Sweden

Sweden is a beautiful, friendly country. My impression of people here is that they are very helpful and speak excellent English. They also have a lot of birds that remind me strongly of ones I saw in Beijing.


Our first day in we mostly settled into Constantina's family's house. We went out to the World Culture Museum (Varldskultur Museet) for a little bit and learned about Bollywood and theft of Peruvian artifacts.



Our second day (yesterday) we went to the Fish Church, an important part of Goteborg. Apparently it used to be a church, and now it's a fish market. I'm not really sure how that happened. After that we wandered around Goteborg with Constantina's younger brother, Sotiri. We never quite managed to get to the old city of Haga, but we did find other interesting things. My favorite were the buildings built into the rock. Swedish buildings in general are pretty. It seems like each building has at least one particularly nice or interesting characteristic.
In the evening we went to an event at the Chinese Embassy. I never expected I'd get to use Chinese so much in Sweden! The event was celebrating China's upcoming hosting of the World Expo next May. Strange that the best Chinese food I've had in a while was in Sweden.

Today we took a ferry out and wandered around one of Goteborg's little islands. It seemed like each of the houses there was really cute and had beautiful landscaping. We ended up mostly exploring a small island off of the island we went to. It was a lot of fun climbing around on the rocks there. Wading was sadly short, as the water was pretty cold. But still fun! We also played scientists and observed the life in a little tide pool.

Tomorrow we'll hike up the hill behind Constantina's house, wander a little more, than hop a train to Denmark and Kopenhagen!