All other countries have inferior Potassium: Swedish supremacy of several sorts

I arrived in Sweden in the early afternoon to meet the most wonderful host ever! Tove met me at the bus station and we walked back to her place. First, Tove (pronounced Tu-veh) spoke perfect English and I mean perfect English. Göteborg (Gothenburg) is a really nice city and I could see myself living there, especially after having a really close look at the city. Thanks to Tove, I’ve finally been able to experience how awesome Couchsurfing can be.

Göteborg (well, Sweden in general) is an expensive city (country), but you can see where the money goes – into public services. It’s so clean and everything is just so. Sweden had the best public transportation that I’ve ever experienced – trams, buses, tram-buses, bus-trams (ok, no bus-trams), etc. But as a result of the cost of everything, I decided to do most of my own Swedish cuisine cooking since to eat out costs at least $12 a meal (the cheapest lunch I found). Salmon is relatively inexpensive, so I enjoyed several meals of salmon, which tastes great in Sweden! Because I had little selection in Cyprus and at the Budapest airport, I had to expand my beer tasting big time in Sweden in my quest to try as many as I could. Seventeen was all that I time for, sadly, as I only found the state-run alcohol store on Monday (closed on Sunday, but arrived Thursday). More on that later.

Göteborg is historically a huge port city and continues to be one today. There are many boats and little side harbors for personal crafts. And in fact, they have ferries that move quite quickly around the harbor as part of their public transportation. Tove and I hit it off really well and got along so well that she even took me out to see her mom’s place on her day off. Her mom lives on an old Swedish fishing island and let’s just say I had Swedish overload on that day. From the ferry to the colored cottages; the all bikes and no cars to the quaintly and perfectly disorderly gardens and kitchen, I couldn’t have asked for a better day. Visiting Brännö was definitely the highlight of my trip to Sweden. We poked around her mom’s house for a couple hours, went swimming in the harbor, and then made open-faced sandwiches and drank coffee and talked to her mom, who had just returned from a year in Iceland.

So like a real Swede, and, really, like a good American, I made the holy pilgrimage to IKEA. It was everything I had expected. To be honest, I had never been in an IKEA before, so I had no idea what to expect. I bought a couple things for the kitchen (a knife sharpener and a magnetic knife strip that can hang above the stove or something) and enjoyed a tasty meal at the café. To be honest, that was the only traditional Swedish meal that I could find for less than $15-20. It was really tasty and you’ll be proud to know, Grandma, that I ordered it and paid for it all in Swedish :-) I also went to several fish markets and took in the sights of all the fresh catches of the day.

And perhaps the funniest part of the trip to Sweden was the stories I heard about the park that was just outside my host’s apartment. There are some high hills there and I heard many stories from locals about how during Viking times, families used to take the elderly who only sat at home and ate and who didn’t contribute anything anymore to the top of this hill and push them off. They called it Ättestupan and I know my family will get a morbid kick out of this story as I surely did (I told my Swedish acquaintance that my Grandma would probably laugh if she heard about that and that my mom and aunt surely would, haha) :-).

Sweden: check.