It's time to play...

Name that Larva!!!

I am still shuddering in disgust after finding this little guy ON A PLATE in the cupboard when I innocently wanted to heat up some pizza. My initial reaction, of course, was take a picture of it (with my macro setting!!) so I can identify it after I kill it... Then I took a really really big bunch of toilet paper and smashed it. And you know what?? That little shit curled up like a roly poly and was still alive! Like any humane person, my next move was to douse it with Ajax Universal Fettlösande Supereffektiv Frisk-scented cleaner. I feel really bad killing it by drowning it in chemicals but it does not belong here! It is probably surviving anyway (which is why I'm leaving it soaking like this for several hours).

So, do we need to clean out the cabinets? Is there a colony of somethings living in there and infesting the kitchen? Will they crawl into our ears and start families in our brains? What is this thing? My first thought was a baby silverfish but if you search them you get all these NASTY microscopic images (microscope views of living things have always grossed me out so I couldn't even touch that page in the biology book without wincing). Speaking of wincing, when googling, this came up. I don't think I could have handled finding something "3+ inches." Did you see the picture linked in the answer?

Soo, can someone identify this nasty bug?

I Löv Fall

It is fall in Göteborg, the weather is crispy (C the Swede's words), and the smell of löv is in the air...

Löv = leaf/leaves.... *chuckling* Plays on words is the local Göteborg humor... Just trying to fit in.

Anyway, in this "autumn" this week has been in the 30's, 40's. I've already worn my hat that covers my ears with the cord on each side...(not the white Russian hat, hahaha) peruvian beanie? ear flap beanie?
Usually I don't pull this out until, uhh DECEMBER. But no, not in Sweden. I've seen some locals wearing hats too but no one in a hat like mine... I ask if they're dorky here and no one gives me a straight answer, but they say they like it. I don't care!!! It's the only type of hat I've ever tried that actually keeps my ears warm, instead of merely covering them. Function over form!

Then the weirdest thing about the weather is that it was probably 40 tops one morning around 11, and I was in shorts and a tank top on the (magical) balcony, basking in the sun. The outdoor heater was not on, so I was really confused, but I just basked anyway. I don't think they usually have this much sunshine here, I was told it rains all the time, but it hasn't been the case in the past few months!

Håkan Hellström, this famous Swedish musician who is from Gothenburg, just came out with a new CD. In what I've heard in his older music, he makes a lot of references to Göteborg in his songs, and at least a couple of his videos are set in the city. Here's a new happy song and happy music video in which you guys can see the happy place I live! He just walks around the city the whole time... Saves me from having to post pics!

The first 30 seconds is within a 10-minute walk from my apartment so I guess you could say it's my hood... And the church scene in the first like 10 seconds, that's pretty much the street my building is on.




Enjoy! (And come visit!!)

PS. Isn't he just adorable??

A Saddle of Deer with Jerusalem

These past 2 weeks have been sooo busy!! Resulting in an energy crash today and feeling under the weather... (nothing that can't be fixed by some extra sleep!) But on the bright side, I GOT MY PERSONAL NUMBER!!!!!! Time to celebrate by doing allll the things I couldn't do before. So far I've signed up for Swedish classes and......can't remember... but I've felt more like a person here, now that I have the number for it!! I was feeling really discouraged and sort of unaccepted, but now that I have these 4 numbers (It's your birthday followed by 4 mystery digits. Yeah I know! 4 numbers, I could have made that up myself!!) I feel like they don't have anything on me anymore!!! It's like even the government agrees that I belong here now! Yess!!


I have to tell about my glorious week of working, a.k.a. "guiding," "assisting," "hosting"....

Last Wednesday night... I was going to dinner with a group of 45 people (hostessing), and I was supposed to just hang around with the servers and take care of the group's needs and deal with schedule changes, etc. But it's "rare" said my boss, that if they are nice they invite you to eat with them. This group of people was way nice and they had me eat with them every time I helped them!! (I even got a pasta salad buffet on the archipelago boat tour- ok sorry for bragging)...

One dinner stood out in particular. It was the first night of work (after already somewhat guiding a tour earlier that day). Now I didn't marvel at the food until after I got home. I concentrated on my job during dinner, checking up on everyone enough while still talking to the really interesting and nice people at my table. As pointless as it may sound, when you are there, you realize that they actually do need a liason between the restaurant and the group (me). They used me enough for me to feel needed, anyway!

Afterward... I got a chance to fully reflect on the meal. The restaurant we ate at had a star in the Guide Michelin(!!!), not an easy feat, and I think the highest rating in this city, so it was very fancy! There were 4 courses, I guess 2 of them were appetizers, the first of which was an oblong plate with three tiny, but beautiful and delicious dabs of different food. Literally, dabs. We ate them with a miniature fork (one of like 9 pieces of silverware we had--each person also got 4-5 glasses). All 3 bites were delicious!! I don't remember what all of them were...one of them was a cantarelle mushroom with something else, and another was a French specialty potatoe-fish puree or something...

The second appetizer (I guess?? I don't know the course names) was DELICOUS. the most perfect piece of smoked salmon and some other type of salmon ball, with salmon caviar and a "parsley vierge" decorating the plate.... I was (only half-seriously) thinking, how do you liquify parsley like this??  I guess, being in Sweden, I've had caviar before but this caviar was bigger and... just different. Each time I got a bite of the berry-like caviar, two thoughts ran through my head:

"Mmmm, this is delicious!"

and

"Oh-My-God- these are fish EGGS and I just popped them open in my mouth and they are juicy.....GROSS!!!"

The main course was a saddle of deer with jerusalem. If you watch Hell's Kitchen, that should sound familiar because I think they serve that there. Apparently "jerusalem" is a sauce?? Not 100% on that one... The "saddle of deer" was soo delicious and the most perfect piece of meat I've ever seen! And yeah, then the dessert was yummy too...

Finally, at the end of the night, after getting my key stuck in my apartment building's front door and wiggling it around outside in the cold rain for 5 minutes, I was free to look up the menu on the restaurant's website. I used google to translate some of the menu, and this is one it came up with:

Swedish:

Halstrad pilgrimsmussla med pancetta, spetskål och skummig pilgrimsmusselbuljong

Translated to English:

Seared scallops with pancetta, cabbage and frothy pilgrimage HANKY-PANKY broth

It even had "hanky-panky" in all caps.

Enough about the fancy and delicious food (that would have cost more than a day's work)... The other meals we had were good, though some of the Mediterranean-folk used to their foods with big flavors, weren't very impressed with Swedish cuisine. I felt sort of bad for both them and the Swedes for trying to impress them. The whole experience was fun and was cool to meet all those people. The only thing I lost was a bit of my sanity Wednesday morning, then later on, my baby toes (yes, toes, not the toenails). They haven't fallen off yet but I think they are about to, thanks to the painful shoes I had to wear for my stewardess outfit.


After the boat tour, the tour guide (that's right, I was just a host, not the guide that told about all the islands :)) told me about a course to certify me to be a tour guide in Gothenburg, and that they need young, and good English-speaking people, especially for boat cruises in the summer. It sounded soo fun so I went to a class, but then realized that it was way too many hours of class and a ton of homework for a job in April... I need a job before then, and won't have time to take that 5-month class right now (plus it was all in Swedish and there was probably no way I would pass, haha).


Now that my stint as a guide/assistant/hostess is over, I NEED A JOB (again). Please, someone hire me?

Panic Attacks

I think I was probably leaking adrenaline for much of this Wednesday... Talk about panic after panic!!

It was the first day of my "job" (really just working a few days for this company; they don't have an office here so don't get too excited!) The job is for a travel agency, to guide/host some groups coming in from other countries for a congress.

3 hours before I had to leave the house, the boss calls...
Him: "have any questions about the dress code?"

I had already asked someone about the dress code, and she said I had to look nice, "interview" nice, but that nice jeans were OK (contradictory?? I guess not in Sweden). So I told him that, and do you know what he said??
"Actually, I was thinking more along the lines of something an airplane stewardess would wear..."

Me saying: "So like with a blazer?"   (Me thinking: "AAAHHHH SHIITTTT!!!")
Him: "Yeah, if you have one, that'd be great!"
Me saying: "ok, sounds good, i can do that!"    (Me thinking: "WHAT THE HELL AM I GONNA DO??")

Yeah, I left all my nice business professional clothes (besides a glorious blouse) in the US. Sorry if I didn't want to waste my precious 40lbs of luggage on uptight businesswoman clothes!! My attitude was that when I get a job, I'll either be a dishwasher and not need them, or earn enough to buy tons of business clothes. At this point, there wasn't time to go downtown and shop for new clothes, and get some other stuff done. I called a trusty American I recently met. She saved me by immediately bringing some things, one of which worked. Blazer: Check. Now for the bottom. How about my black skirt? No, the skirt was way too casual, and too big (I bought it in France, when my staple food was Camembert cheese and I had been on a 7-month croissant kick)... It fit like our Kapaun skirts when we bought them 4 sizes too big so they'd be low-rise. Basically I looked like a witch.

With an hour and a half left, I was still f-r-e-a-k-i-n-g out with no nice clothes to wear, still needing to go make some copies and shower, etc. Saving the day, my assistant/boyfriend made the trek to the (hellhole) mall for me and bought an array of very nice business clothes, including perfect slacks. With the clothing dilemma mostly solved, I checked the mail when I was almost ready to leave...

An envelope from the tax office!!! It must be my personal number, to make it legal to get paid by this job I'm about to go work at!! I'm thinking, "Oh good, something to make my day better and to relax me!" So naturally I rip the envelope open. Too excited/hurried to do any real thinking, I read one word. "What does avslår mean?" Christoffer said it means "reject."

After panicking for about 2 minutes and producing even more adrenaline, I realized that I knew my rights, and that there had to be some mistake (not AT ALL surprising for these gov't offices to screw up, after my experiences with them). So I calm down, and decide I'll deal with it later. (Found out later I was right, thank goodness!!)

The morning of this nerve-wracking day is enough to make a very long and tedious post, so I'll leave it at this for now. I can't bear to have any more text than this today. I'll write about the job later. (the short version of it now: it went well)

Miss everyone!

Celebrating Cinnamon Roll Day, AKA Kanelbullens Dag

Today is a big day in Sweden. Since they don't have a Thanksgiving, Veteran's day, Labor day, 4th of July, or Martin Luther King, Jr. Day (I know! can you believe it!?), and barely even celebrate Halloween, Valentine's day, or St. Patrick's Day, today, Monday, October 4, Kanelbullensdag, is a very special day indeed!


(Background information about the holiday from "C," my Swedish source of knowledge on Swedish things: he doesn't know if it's every October 4, or the first Monday of October. He says "it's quite new.")


What does Kanelbullens Dag mean for Swedes? Well, for starters, everything you need to make Kanelbullar (that's the plural) is on sale at the grocery store. You can even buy the pre-made, frozen cinnamon rolls on sale! I don't know if it's at every grocery store, since we just went to LIDL, the (cheap) German one (basically Aldi). They seem to be doing really well in their cultural adaptation to foreign markets, since they joined in the celebration of this great Swedish holiday today!


So that's it: the Swedes eat cinnamon rolls today. So Christoffer, the full-of-Kanelbullens-Dag-spirit Swede, will celebrate accordingly tonight by making cinnamon rolls. Mums!! (that's Swedish for, "yummy" ... though I don't really mean that, since cinnamon isn't really my thing)

Practice Post

Hello beloved and missed family and friends!


I feel like an old person who's out of touch with technology because blogging intimidates me... I don't know what any of this stuff means that they want me to make a name/title/username/blogtitle/someotherkindofname? for (not to mention this one's all in Swedish) and I can't figure out if I'm logged in, I actually don't even remember ever logging in or giving it a password... But anyway here I am, and I think I'm writing the first post of this blog... About the background, it was one of the first choices they gave me for a design so I bet there are a million other people with this original, artsy, quaint background photo that makes my blog so special.


Life in Sweden is oh-so-exciting! The other day at the tax office, I had to stand in line to get to the machine that gives you a number in the queue. It's not that there were lots of people needing a number paper, it's that there were officers waiting there, directing the people to stand in line, speak to a representative, then get a number. So, I was queuing to queue. Only in Sweden. And, being so close to the UK, I use the word queue now! Did you know it's pronounced "Q" and not "Kay" -? So did I...
I also sometimes say "flat" now, because it's easier than apartment. You'll see an example in the next paragraph.


The other evening we were walking through Haga, such a quaint part of the city (only a 5 minute walk from my flat!!) that makes you feel like you went back in time... The streets are all cobblestone, the buildings are no taller than 3 stories, all the same looking Swedish "houses" (ok, buildings), and pretty much the only businesses there are second-hand or antique shops, or cafés. How many cafés are in Wichita? Take that number, and that is how many is in this ~10 square blocks Haga. You can do the same comparison with secondhand shops too. Anyway to add to the feeling of being in the 1800's, there was a little boy, 7 or 8, playing violin on the side of the street. It was soo cute! He wasn't a prodigy or anything, just practicing. He stopped for a while to warm his fingers, and looked a bit bored and slightly miserable.... He then said "Mama, can we go home soon?" to a woman across the street, who was inconspicuously standing there with a toddler girl. It was soo funny to see this middle-class mom making her son practice on the street!! Character building, I guess!


This blog will probably be filled with little (lame) stories like that... I like this blog because....
1) I don't have to type mundane news to everyone in separate facebook messages or e-mails
2) You can pick if you want to read about it or not, so as not to waste anyone's time!


I'll tell you more about what I'm up to when I upload pictures onto my computer. Actually I have to put some facebook albums up first, I'm a year behind. So after that process is over, I'll start writing better blog posts with better content and pictures. For now, miss you all!!


Funny Foreigner Words of Lately-
Christoffer told me a story in which the cops put someone in hankercuffs, and on an unrelated note, is afraid he may have a fraction on his rib.