I Want You To Know

I want you to know that Jacob and I are really cool, super attractive, artsy, creative, and perfect in just about every way.

I mean, obviously.

But seriously. I've always hated the blogs where people give off the carefully calculated impression that their life is perfect. That is blatantly untrue. It can't be true, because no one's life is perfect, even when you are traveling the world and taking pretty pictures (like the one above).

As amazing as travel is - the thrill of new places and cultures, the beauty of new sights, the experience of new foods - it can all give way very easily to a sense of restlessness. Homesickness. Purposelessness. (Not sure if that is a word). Living out a dream still has it's ups and downs.

So, now that we are on the same page regarding our awesomeness, here are some pictures.

Thursday evening our hosts threw a little party for all of their house guests. (Besides us, there was family visiting from Washington D.C.). In Sweden there is a traditional summer celebration meal: The Crayfish Feast.

The Crayfish Feast is held in August to mark the beginning of crayfish season. The crayfish are served cold after being boiled in vinegar, dill, and other good stuff. They are traditionally served with Aquavit - a caraway-infused vodka (really good - tastes sort of like whiskey). I couldn't believe it when I saw the platter of crayfish - they looked like plastic.

After our first course of crayfish and vodka, we moved on to another traditional Swedish meal: Pickled Herring.

Pickled Herring is right up there next to Swedish Meatballs on the scale of All-Things-Swedish. It is fish which has been preserved in a vinegary-sugary brine, sometimes with a sauce like honey mustard. It is served with boiled potatoes, red onion, and sour cream. All together it's very good.

To further our education, we learned some traditional Swedish drinking songs. I can't actually sing the words for you, but I can follow along the tune while making convincing Swede-like noises.

On Friday Jacob and I took the bicycles 4 km. out to a nearby lake. It was my turn to take the little yellow bike, the same bicycle that Jacob had taken 20 km. to Skinnskatteberg just a few days earlier. Little did I know - that bike is the two-wheel equivalent of a clown car. I barely made it to the lake, hunched over a bicycle intended for someone a foot shorter than me. I still can't figure out how Jacob made it 20 km.

It rained on us just as we got to the lake, but cleared up fairly quickly.

A picture cannot do it justice.
Now please comment and tell us how cool we are.

The Food Issue

This post is going to have a lot of pictures of food. If you are feeling a bit hungry, I suggest you go find a snack now.

Much of the past two days have been spent in the garden or the kitchen. On Wednesday Jacob and I switched jobs. I took on the manual labor, while he put on the apron and baked in the kitchen.

It was challenging, but digging flower beds in the garden and transplanting trees was fun and (sort of) empowering. Meanwhile, Jacob was in the kitchen, baking up a storm and having a blast. Jacob got the extra satisfaction of selling a number of his confections that day in the cafe (with compliments to the chef!).

First I will show you my favorite stool in the kitchen. It's my favorite because: 1. It's pretty, 2. It's handy, and 3. I stand on it or use it several times a day to take pictures of food that we made, foraged, or dug up in the garden. You will be seeing it a lot.

The Stool

This stool is a good example of our role in the kitchen: Apprentice. We are learning to run the cafe the way Amy does, which means we do a good amount of watching and listening before we can jump in. But when we do jump in, we get to make some pretty awesome stuff.

Key Lime Pie

Chocolate Cupcake

Homemade Bread

Once we were done with work, Jacob and I decided to bike into the closest town of Skinskatteberg - 10 km bike ride each way. It was a very pleasant bike ride - mostly flat, with beautiful views of fields and forest and storm clouds on the horizon. Once we arrived in town, we found a train station, a church, a grocery store and one town square. That's about it. Tiny.

Regardless, it was nice to be in a town for the first time in a week.

Today consisted of more baking and digging in the garden - but this time Jacob and I worked together. Since the summer season in Sweden is winding down, Amy has tasked us with working through her garden to harvest vegetables and find creative ways to preserve them for the winter. For obvious reasons, I'm thrilled with this job. The first thing we harvested were garlic and potatoes. For a mid-size garden, the variety and quantity of vegetables in those beds is constantly surprising.

The Daily Crop of Salads

Garlic, Beets, and Carrots from the Garden

In the afternoon Jacob and I went for a walk through the woods and found a treasure trove of mushrooms called Summer Chanterelles. We had heard from Amy that they could be found everywhere this time of year if you just knew the right type of forest to look in. Jacob and I had been searching for them on every walk we had taken, and now we have finally found the right forest. We stuffed the huge pockets of my coat with the mushrooms, and took them home with us.

Summer Chanterelles

Tonight we are going to participate in a traditional Swedish summer celebration - the Crayfish Feast. Jacob and I have been really looking forward to this. I'll tell you how it is in a couple days!

Daily Routines

Our days in Sweden are falling into a rough sort of schedule:

Up at 8 am, begin work around 9.
Work in the kitchen or on various projects.
Take a prolonged lunch break.
Work a few more hours, and then call it a day.

When we finish in the afternoon, generally around 2 or 3 pm, we are still left with about 7 hours of daylight to go explore the countryside.

Saturdays are a busy day for the cafe. Every Saturday there is a flea market held in the barn on the property, so visitors pour into the cafe from the flea market for their afternoon "Fika" (coffee break). We spent the morning baking, then went for an afternoon bike ride and visit to a nearby lake.

Sunday morning we woke up to a heavy rain storm which cleared up shortly after noon. On a recommendation from Tomas, our host, we hiked through the forests to a place called the "Valley of the Snakes" (I was assured there weren't actually any snakes there). Tomas had said to us that if there was one place where trolls really do live in Sweden, it's in the Valley of the Snakes.

We found our path, started into the woods, and remained mildly skeptical for about 2 miles. Then, a good ways into the forest - Holy cow. Tomas was right. This place was straight from a fairy tale.

But my camera acted up, and all the pictures we took there were lost. SO - I will leave you with that anticipation until we can go back.

On Monday morning the lot of us went on a neighbor's invitation to pick their red and black currant bushes. Six large bushes, dripping full with berries - we probably gathered about 20 pounds of berries.

Some of the berries will be frozen for later, some will be baked or made into jam, but the best bit of it is going to be pressed, fermented, and made into wine.

In the evening Jacob and I went on a walk, retracing some of our past explorations around the house. Directly behind our house;

(this house) there is a river, which is apparently wonderful for swimming, although we haven't had the guts to jump in yet. Go over the bridge and head into the forest, where a five minute walk will take you to a forest road and a pretty magical patch of woods.

A little further brings you to a field and an empty old house. Rusted farming equipment is being overgrown by grass and wildflowers, and the house is falling apart. It's a beautiful sight.

We went back in as it started to drizzle again, and sat down to your classic straight-from-Ikea dinner of Swedish meatballs, gravy, boiled potatoes (from the garden of course), and lingonberry sauce.

At dinner, Frida, 6 years old and the eldest of the two children, informs the dinner table: "There are three kinds of red berries:  Raspberries, red currants, and Lingonberries". Hah. Words you would only ever hear from a Swedish child.

Settling In

Our first night in Sweden we weren't sure that the sun had ever set that evening.

We fell asleep at 9.30 pm with the sun still up, and awoke at 6 am to the sun streaming through our  massive un-curtained window. I didn't think we were that far north, but it turns out we are far north enough that the sun doesn't set until 10 pm.

Our first morning Jacob and I were bouncing around with energy, so our host family Tomas and Amy, decided to put us to work. Jacob did manual labor (restoring a wood floor), while I got to do the fun stuff - help bake for the cafe.

Amy runs a cafe in the bottom level of the house, serving mostly "Fika" items, the Swede's beloved coffee break. There are some regular customers, but the majority of the visitors are tourists on vacation, or passing bicyclists. The food consists mostly of pastries and breads, a large amount of the ingredients sourced from foraging in the woods and her own garden. She bakes her own bread every day, grows her own salads and vegetables, and decorates her pastries with edible flowers from the garden.

Needless to say this keeps Amy quite busy, so it will be one of my main tasks to bake with her every morning. I really can't complain - I'm happy as a clam spending my day around food. Especially this food - there is going to be a lot of pictures of food for the next month.

Home grown mini Rhubarb pie, and Lemon Thyme flat bread

In the afternoon we all went out to a nearby lake for a swim. On the drive there we saw a moose.

Now we are in Sweden, where "hot summer days" max out at 70 degrees. Beautiful, but not ideal for swimming in a frigid lake - especially not for those of us spoiled by the California sun. Our host family jumped into the lake as if it was a balmy tropical day with bath temperature water. However it took us a lot of self-motivational speeches to finally flop into the water (which was about 55 degrees Fahrenheit), but we did and it was worth it. At least now we have the bragging rights.

That night Tomas took us out on a "Beaver Safari". We pulled on our boots, bathed our selves in bug spray, and stalked silently along the river bank. Beavers apparently have terrible eyesight, so if we were quiet enough and stood still for a while, they would begin to mistake us for trees. We saw four beavers in about two hours, walked a couple miles, and circled back to the house as it started to get dark.

The next morning was filled with more baking for me and floor scraping for Jacob, until the afternoon when we took a break to go berry picking. Armed with a basket and Swedish berry-picking contraptions, we marched off into the woods, doing our best to act like we had a clue what we were doing.

The forests here are pretty magical. It's not surprising that the majority of our fairy-tales originated in this country.

We managed to find raspberries, wild strawberries, and blueberries. We also picked an unknown berry which we thought might be currants - but they weren't currants. They were poisonous. Whoops.

It's pretty incredible what you can find in these woods if you know what to look for. Amy has promised to teach us how to find mushrooms.

We came back exhausted, happy, and hands stained with berry juice. It seems like life here may take less adjusting than I had first thought.

The Beginning

As far as America is concerned, today Jacob and I vanished. We departed the U.S. as American, switched passports mid-air, and entered Europe as European citizens.

I like to imagine that if America tried to track us down, their only possible conclusion would be that we were stuck on the eternal flight from hell, or in an airport somewhere like Tom Hanks in The Terminal.

I'll spare you the gory details (of sitting sandwiched between two rows of hyper-active, over-hormonal "scouts" from the Isle of Man on our 8 hour flight) because I realized that all the observations you make when traveling ultimately become worthless once you arrive at your destination.

The trip was long and boring (over all). The End.

And then we got off the train in the middle of nowhere and were greeted by a cheerful man holding a little girl with blonde ringlets. His name is Thomas, her name is PJ - they were there to pick us up and introduce us to the rest of the family back home. But first we needed to go to the store and buy ice-cream, because the Swedes love their ice-cream, and it was the only proper way to welcome us to the country.

Twenty minutes later, even further out in the middle of nowhere, we rolled up to their home - a 20 (ish) room converted school house. I say school house - but think more the Bennett's house from Pride and Prejudice. Just more Swedish looking.

And while everything in the house is very homespun and the house appears to be undergoing constant amateur renovation, everything inside is remarkably pretty. Never before have I wanted to take pictures of kitchen sink - but you are going to get some, and just wait until you see this kitchen sink.

Dinner was made with vegetables from the garden, fish caught from the river in the back yard, home-made bread, and all laid out on a trestle table underneath a tree outside. It was delicious.

This place is going to take some adjusting. The pace here is slow, and life is not at all organized. But so far it looks like the charm is going to take us over for the next month, and along the way I'll have learned some useful things, like how to clean a fish.

(I didn't even pull out my camera today, but I took some Iphone photos.) Here's your sneak peaks of this beautiful place: