fantastic civic art (my favorite was Tony Craggs’ Point of view).
After Marstrand was an authentic taco dinner made by Karyn’s fantastic friend, Rachel (another LA escaper, though I think she didn’t hate it there, so we’ll have to try not to hold that against her) and there are not words for how fun it was to not only have dinner with friends, but also to have tacos. Seriously, who knew you could miss tacos so much?
Some food for thought:
- Licorice is a BIG thing in Sweden. They pair it with everything, berries, salt, chocolate, the list goes on. I am a fan of black licorice (much to Matt’s chagrin), but seriously, it’s not a versatile pairing flavour people. Stop trying.
- The long summer days in the UK, but even more so in Sweden (it was still light-ish at 11pm when we were there, in late May), are amazing (if not a little weird), but they do make me fear the VERY SHORT winter nights…
- The Swedes don’t lack in national self-esteem. And, for good reason, Sweden takes great care of itself, but there’s also only a few million people there, so that’s not exactly as difficult to do well as it would be for other places…
It still amazes me that we know live somewhere where international travel is so logistically feasible and (comparably) cheaper.
More to come.
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