Nybro

For the past few weeks, we’ve been working hard on our first (but not last) help exchange. We’re staying on a snowy little property in southern Sweden, near Nybro. It’s out in the middle of the forest about 15km from town, and is home to Emilie and Matthias, their two sons Matthias Jnr (16) and Robin (19), Bastian the border collie, Chikan the horse, 3 cats, 4 rabbits and a sheep. Apart from the main house, there’s a guesthouse that is rented out during the summer to guests and a massive L-shaped barn that houses the firewood, horse/sheep, cars and other things, with part of the building converted into a house for us helpers. It’s been cold – the first few weeks it snowed regularly and the temperature ranged from about -10 to 0 degrees – but now is starting to warm up more. It feels ridiculous to be saying ‘oh my god, it’s so hot!’ when the mercury climbs above 2 degrees, but with the work we’ve been doing outside it’s easy to get a sweat up.

The main project we are working on here is the building of a second guesthouse. There’s an old stone building that we are revamping using old car tyres (yes, car tyres!) packed solid with dirt and stacked on top of the original stone wall foundations. It’s hard work, so we are definitely earning our keep (despite both eating like champions)! So far we have discovered that when it’s consistently below 0 degrees, everything freezes - including dirt! In fact, the pile of dirt fill we are using to fill the tyres has to be chipped away at with a pick axe before you can fill the buckets, and you need to use a sledgehammer to smash the frozen ground and old wood on top of the stones when levelling the tyres. There are two other helpers here at the moment as well as us – Phil is another Aussie from WA, and Onofre is from Spain. So between us we’re making pretty decent progress on this little house.

In between carting buckets of dirt and packing it in tyres, we’ve had plenty of time to do a bit of exploring and have fun attempting to injure ourselves in new and interesting ways. Our hosts took us to a local ski field with toboggans, where we managed to raise the average toboggan-er age significantly. We’ve taken Chikan out riding through the snowy forests, and gone hiking along little paths to visit the horses on the adjacent property. We even spotted (and subsequently chased) a couple of moose through the woods! Of course we’ve used the sauna (at about 80deg!) and then rolled in the snow. Add to that, Robin and Matthias Jnr are thrill seekers…so Lecky just had to have a go of being dragged behind the car on a steel sleigh type apparatus after seeing the boys hard at it!











We also had the chance to got to Kalmar (the next town over) to meet Lecky’s mum’s cousin Barbara, her husband Siggie and all the subsequent family that has followed. We went to see Kalmar castle which was built in the 12th century I think, and despite many attempts by invading Danes, the castle never fell. Upon having a look around it was easy to see why…perfectly located, drawbridge and moat, massive canons, well constructed (you could live there now!) as well as several other built-in anti-sacking-by-invader mod cons.



So far Sweden has been textbook…we live in a pine forest, so with the snowfalls come picturesque photos like something out of a storybook. We went to the bakery, which was fully equipped with a blonde-haired, blue-eyed Swede woman wearing a bonnet and happy disposition. If this keeps up we’ll expect to see Vikings walking around when we get to Denmark in a week or so!

Stockholm

Hooray! We're out of London!

We arrived in Stockholm mid afternoon to sunny skies and fields dotted with red barns/houses, ice-covered lakes and fir trees, all dusted in powdery white snow. After catching the gay pride bus (not really - it just had big rainbows on the sides) into Central, we demolished two kebab burgers (didn't quite manage to order proper kebabs with our complete lack of Swedish language) and then tried to figure out how to get out to our couchsurfing host's (Johanna) house. Lucky for us, she'd given us really good directions, so all we had to do was find the metro (subway) and get off at the right stop. Unfortunately we'd missed the last email from our host, so we went straight to the house while she waited at central station.. oops. While waiting we amused ourselves by sliding on the ice in the playground, and then tried to take blurry motion pictures of our feet (which didn't work).

As far as cities go, Stockholm is pretty nice. We did a lot of walking on our only full day - starting along a little local walk (tip from Johanna!) that had really great views over the old city, and then back through the bohemian district in search of crepes. We found the crepes shop, but it was closed until the afternoon :-( Then on to the old city, Gamla Stan, which is full of narrow cobbled streets, a lot of shops (being a major tourist drawcard a lot are overpriced and full of souvenirs) and plenty of nice things to look at. We followed this up with another trip to a kebab shop....this time we managed to order the right thing, and they were awesome....~40cm long!


Resisting the urge to lay down and go to sleep we decided to walk our way over to Djurgarden and go for our first walk through Sweden forest. It was really pretty although the trails were completely covered in ice, which meant hands out of pockets for balance and trying not to slide backwards down the hill!


For those who aren't aware...Stockholm is actually an archipelago city....all these places mentioned above are actually separate islands connected by bridges.

We bid farewell to our host Johanna after 2 nights and are now sitting in our new temporary home for the next 3 weeks or so, down south in Nybro...more to come in the next blog...

Sweden bound

Well, after turning down job offers and opting not to work in London right now, we are about to trade in grey old London for (hopefully) the snowcapped forests and lakes of Sweden.

We will be embarking on our first help exchange for the trip - basically swapping about 5 hours of work on weekdays for free acommodation and food. And given how much we eat, I think we'll be getting a pretty good deal :-)

You can read more about our hosts here.

Meaningful cold

So if you haven't read the news headlines, the UK has been hit with some of the heaviest snowfalls in over 18 years. For us, the first snows begain falling in earnest as we waited for our overnight bus in Newcastle. Full points go out to the two bus drivers on duty that night, because after seeing some of the more isolated roads we passed through, I have no idea how they managed to get us back to London unscathed. Even so, this wasn't enough to keep everybody happy - at about 6:30am as we hit the outskirts of London, a particularly stupid induhvidual heads up to the front of the bus to speak to the driver.

Induhvidual: Hey buddy, I gotta be at work by 7. Why are we running so late?

Driver (to Resting Driver): What's he saying?

Induhvidual: I got a meeting at 7, it's very important. I can't understand why we're so late.

Resting Driver (in disbelief): Uhh... have you looked outside recently??

Driver (to Induhvidual): Look mate, just go and sit back down.

Induhvidual: But I gotta...

Driver (rage building): Go on, just go and sit back down. (pause) Go on. Back to your seat!

At this point the Induhvidual grudgingly goes back to his seat. Any passengers within earshot are sniggering to themselves.

Driver (to Resting Driver): Fucking idiot.

Arriving in London about an hour and a half late, we were very lucky to get in at all. Many of the underground tube lines were suspended in part or full, and no local bus services were running. Schools and businesses closed for the day, motorways were shut down and gridlocked, and at the airports, flights were delayed up to 48 hours.

But thankfully for us, we didn't have to be anywhere or do anything, besides admiring the pretty white-capped buildings, cars and parks, and having impromptu snowball fights.

Quintessential England

So after tiring of dreary London and its grey skies, we traded in a weekend of darts and frivolity at the Market Trader (our beloved former local pub) in favour of a bus trip to Newcastle-Upon-Tyne and some Geordie confusion. The weekend started on Friday, rising at the ungodly hour of 8am to catch our 9:30am bus. After destroying bacon and egg rolls, we fell asleep almost instantly - conveniently missing the entire peak hour bedlam on our way out of London. When we woke up, it was to a completely different backdrop. Gone was the urban jungle of suburban London - instead, we gazed out upon rolling green fields, neatly edged with post-and-rail or stone fences (with or without thorny hedges) and dotted with postcard fluffy sheep and horses. Granted, the quintessential English landscape was a little soggy and waterlogged, but I'm sure in spring and summer it would be just gorgeous. We even passed what looked like an old royal estate - enclosed with high stone walls and terracing, with a herd of deer grazing on the forest's edge.

Newcastle is a pretty city that retains a medieval feel (especially in the city near the riverside), and is home to the Newcastle United F.C. and the Tyne and Gateshead Millennium bridges.

Saturday morning we spent ambling around Durham (a country town just south of Newcastle). This would probably have to be one of the nicest and prettiest places we've been to in England - loads of narrow streets and lanes full of quaint stone buildings, with the Durham Castle and Cathedral forming a magnificent backdrop to the whole town. At first it was freezing, but then the sun came out and made everything a lot more bearable.

Saturday night we took in the Manchester United v Everton game at a pub - unfortunately the highlight (lowlight?) of the night was our friend's car's handbrake giving out, sending it rolling slowly down the hill into a parked van. We have just about overcome the traditional Aussie habit of calling football "soccer", reserving "footy" for the far superior game of rugby league.. Can't wait to see if any diehards take the bait on that one :-)

Sunday we woke to freezing temperatures and blizzard-like winds - so of course, we went ahead with our plans to visit the beach. As it turns out, there actually IS a sandy beach in England!

Given the arctic conditions, we voted against kite-surfing and wetsuit swimming, instead agreeing over lunch that "lovely" and "cod & chips" can be used in the same sentence without forming an oxymoron.