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Published: March 27th 2006
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I've been spending my first month since I quit my job at my parents house in N. Ireland lazing around, relaxing and meeting up with school friends.
I've also managed to incorporate a trip to Sweden for a week (11th-19th March) to go skiing in Åre (pronounced 'or-a', I think...) which was wicked fun. I went with Jenny (a friend from university) and her boyfriend (Per) and friends (Bjorn, Nicholas, Hannah, Sarah, Andreas and finally Sandra and Hans - her sister and her sister's boyfriend). A big thanks to them for speaking English everytime I was in the room, putting up with questions about 'weird' swedish food, embarrassing me with their skiing technique (well, it's hardly fair, they learn to ski before they can walk...) and generally making me laugh all day long - was quite amazing really. And of course, apologies to them for not knowing the 'exciting' English words for belly-button fluff, 'itchy-berries', and random small stuffed Swedish animals. Still, I'll always remember how saying the words 'piste basher' can keep a group of swedes entertained for a week...
Anyway, the skiing was excellent - hmmmm, correction - the snow and slopes were excellent; my skiing was
probably a little less so... :o) Still, was much better than the first (and only other) time I went skiing and no-one was shouting 'forget your snow plough Brian! Ski's parallel!' which was all I heard last time in France - cheers to Sceats and Andy for that... So next time I'll be on the blacks (there were none open in Åre - I think because the skiing world cup was on) trying to force myself to make at least one turn as I scream and all the way down...
The food was excellent as well (I think my entries will be full of references to food - can be one of the best things about going away somewhere new I reckon...) - everyone took it in turns to cook in the place we were staying - although obviously no-one trusted me to be in charge of cooking anything - I don't think anyone was tempted by beans on toast... Anyway, managed to eat porridge every morning with lingenberry jam which is much better than it sounds, and definitely better than I ever expected; I had fruit soup everyday for lunch, which is incredibly tasty - although apparently they
eat it with ice-cream sometimes which sounds a little wrong...; I had 2 vegetarian meals in the evenings (a first for me in many a year - vegetarian lasagne was excellent though) and even managed an elk soup. Most amusing was being told by Jenny that Swedes just eat healthier than us, whilst her brother went off to get burger and chips every day, and everyone ate a block of cheese the size of their heads for breakfast and lunch. Anyway, as you can probably tell, I was impressed by the food - although the best meal came when we went back to Uppsala for a couple of days and we had an excellent meal with Jenny's friend Eda accompanied by a few glasses of whiskey (which incidentally, everyone I met in Sweden is also obsessed with, so you know what to buy any swedish friends you have as a present - has to be single malt scottish though apparently...). Another top tip for swedish living - whilst drinking whiskey with Swedish women don't innocently mention that you can't really see anything that wrong with dressing baby grils in pink, or boys in blue - you could be in for
a long conversation...
Anyway, enough about food for now. After we finished skiing in Åre we headed back to Uppsala on the train which took about 6 hours and we managed to spend most of the time cotemplating the possibilities and challenges of making an artificial cow to produce milk...don't ask. Anyway, Jenny, Per and I went out the next day to a lake near Uppsala to do a 10km ice skate on a frozen lake which was fun, and followed by a well earned pint in the nearest Irish bar for St. Patricks day. We then spent a day wondering in Stockholm and we saw an art exhibition on fat american kids and then onto an open air museum with loads of old swedish buildings and some live swedish animals like bears, elk, wolves, lynx's and wolverine (this time the wolverine was live and not one of the aforementioned stuffed variety when I didn't know what it was...)
The other thing I'll take away from Sweden was the idea of fika - basically means taking a break from whatever you are doing, going for some coffee and having a slice of tasty tasty cake - anyway, I'm
probably underplaying its importance in the mind of the Swedish, since everyone I met was obsessed with it - so, when skiing we seemed to spend more time doing fika than doing skiing, which was ok by me. I must be getting old.
I'm back at home now, and have been for a week and I'm getting ready to head off to France - I'm flying out of Dublin on Sunday (2nd April) - I'll be staying with a french family for a month and attending french lessons each morning in the town of Annecy, which is in the middle of the french alps and not too far from Chamonix - how convenient I hear you say...
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Hilary
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fika
fika sounds great as do your travels ... and now I finally know what a blog is!