My trip to the suburbs.

So this past weekend involved me finally really getting out of the central city of Stockholm and out to my coworker Joakim's place for some traditional Swedish meatballs. We went straight from work to the liquor store to get a couple bottles of red wine (you can't get anything stronger than 3.5% ABV beer at the grocery stores here, which is weird). After that we got on the subway for a ride that is almost exactly the same length as the one from Penn station to Valley Stream, about 35 minutes or so. After we got to his town, Alby, we went straight to their grocery store, where I immediately noticed the approximately 30% drop in price on most of the food. We picked up a few things and headed to his place where his girlfriend and eight year old girl were waiting for us and waved through the window.

After we got inside, his daughter Saga pranced up to the door to greet us. She was dressed in her semi-formal clothes and wearing perfume, which was cute and made me feel welcomed. After touring around Joakim's place and seeing his other three month old newborn, it became apparent that despite only being a few years older than me, he is very mature and fits perfectly into a father figure, right down to painting his eight year old's room pink and building a stage for her to sing on.

They made very sure to make me feel comfortable, took my jacket, set me up with God of War III on the PS3, and started cooking. His daughter seemed a little shy and sat far away from me on the couch, but then got her courage up and sat right next to me and tried to conjure up enough English to blow plot points in the game for me. The meal was excellent and the wine Joakim picked out went perfectly with the flavors. We had meatballs, which I had originally thought were going to be big like spaghetti and meatballs, but then I'd never had Swedish meatballs before so I didn't really know what to expect, mashed potatoes, and lingonberry jam. Also, the potatoes came to the table just peeled and cooked, we used what appeared to be a gigantic garlic press to mash them ourselves, looked like this:




After dinner, I got back to playing God of War (I hit over five played hours while I was there, eek) and they started making dessert. After a little while longer they came out with a delicious blueberry pie made with home-picked blueberries from autumn and a vanilla sauce his girlfriend made (which was much better than either of them let on, they made it sound like it got a little messed up in cooking, but it was really great). After the pie, it was back to God of War until everyone started to go to bed leaving just Joakim and me, at which time I took my leave at about 1am.

Overall, a great night!

Saturday consisted of me attempting to do my laundry, getting it all together, walking down to the laundry room and realizing I had scheduled my time slot for Wednesday and missed it. Damn. Had to reschedule for Monday, which meant a day or two of dirty clothes, oh well. Saturday night I met up with Amy and Tintin. I was attempting to get directions and literally walking back and forth along the street trying to figure out where they wanted me to go when I realized I heard an echo over the phone, looked over my shoulder and saw them standing no more than 20 feet from me. We went to a whisky bar called Akkurat which was nice and laid back. It wasn't our usual late night, but it was fun to hang out nonetheless.

So little happened Sunday that I don't even remember it at all, hopefully something more interesting will happen in the coming days.

-Brandon