Aug
18
Another Dinner, Another City
Filed under Sweden 2010
On Saturday, we had another nice evening. Fredrik invited Per, his close childhood friend, and Per’s sister Therese over to make and eat dinner with us. Per’s family actually lives next door. The four of us went grocery shopping together and then made pasta, garlic bread, and prepared strawberries for dessert with ice cream. Fredrik opened up a bottle of wine he’d been saving for my visit, so we enjoyed it along with dinner. I felt relieved that Fredrik’s friends seem very at ease to speak English in my presence. We enjoyed the food and conversation until nearly midnight. During the last hour, Fredrik’s dad Otto came home from his fishing trip in Trondheim and joined us at the table.
On Sunday, after having a nice lunch on the patio with Eva and Otto and a couple of their friends, Fredrik and I packed a small suitcase with too many clothes and drove two hours north to the city of Göteborg (or Gothenburg) for a few days. Upon arrival, we met up with Fredrik’s business partner, Daniel, for dinner at a nearby restaurant. Afterward, we drove to Fredrik’s uncle’s apartment complex where we were able to rent the small guest apartment for our visit.
Monday morning, we were invited up to the family’s two-floor apartment for a nice breakfast. Peter, Fredrik’s uncle was already off to work, but we joined his wife Helene and their two daughters, Matilda (12) and Elin (10), and baby Alfred (14 months) for a nice breakfast. Then we were off to the archipelago northwest of Göteborg for the day. On our way, we stopped at an old fortress to look around. Back in the Volvo, we drove an hour to the small, quaint fishing village of Klädesholmen. Of course, we were stuck with rainy, cloudy weather, but we still tried to make the best of it. For lunch at a local restaurant, I had a really tasty seafood stew with fresh shrimp and fish caught in town.
Afterward, we walked around the village and admired to cute, Swedish-style houses that are right out of a travel magazine. They seemed to be built very organically with narrow cobblestone streets winding between them. On the edge of town we had a beautiful view of the archipelago, small islands composed of rock and moss with a sailboat here and there passing around them. Looking back to Klädesholmen was also a beautiful sight, the harbor of sailboats and houses painted solid colors with white trimming.
Having sufficiently enjoyed our surroundings, we left the village and headed back toward Göteborg but detoured to Marstrand, another and more famous fishing town but with very large homes and cute shops. The sun was out when we took the ferry over to the island town, but the clouds and rain soon rolled in, so we didn’t stay for too long except to enjoy a fika (going to a cafe with someone and enjoying tea or some other drink and each others’ company) of hot chocolate and a pastry. The evening ended with a take-out kebab pizza and mindless, trashy TV.
