Saturday was a day filled with activities so we’ll see how short I can keep it…

As we were heading to Junkön ( as I mentioned in the Wednesday post) Ingemar and I had to get up at a decent time, 9 o’clock or something like that. We picked up Andre by Pingstkyrkan at 10.05am and then we were off for a new adventure.
The sky was blue, the snow was white, the sea was frozen, the temperature was perfect as were the company so the day looked rather promising. After a long ride across islands and over the frozen Baltic the people went out of the cars into the snow like cows that are let out on green fields after a long winter indoors… ;)
Before barbecue time we played an advanced version of tag, Monster’s Ynk, a “confusing” game were the Monster is supposed to catch the Ynk but they switch roles every now and then (decided by very consistent rules) and the we had an old fashioned snowball fight. Yay!!
As we had lots of snow pretty much everywhere I started to dig a hole for sitting in the sun and fika. Ingemar dug a hole of his own and when we were done I must say that his hole wasn’t much of a hole but very good to sit in, my hole though was a great hole but not very good to sit in… Well, with some help from Lauren and Kacie we later turned it into a great fortress with both entrance and escape tunnels so at least I didn’t dig the hole for nothing ).
As I believe that taking a sauna is highly overrated I didn’t take one, but instead I made flips in the snow, had more snow fights, taught Abby how to pronounce “Gunnar är en artig gosse” at the museum and had an over all great time! (As for the “Gunnar är en artig gosse” phrase I think it’s a great counterweight for the other useful Swedish phrases we taught our English speaking friends, “Kinesiska muren” and “Storsjöodjuret”).
On our way back home after a lovely day Johan got the command over the Volkswagen van so that we would enjoy some good ol’ drifting. I can’t say that he didn’t meet up to the expectations, rather I’d say he did pretty well even with an overloaded van…
The night was reserved for the Birthday party I mentioned last Sunday. As I was early and involved in some strange way I helped preparing by not standing in the way so much and then make pizza sandwiches. You who weren’t there should have seen the tomato soup cauldron or the bowl with cake batter (consisting of 20 eggs, 3 litres of sugar, 1 kg of butter…) Sure it was cooking to remember.
The party had all the parts that a party should have to be called a party, good food, nice people, opening of presents, singing ( Peter Gustav and I performed the song we had written, it went as it went and Lauren later diplomatic told be that it was “amusing”. I don’t know what she meant with that..), games and a trilingual speech from the birthday kids.
This was also the night I was introduced to the vegetable game (I couldn’t be a pig though so I had to settle with cucumber which isn’t as tasty but not too bad…) and the discussion of the existence or non-existence of spoons (that evidently do exist in a souvenir shop at Arlanda airport but not in the EFS church in Luleå).
As people started to drop off, only the hard core party people stayed until way too long. I think we sang hymns until 2am or so…