Pastries & Lisbet

I'm a little sad. We've been here about twice as long as we've been in any other country but today is our last day and it's kind of just somber. It's been so much fun, and I have no idea when I'll see these people or this country again. I will find a way back though, for sure.

We spent the early afternoon walking about Sundbyberg (Helen/Daniel's neighborhood) with Helen. She showed us the pastries that Sam had recommended to me. One was called kanelbulle and is a cinnamon roll, and then we also tried one Helen recommended that was a vanilla heart. Like the dough was heart shaped with powdered sugar and the middle of the heart was filled with vanilla creamy goodness. Helen was so surprised that we didn't have any of these amazing pastries back home. Probably a good thing for my health that we don't though. After we bought the pastries we walked to Sandra's apartment which is pretty close by. Turns out she is giving her little puppy Harley back in a couple of days, and this was our last real chance to see her. So we sat in the sun and ate our pastries and chatted with Sandra and watched Harley run around for a little bit. Then, Sandra, uber-busy as usual had to go nanny.

Helen showed us to a cafe where they serve princess cake, another pastry Sam recommended (she is good at these recommendations). Princess cake is a huge layered chunk of deliciousness topped with green marzipan. I took pictures, obviously, so sorry for the lame description. We then parted ways with Helen and headed into town, full of sugar and nothing else.

We decided to go to the Central Station to reserve our train seats from Stockholm to Copenhagen. But we told the lady that our end destination was Bordeaux, France. She looked at the route we had decided on and informed us that the trains we wanted to take were fully booked and there was no way to get on them. GREAT. We literally spent at least an hour talking to this poor woman, who was so patient, kind, and helpful. You know how you pull numbers and wait for the desk to light up with your number above it? She just turned hers off and spent what felt like forever helping us find a way to Paris. The problem was that high school just finished this week for the year, so there's tons of kids in Europe traveling for the summer, not to mention...it is June now. Which means Laura and I are now in the masses of travelers instead of in the off season, like how it started off. Which was now 2.5 months ago. Crazy.

It was a big complicated mess, but essentially, to get to Bordeaux the easiest route would be to go Stockholm - Copenhagen - Koln - Paris - Bordeaux. 4 transfers. We could book seats to Copenhagen, but Copenhagen to Koln was fully booked. And France has like cut off it's train system information from the rest of the world, so you can't reserve domestic French train seats until you're IN France. So there was a possibility we would get to Paris and NOT be able to make it to Bordeaux the same day. And we didn't have a CouchSurfer set up for Paris, only Bordeaux. And it's like a solid 24 hours on a train to get to Paris, so there wasn't really time to find one in case we got stuck in Paris. So what we ended up doing was booking seats to Paris leaving Thursday from Stockholm (arriving Friday in Paris). We hoped Helen/Daniel/Hakan would be OK with us staying an extra night...we needed time to find an "on-call" CouchSurfing host in Paris and to update our host in Bordeaux. So nothing was working out how we planned, but I think it will all work out. We will have to go from Stockholm - Copenhagen - Frankfurt - Paris, which is slightly less direct but hopefully it'll all work out. Bleh.

By the time we finished at the train station, it was time to go to Lisbet's where we'd been invited for dinner. Lisbet is my great grandmother Mor Mor's cousin's wife. A little bit hard to grasp at first, but she is somebody that my grandparents and parents had met so I was excited to meet her too! And Laura and I will never say no to a home cooked meal :)

Finding Lisbet's place was very easy and she was such a sweet and lovely host. She started us off with a glass of chilled white wine and we quickly began talking about traveling, which was pretty much the dominant subject the whole evening. Lisbet has done a lot of traveling and is still taking at least 3 big trips per year. That is how I want to be when I grow up! Always traveling. It was very easy to talk to her about our adventures and hear about her plans. The actual dinner was also a really interesting experience for me. For the first time in my life, I tried caviar!!!! I am SO proud of myself!!! I don't even think my family will believe me on this one. It was actually pretty good, much saltier and less fishy than I was expecting. Lisbet served it on kind of a graham cracker toast kind of bread with yogurt sauce and chopped red onions. So that was a very brave and exciting gastronomic experience for me! The main course was raw salmon with a salsa verde sauce and a white sauce (which was all very good). There were also some delicious vegetables to go along with everything. Seriously, home cooked meals when traveling is like the best thing that could ever happen. Overall, I am so glad that I got a chance to meet with Lisbet to chat about travels! I think I've now met everybody my grandma recommended I should meet that still live in Sweden, so it's been an ideally successful visit here!

We stayed at Lisbet's for a solid three hours, and finally we left to go home and break the news to Helen/Daniel that we needed to stay another night...haha. They of course were fine with it, but we've just been here longer than planned so I was starting to feel kind of badly like...maybe they want to be able to walk through their living room again?

Daniel, Lynn, and Hakan were about to watch the movie "Leon" which is actually the real name of the movie called "The Assassin" in the States. I don't know when or where but I definitely saw that movie (rare for me) but it's a really good movie. While we all watched that, Laura and I worked on figuring out the CouchSurfing situation for Bordeaux/Paris. By the end of the movie, we'd done as much as we could do. When the boys and Lynn went to bed we of course stayed up and watched more Mad Men. Sadly, we finished the second season so...pretty impressive how we powered through that haha.


Quotes:
"I'll get another bottle; these bottles are so small!" - Lisbet, regarding our wine consumption