Äpplemarknaden i Kivik and a Swedish hobby farm

Generally we are not festival/fair people.  We tend to head away from crowds rather than towards them for entertainment, but this last weekend we saw a Swedish festival that we just had to check out.  Äpplemarknaden is held each fall in Kivik, a town on the southeastern coast of Sweden, to celebrate the apple harvest.  The big draw is that each year they have an artist create a huge work of art-- all out of apples.  This was something we had to see.

Poster showing previous years' apple art

We headed out early, arriving right as it opened at 10 am, because we heard it would get really crowded.  We chickened out of the huge field parking (knowing Europeans it would be very tight spaces) and parked a little ways up the coastal road instead.  It was a beautiful day and it was a nice walk along the shore. It is a very picturesque area.  We'll have to come back next summer when it is warm enough to think about water.

We were disappointed to find that they wait and do a big "unveil" so we couldn't see the apple art yet. 



We wandered around and looked at all the booths.  It was like any craft show/festival sort of thing-- lots of vendors selling arts and crafts, clothing, food items.  They did have lots of different apples you could sample.  The coolest thing we found was a tent whose interior was all decorated with apples.  There were posters of all the previous apple art and pyramids and other decorations made of apples.  On the railing were apples of all different varieties arranged by name. It looked really cool.

A smaller version of apple art.  It showed us how they do the big ones.  They build a pegboard from wood and nails and then just press the apples (or pears in this case) on.



 When it was finally time for the unveling, we gathered in the big square.  We happily managed to get ourselves situated close to the front. We knew there was supposed to be some sort of procession with a band and we couldn't figure out how that was going to happen.  The square was packed tight with people.  There was no aisle or corded off area. We started to hear the band, and looking over the heads you could see a few flags coming slowly towards us-- straight through the crowd.  As they got close, all the people around us started say "bakåt, bakåt" as we all got shoved into each other to make room for the band, led by (the kids loved this) an apple man.

The Apple Man clears the way through the crowd for the band.

This group's name translated to Youth Orchestra.  We must be missing something there!





 At last, after a too long speech by the emcee--we couldn't understand what he was saying but could tell he was trying to be funny but was not succeeding in getting many laughs-- they let down the tarp.



This year's masterpiece.  We really like the trees on the right but aren't quite sure what the big red pile on the left is supposed to be.  A tree in the foreground, a pile of apples, a pile of leaves? Hmmm...

We really like how this view shows how it really is all apples.

 

  We didn't stay long after the unveiling.  The boys had another adventure they wanted to get to. A coworker was planning to cut some lumber with his portable saw mill and announced "All are welcome. None are invited." (We love that.  We want to post it above the door to our house.) So the boys drove up to a small farm in Arkelstorp and spent the afternoon there. 

The house they visited.



The sawmill was powdered by an old tractor.



Finished product

T was wishing he'd packed more work clothes so he'd have fit in better. He didn't like looking like a city boy. :-) They enjoyed checking out the machinery.  They also got to see some motorcycles and a wood chipper made from an old "diesel lorry" (semi-truck for those who don't speak British). T enjoyed escaping city living for a while.  (When he gets "homesick" it is for his cars and garage.)

Cute chickens that reminded them of Muppets

Nice pony

Katten Hus

So what do you do when you're living overseas (with a "no pets" lease) and your kids miss their cat?  We'd hoped there would be some roamers in the neighborhood that they could "adopt" but no luck so far with that.  So one weekend we hit the computer trying to find an animal shelter to visit. That is not as easy as you might think.  Apparently, while the government does about everything here, one thing they do not do is shelter unwanted animals.  We lucked out, though, and found there was a cat rescue place very close to our house and that they had open house hours on Saturday afternoons.

They currently have around 30 cats in the place.  Yes, the smell was pretty overwhelming, but it was a pleasant place.  There was a large room with some couches and tables here and there and then a bunch of cat condos.  The cats were free to roam where they wished.  They also had a window open to a fenced in outdoor play area so they could go in and out.  There were literally cats eveywhere and of every size, shape and personality.  The only cages were for new cats that needed to be kept separate for a while. We all enjoyed playing with, petting, and brushing cats. I'm sure we'll be back again.







More Stuff that is Different in Sweden

Since we spent last weekend putting laminate down in the kitchen rather than touristing, we don't have any new, exciting scenery to share.  Instead, here's some more things we've found that are different in Sweden.

Covering the kitchen floor with cheap laminate made it SO much nicer.

DRIVING

Luckily, they do drive on the right side of the road.  There are still some differences though.  An obvious one is that the speed limits are all in km/h.  Also, they stripe the roads different.  All the stripes are white which was hard to get used to at first.  We've only seen maybe two stop signs ever.  They have a lot of signs that are essentially yield signs instead.  I don't think they ever have a 4-way stop.  There are lots of roundabouts.  They are a little intimidating at first but actually work really well.  They keep traffic moving quickly through intersections.

I tried to get a picture of a typical round-about but they aren't very photogenic

The street lights also take some getting used to.  They go green-yellow-red-yellow-green.  It's kind of like "on your mark, get set, go!"

This means it's about to turn green.

There are often separate lights for bikes at crossings (with a little button to push like the pedestrian crossings). I'm not sure why they bother since they always change with the pedestrian walk/don't walk sign anyway.  The bikers and pedestrians are probably the most challenging part of driving here.  There are lots of them to avoid.  Oh, and you have to make sure you don't turn onto a bike path instead of a road-- some are wide enough to fool you.

One other funny driving thing that I have yet to get a picture of--when they want you to slow down, they put a nice chicane into the road.  Some are pretty dramatic.  Unlike speed bumps which you can go over pretty fast, a tight chicane really forces you to slow down.

This is not so much about driving, but I'll put it here since the picture is a road sign.  Can you figure out that sign?  It's a reduced speed for a school zone that is in effect the dates school is in session.  What makes it confusing is that in Europe they write dates backwards from how we do.  September 12 is 12/9 not 9/12.  It is hard on the brain!  You'll also notice they use 24 hour time.  One other weird date thing.  They frequently use week number, especially at school, as in what week of 2011 this is.  I get notes that say, "Homework for week 36 is..." (but in Swedish) or "Week 45 will be fall break"and I must admit I never know what week number we are on. 

SHOPPING and FOOD

You have to put a coin deposit in to get a shopping cart.  That won't be shocking to anyone who has shopped at Aldi.  You also have to bring your own bags or pay for bags and you always bag it yourself.

Stores close much earlier than in the US, especially on the weekends.  Grocery stores are open a little longer, but most stores close by 5-6 pm on weekdays and by 4 pm on Saturdays.  Apparently Swedes do not spend their weekends shopping.

There is a whole line of food here that comes in a tube (like a giant toothpaste tube).  The best we can understand, they are spreads of some sort.  Some are various flavors with cheese and we've also seen some labeled caviar and herring.  We have not dared experiment with any of them yet.

Reading your cereal box (and other packaging) is a multicultural experience.  Here's two sides of a box of Rice Krispies.You can count all the languages.  Since each Scandanavian country has its own language but none is big enough to warrant its own packaging, this is common.

And here's a box of Ritz crackers.  It covers all of Europe.

A couple of other food things-- people tend to eat with both their fork and knife, one in each hand.  We had dinner with some friends--some American, some Swedish-- and at the end of meal, we noticed all the Americans' knives were unused.  :-)

And it seems really common here to eat a hard cracker-like bread.  None of us care for it. It is always available at school lunch.  G has started calling it Hard Tack.

And here is a typical barbecue grill at a Swedish park.  The kids think it looks like a fire hazard and they may be right since we've seen several charred tables.

OTHER ODDS AND ENDS

Toilets typically have a button or knob on the top of the tank. The ones at our house have two buttons next to each other.  You can push either or both, depending on how big of a flush you want.

A fairly typical toilet-- though we've seen a number of varieties

The beds look really different.  They have a really thin top mattress over a thicker foundation. They still sometimes push twin beds together and call it a double (both the hotel and our rental house-- good old American queen bed is coming in our sea shipment.  Hurray!) They make up the beds a differently as well but we ignore that.

Bikes are decked out to be useful vehicles, rather than just toys.  The bike sections of stores are huge--tons of accessories available.We picked up a used bike to use until ours arrive.  It came with a bell, a headlight, fenders, and a book rack on the back and we added a basket for all those textbooks.  

Bikes at a church youth activity.


 We've seen that a lot of kids use the rack on the back as an extra seat to give a friend a ride. You also see many bikes equipped with baby/toddler seats and often see whole families heading out in the morning for school, daycare and work on their bikes.

 

Exploring the eastern shore

Last weekend we weren't too adventurous.  We were ready to have a lazy Saturday at home.  We did take a quick trip to Åhus, a town nearby on the eastern shore of Sweden, in search of ice cream.  We heard there was a stand that sold big ice cream cones.  While they weren't Chill N Grill proportions, they were very yummy!

We hear that Åhus has nice beaches but since it has been rainy and cool, we haven't checked them out yet.  We did roam the town a little and found a remnant from the old city wall. 

This weekend, we headed out on a longer adventure.  We decided to cater to the boys in the family. We drove 1 1/2 hours north to Karlskrona, the headquarters of the Swedish navy for hundreds of years. 

Cool bridge just outside Karlskrona

We visited the Marinmusuem there which had artifacts and information on the history of the navy and shipbuilding in Sweden.



 They had nice audio tour headsets in various languages (though M was concerned they'd hurt her photo ops).  They had a huge model room with old models of various boats, docks, etc. Everyone thought that was really cool.

They also had an underwater tunnel through which you could see a shipwreck.  The water was pretty murky, but you could make out the old pieces of ship. You could also see lots of fish and jellyfish.

They had some curious art work-- all made of weapons.


 There was a hall of figureheads. It's hard to get the scale in these pictues, but they were huge.

They also had many hands-on exhibits. One let you try to navigate a ship. We did it right once, but then just had to do it again to see what would happen if we did it really wrong.  They had you take two measurements along the simulated journey.  After the first wrong measurement the computer captain said, "The men are wondering what you are doing." After the second, the captain complained that they were hours late to their destination and that we "Sailed like a Dane!" At another spot in the museum, he got to blow up Danish ships with a cannon. They had a play area for kids that was a mock-up of a ship.  It had dress-up clothes (our kids are too old for that) hammocks, ladders to climb, radios to play with, etc. 


Exhibit about the Cold War

Outside they had a number of boats docked.  They also had a submarine sitting out of the water.  G's great disappointment of the day was that we weren't able to go onto any of them. 

Karlskrona is built on an archipelago-- lots of little islands with narrow water passages between--which is what made it a strategic harbor.  We could see fortifications on many of the islands. Unfortunately we didn't have time to take boat rides to the outer fortresses. We did walk around one fortification near the museum and you can see several others in the distance.

We also walked up the hill to town to see two churches in the town square.  Unfortunately, they were only open for a few hours in the morning so we weren't able to see inside.  The town was a fun town, though.  Lots of tall narrow buildings.

A typical street



Lovely People!

After spending a frustrating day fighting with the bureacracies of banking in Sweden (paperless financial transactions are great-- unless you aren't allowed access to electronic transfers), I thought it would be cathartic to write about one of the best things about Sweden--the people we've met.

Before we came, our relocation package included a weekend of "Cultural Traning" for the whole family, which was frankly a waste of our time and the company's money. Anyway, one of the things these experts (who'd never actually lived in Sweden themselves) told us was that we should expect Swedes to be very reserved and private and that it would probably be hard to befriend people during our short stay. From our experience, that has not been the case at all.

For one thing, thanks to belonging to a world-wide church (The Church of Jesus Christ of Latterday Saints), we had an instant family of fellow believers here, and we have been welcomed so warmly by all the members of the Kristianstad Branch.  We've been invited into their homes.  They've helped with laundry while we were in the motel and answered all my questions about shopping, buses and garbage pickup.  They've befriended our kids.  It is an interesting congregation because there are people from all over the world-- native Swedes, Danes, transplanted Americans and several families from South America, but they manage to integrate and support each other. We don't understand alot of what is said at church but what is clear are the strong testimonies of the gospel of Jesus Christ.  Sweden is a very secular country.  While it is traditionally Lutheran, few people today attend any church at all or consider themselves religious, and the general standards of morality are more lax than what we are used to in the US.  So it takes courage to be a Christian and live high standards.

Jesu Kristi Kyrka av Sista Dagars Heliga, Kristianstad, Sverige

But it isn't just at church that we've found friendly, helpful people.  Whether it is the stranger helping us get on the right train or pay for parking, the teachers and administrators at school working hard to find the right classes for the kids and to include them in the school activities, soccer coaches welcoming them to training, or coworkers inviting our kids along on a business dinners and bringing things to us at the hotel, people have been so helpful and welcoming to us.  They have been patient with our non-existant language skills and done everything they could to help us feel comfortable in Sweden.

Last night I went to a Parent's meeting at G's school (a back-to-school night).  I debated whether it was worth the time to go since I would only understand probably one word out of twenty spoken.  I decided that if G can go to school each day, I could handle one parent meeting.  I was correct about how much I understood but it was actually a very good experience.  G's teacher is so kind and I can tell she is working so hard to help him understand and learn and feel a part of the class.  For example, since the boys always play soccer at recess she had the class make a list of soccer-related Swedish words for G.  I had several parents express how glad they are that G is at their school.  Since the kids here all have to learn English in school the parents say it is an asset to their children to have a native-English speaker in class. One mom waited whlie I talked to the teacher so she could walk home with me and show me where they live (just around the corner from us) so our boys could get together and play. 


M's classmates have also been very welcoming to her.  The IB program at her school only has about 30 kids in each grade level so they are a tight-knit group.  They pulled her into their social circle right away, have helped her learn the ropes at school, and most importantly, included her in their runs for Fika (traditionally a coffee break with bakery treats--but for M's friends it seems to be all about the treats).