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!