Kalmar, Lund and Malmo

After farewelling our snowy (and later slushy and waterlogged) farm in the deep forest, we bussed over to Kalmar and checked into the guesthouse at Sigge and Barbara’s place. Barbara is Lecky’s mum’s sister who has called Sweden home for about 40 years - we couldn’t have asked for more welcoming hosts. Every day we were treated to some delicious food, including semlor – cardamon spiced buns with a filling of sweet almond paste and whipped cream. Needless to say, the recipe for semlor has been written down carefully and will be recreated numerous times when we get back to Australia!

We took in a driving tour of Oland (a small island just east of Kalmar, connected by bridge), stopping for tea and cakes at the “Oland Café” in a windmill, and then at the southern lighthouse, which is popular with birdwatchers checking out the migrating flocks of bird species. Unfortunately the lighthouse was closed so we had to content ourselves with wandering around trying to stay warm, and then squelching through a waterlogged field trying to get a close look at a herd of elk.

We couldn’t come to Sweden and not visit Ikea, so we spent a morning wandering around the massive building full of Swedish furniture and homewares, and then ate Swedish meatballs in their restaurant for lunch. And to our joint amazement, we managed to walk away from the store without buying a single couch, kitchenware or any other quirky, tastefully designed piece of house furnishing.

The area near Nybro is renowned for its high quality glasswork. We visited one place called Kosta Boda, and were able to go into the factory to watch the glassblowers and artists at work. Although many of the pieces are your standard tumblers, plates and the like, there are some original pieces of art that are just amazing. We were very sad not to be taking one particular piece by Bertin Vallien with us.

We spent a night in Lund, bunking down in a train hostel that uses converted sleeper carriages as its hostel rooms. Here we met up again with Phil (a fellow helpXer from Nybro) for a drink and caught up on all the news from the farm since we’d left. Got a train to Malmo, where apparently some big protests were going on at the Davis cup tennis match between Sweden and Israel. After buying our tickets for the train to Copenhagen, Denmark, we were down to our last 2 or 3 Swedish kroner in cash – not enough to buy anything of interest – so Lecky went on a mission to find a coastal point to view the Oresund bridge, while I stayed in the station minding the bags (sitting on a bench next to a couple passionately kissing). Turns out the start of the Oresund bridge is a fair way from the town centre so it was a fruitless expedition. The bridge is one of the longest and prettiest in northern Europe – it’s about 16km long, part over water and part tunnel.

We're now in Copenhagen taking in the sights....and enjoying Carlsberg beer, which as the sign points out is "probably the best beer in town"...a less than confidence instilling advertisement. More on Copenhagen and Denmark in our next adventure...same bat time, same bat channel...

Farewell Sweden

Well, after enjoying a week of luxury in Kalmar, we have arrived in Lund (southern Sweden) and are staying in a hostel based in old converted train carriages. It's pretty interesting although a little cramped as you can imagine! Off to Denmark later today, so will be writing more about our time in Kalmar plus some more photos when we arrive there (new ones of the farm in Nybro just added)...

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.