Our Staff In Sweden: Grace Taylor Part 2

Hey all! 

Today is my first full day back in Minnesota. I wrote this post at the airports and on planes yesterday. While I am sad to leave my family and friends in Sweden, I am excited to come home to see the rest of my family and friends as well as get into a routine again. This post will include stuff from the last half of my trip.

 

When we fika at home we try to relax on the couch together and enjoy a show together. This fika included coffee and chokladbiskvi. One of the shows we’ve been watching was Allsång. Which is an event in the summer in Skansen (a park/museum in Djurgården, Stockholm). Swedish music artists come to sing songs with the crowd in a group karaoke setting. The artists or groups often sing one song that is a Swedish classic and one of their songs. One notable artist we watched was Zara Larsson, a pop singer from Stockholm who sings in English and Swedish and has had success in the United States. 

We took a trip to Djurgården to visit Skansen. Like Gammelgården it is an open air museum that highlights many historic buildings. Skansen also holds a zoo of Swedish animals. I will include one picture here but will likely make a separate post that will highlight some items we have at Gammelgården that are similar to ones at Skansen. 

Here are some pictures I took on the island and some more information about the area! 

 

One of the cool things about Stockholm being a place largely full of islands is that there are bridges that connect islands but also ferries. We took a ferry to Djurgården this time and other times too! I will include pictures and videos from this trip and past ones. One really nice thing about Stockholm is that they have amazing public transit. The way it works is you buy a ticket and for the timed duration of the ticket you bought you can use buses, subways, trams, trains, and ferries on the same ticket. It makes it very easy to get around. 

 

On the 22nd we went to a concert at a venue called Göta Lejon. It was really fun! We saw Jason Mraz, which was lovely! I only knew his major hit songs but still enjoyed the acoustic, jazz scat, quick humor, and compassion he sang with. It was a very informal and personal scene watching him play behind a stained glass inspired background and with just a guitar. The inside of the venue is also really beautiful. It was a wonderful theatre.

 

We went to another hockey game for Calle’s hometown team Södertälje. Tickets to hockey games are much more accessible here in general, but this team is also in the second league in Sweden making tickets easier to get. The team we played was called Troja-Ljunby and was promoted to the second league at the end of last season. The game was very intense! We played rather poorly in the first two periods and went into the third/ final period down 1-3. Momentum switched and our players performed better and we managed to win the game 5-4 in the end! I took a video of the crowd after the 3-3 tying goal was scored and it was so loud! 

Video of fans cheering from hockey game

I always leave these games so impressed at how loud and passionate the fans are. When I attend a Wild game I expect a loud crowd knowing there will be around 18,000 people. This area felt like it rivalled a Wild game at times despite being under 5,000 fans! 

 

We do not usually spend a lot of time in Gamla stan because it tends to be a more expensive area of town due to the high amount of tourists and attractions. We did stop this time to grab a sweatshirt for my younger brother for his birthday. While there we also stopped at a super cool and large bookstore called Science Fiction Bokhandeln. I ended up getting one book for myself and another book for Calle that I have been meaning to recommend to him for a while. I got a new Moomin book that included three of the short stories in Swedish so I can continue to practice my Swedish reading while in the U.S. For Calle I grabbed the book Before the Coffee Gets Cold by Toshikazu Kawaguchi.

 

We spent much of the last half of the trip relaxing at home. We started a couple of shows and took trips to local places to grab fika or meals. One of the places we went to was a local Chinese restaurant that offered a lunch special for lower prices where they shorten the menu and serve coffee and packaged cookies. I forgot to take a picture of my wonderful lunch but did take a picture of our fika after. These cookies are called bondkakor (farmer cookies). They are a plain shortbread cookie and have an almond flavor to them and are amazing with coffee!

 

Calle and I are both Lord of the Rings Fans. My mom got me into the movies and Calle is a superfan and has brought me deeper into the universe. That led me to buy this game to bring to Sweden. It’s from a series of games that are escape room style games that are designed to be played once. This one was Lord of the Rings themed and had us complete riddles that tied to helping Frodo complete his mission of bringing the Ring to Mordor. It was really fun and challenged our thinking processes. We struggled with the earlier  clues as we began trying to figure out how the game wanted us to think. Ultimately we really enjoyed the game and the experience but determined that had it not been a Lord of the Rings game we would not have enjoyed it as much. 

 

One of the last noteworthy things we did was go to the Viking Museum also on Djurgården. It was a really cool experience and we spent about an hour there. Seeing the different artifacts was really interesting as well as the stories. I felt like much of what I knew about Vikings was very surface level and influenced by popular culture and an idolization of Nordic culture. We learned some interesting things that showed very interesting and complex parts of Viking society as well as parts that are often omitted from history.

One of the dispelled myths for me was clothing. This outfit shows what is likely one of the most expensive Viking outfits one could have. There are no furs and l as decoration than often shown in media, and that makes sense! Furs had more important uses in other places and would likely become heavy, damage, and be more of a burden in battle.