Braving the Swedish summer
Apparently, this is an especially wet June/July for Sweden. The wet weather is headlining all the daily papers. Our Swedish friends are not happy at all with the cold, overcast, often rainy weather. We don’t really mind as rain in July is a novelty for Californians.
We are now at the Sjoholm/Ekblom summer house. This is where I spent my summer as a high school exchange student in 1979. We are here with Per’s family – Albin 17, Filippa soon-to-be-12, Hugo 1, and Per’s partner Eva Lotta. Gigi is quite enamored with Hugo, who is definitely the prince of the house. Filipp
a is still deciding if she wants to speak with us in English.
Albin turns out to be a Mac super genius and part-time web designer, so he has been giving Gigi tutorials/instruction in setting up this blog page. Funny, as I write this there are 3 mac laptops and an iphone on the table with me, along with the iphone in my pocket. Apple will soon control the world.
Has anyone heard of the website Pirate Bay? A super Napster-style website that is ‘legal’, or at least heavily patronized here in Sweden. Check it out.
Today we ate lunch at a renovated boathouse for lunch – pasta in a mushroom sauce topped with dill-cured salmon slices. Gigi had a salad with smoked boiled shrimp in the shell. I love Swedish-style seafood! When the weather gets better and the sea calms down, the boys get the chance to go tubing out on the cold Baltic.
Our first night here Jordan and Justin had fun with Albin, who is also a budding DJ. In a local community center – just a barn-like building on the main road – Albin put on a disco night. He has 6 – 700 watt amplifiers and major soundboard for his mixing. The old windows were rattling from the sub-woofers. 4 paying customers showed up in addition to a few friends, but apparently that is OK because he gets a chance to use his equipment and there are no neighbors to complain about the ‘noise’.
I feel at home here, since this is kind of a second home for me, having lived in Sweden for a year. All our friends have been very welcoming and everyone is getting along great.
