Our new home!

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Tingberg, Lödöse, Sweden

Since there are so many friends asking for pictures, I might as well make a travelblog about our new home.
The outdoor pictures are from October 2008 and the indoor ones from December 2008, unless otherwise stated.

So what's there to say about Lödöse? A lot, if you could stay for a history lesson, but I'll stick to a few bits and pieces. There's a very good museum showing the history of the city and the region, since this was the metropolis of Western Sweden in the 12th to 14th centuries. There are only some 1,300 inhabitants in the town of today, and only about 8,000 in the whole municipality of Lilla Edet. The municipality's coat of arms is the old Lödöse coat of arms, that can be found in places like the Hanseatic Museum in Bergen (norwegian link here), that we visited earlier in 2008. I wasn't surprised to see an English Wikipedia-page about Lödöse, but it's actually there in Italian, Dutch and German as well! For some reason, it doesn't exist in Danish (yet).

Close by, we have Ale vikingagård, which doesn't seem to have a proper web page even in Swedish, I'm afraid. It's a reconstructed farm from the Viking era, Scandinavian late iron age, with a long house and lots of activities, although mostly in the summer. We haven't tried any "konditorier" yet, old fashioned cafés, but there is one in Älvängen, 12 minutes away by car and 15 with the bus, and I think we saw one in Lilla Edet, about the same distance away but north instead of south. At least there's a decent fish monger every Saturday in downtown Lödöse, and there's the bed factory, Älggården! But what I perhaps like the most, when I get off the bus in the evenings, is that I can see the stars. One of our neighbours said that someone had once suggested that they'd get street lights to our street, but noone else liked the idea. I'm glad they didn't.

It's really easy to get here from Göteborg, at the moment, it's bus 600 or 610, the 600 stops just down the road, maybe 300 meters away. It takes everything from 35 to 50 minutes, depending on the time of day and traffic. In a few years (they say 4, I say 5 or 6), we'll have a commuter train with a station some 15 minutes walk south, but on the other side of the hill, so hopefully we won't be disturbed by that nor the highway that they're making at the same time.

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And on January 4, 2009, we got our cat! Now the guestroom is done as well (except for painting the walls), we closed some kind of circle by getting a cat. He's actually the former neighbour's cat, that got badly treated by other neigbours' cats, so now he's got a new home. He seems to enjoy it, he started by examining the whole house, and now he's found his favourite place and tries to hang around to be able to see us most of the time. We'll start taking him out on a leash (!! he's got incredibly good leash skills for a cat!), and then we'll just let him out hungry, so that he has a reason to come home again ...

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I guess I might be editing this text in the future, when I realize that some things should be added. Feel free to ask in the commentary below!

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