Aug
12
Swedish Sunshine
Filed under Sweden 2010
It’s a beautiful morning in Halmstad. The sun came out, and Eva served breakfast out on the patio. What a nice spread (a smörgasbord, if you will): bread, butter, honey, salted herring, veggies, blueberry and nypon soups (more like thickened juices), grapefruit, hardboiled eggs, caviar in a tube (yes, like toothpaste), liver paste. I asked if they normally eat outside; yes, they said, in the summer whenever the weather is nice. How fantastic! The weather is probably 70F, sun, slight cool breeze, and NO HUMIDITY. Over the rooftops is a nice view of the water and the land across the bay.
The architecture here is really interesting. When Fredrik came to visit me for two weeks back in May/June, he commented on American architecture. I asked him to explain what was different and he said he couldn’t, to which I replied, “What do you mean you can’t? You know what it looks like in Sweden and now the U.S. so can’t you describe it?” Now I get it. It’s just different here, yet I have a hard describing how. Many houses in this neighborhood look like old, two-story barns. Also, many homes are painted a very traditional Swedish red (a hint of copper) with white trimming, including the Strömberg house. Really nice.
Other small differences include having to navigate a different computer keyboard. It has the same letter and number set-up as the American version, but the ö, ä, and å letters are added, and some of the keys that need Alt, Shift, and Control are changed up. Also, the doors here open outward, a very subtle difference. Traffic lights are the same, except that the yellow light flashes on for a second while the red one is on before turning to green.
