Not too many news up in the frozen wastelands of the north™.
It’s basically the in and out of sitting in the train, trying to explore some of my surroundings (I’m still having a hard time adjusting to the 7-days-a-week open grocery store nearby) and get a hang of things. Applications are in progress, but seeing as I’m still at the butt end of vacation time here it might take a bit before the final replies begin rolling in.
In a rather surprising twist – and despite the rather… generous pricing levels when it comes to alcohol – I recently found one of my preferred cider brands at Systembolaget recently. Oh, and it was actually cheaper when compared to the times I got it in Austria at Bobby’s. Doesn’t change though that I more or less exclusively drink water and fruit juices these days.
The biggest disappointment to date was discovering that turkey was hard to come by in the grocery stores. Chicken? No problem. Beef? Piece of cake. Pork? Also not so much a challenge. But I’ll be pretty baffled if I ever stumble across a turkey steak or filet, at least one that’s affordable. I’ve found smoked turkey ham though.
Still a bummer for someone who loves to use copious amounts of that bird in his meals. Guess I’ll have to switch over to chicken for the time being. Or eat more fish – there’s hardly a shortage of our delicious oceanic friends here. Now to learn how to properly prepare fish besides the frozen baked varieties I’m used to from home.
German tourists seem to be a target market as well. Or so I thought at least when I stumbled across this:
My German-speaking readers will probably get a chuckle out of this on the first glance. The bad positioning of the print makes the tittles (yes, this is an actual word) disappear on a cursory glance, turning a “Nötbratwurst” (Beef bratwurst) into the rather hilarious “Notbratwurst” (or literally translated ‘Emergency bratwurst’).
I guess Sweden gets enough German tourists every year that, on the way home from Norway in their camping buses, run out of bratwurst and have to buy them here as emergency rations.
Oh, and one more fun thing I saw on the shelves, to be filed under the category of “uh-huh, what the hell were you thinking?!”: Cactus juice.
The general politeness of the people over here is almost British to a point. Being used to the rather grumpy “Wiener Schmäh’” and the daily dose of road rage display directed at pedestrians and cyclists, I found it to be a rather welcome change that cars actually care to stop here when you try to cross the road. And it doesn’t even necessarily require a zebra crossing.
Aside from all that, I’m not sure if I just pick bad times to go out these days, or if it’s just bad luck. While the weather so far has been consistently relatively warm and only dotted with a few scarce, short rain showers, I seem to have a knack to pick bad times for leaving.
Showers might only last five to ten minutes, and are not particularly intense so far – but they always start a minute or two after I have left the house. Hilarious in a way, and luckily not enough to soak me – with current temperatures it doesn’t take long to dry those few wet spots.
That’s all for now.










