A Swedish White Christmas

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Merry Christmas everyone!!!!
We hope you had a lovely day yesterday, ours has been truly amazing. After a long journey to Lund on Sunday, we arrived in Lund on Monday morning, with only one small problem. We had forgottten to write down Stus address...whoops. We headed to a cafe, sent many text messages. And tried to rectify the problems, which included one flat mobile phone, no internet connectivity and the wrong mobile number for stu. A big thanks goes to Ash who helped us in our time of need, by sending us the directions to Stus. As it goes, after we recieved Ash's text, stus replied straight away with exactley the same directions... very funny.
Stu and Em have a great little set up in Lund, we really like their place, and Lund is a very pretty city. We spent monday wandering the Lund sights, and getting stuck into some local food and drink. We went on a mission to find some Lund sausage. We went to the market to the large deli their and took a number, there were many people there and i was confused to see that i was next in line according to the numbers. But i was quickly corrected by the swedish gentleman in front of me that in fact my number was 668 and they were calling out 468. There were 200 people before us... apparently about a 1.5hr wait. So we gave up on Lund sausage...but found it later in the supermarket. We checked out the tragically named australian export wines, and the winner of the bad name competetion goes to 'Kangarouge' oh my god, how embarrasing.

We hooked up with stu for a burger after work and then got stuck into trying the local ales at his house, with a wander to his work as well. I crashed on the couch at about 10.30. And in the morning we headed to Askersund. Which is where emmas family home is. The train showed that there was no snow anywhere so we didn't expect a white christmas. But when we woke up yesterday it was snowing and there was a lovely soft layer of snow over everything. It really was magical.

Christmas here is a little different from home, the christmas festivities, presents, large dinner or lunch happens on christmas eve, and christmas day is a rest day. so we started the day with some breakfast and a walk through askersund to the lake which was partly frozen and so cool to see ducks walking across the lake... amazing. the snow and ice make everthing so special. Then back to the house for some coffee and cake and to watch some famous swedish christmas shows, a disney highlights show and also a christmas cartoon, which was really cute.

Dinner was a huge smorgasboard of pickled herring, salmon, ham, sausge, meatballs, breads, cheeses, and all sorts of yummy things. We had a large dinner and then got stuck into some beers. And then santa came and we all opened our presents. i got some lovely earrings from scotty and a czech cookbook, and he got a really nice man scarf. Em and stu gave us these really cool wooden coasters, which have lungs and body sketches on them, they are great.My mum, also gave me these very funny christmas decorations, which have pictures of the family in them, so daggy, but it was really nice to see everyone, as i was a little home sick on christmas day.

Late into the evening we played this great board game, which was lots of fun, and helped the beers dissapear quickley.

Christmas day itself is a lazy day of sleeping in and making snowmen, he was pretty hard work as the snow was the wrong sort (i know its crazy that there are different sorts...who knew?) He looked pretty good in the end.

We are off to stockholm tomorrow for the weekend, and then meet up with stu and em on Monday for a week of activities around lund and copenhagen.

We hope that you all had a very merry christmas, we wish we could be there with you, or even better that you could be here with us.

Lots of love ness and scotty

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Photos

Playing in the snow
like idiots

frozen boat
the boat is frozen 'sunk' in the lake

Bloody Cold
thats right -7.5 outside on christmas eve evening

Snow Angels
embarrasing the swedes by making snow angels on someones drive way

Christmas Day Snowman
It took us about an hour to make a new friend, cornelius

Stu and Em
Fantastic hosts