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?