Barbeques and Quiz Walks

Hej! Guess what? It's finally becoming spring here in Sweden! Yay! We've gotten to enjoy the outdoors some more, though it is still a bit chilly and rainy some days. I am REALLY looking forward to a beautiful Texas summer and days on the boat with family and friends! But until then, here are some pictures of the last couple weeks in Växjö. 

We met some friends for a picnic at the lake before some geocaching and this cute duck kept following us around! He had come quite a ways by the time I started recording - too cute!

Jonathon and I went to meet some of his friends at a grill near the lake for a barbeque. We got to visit the vegetable market in town that morning, so I made a beautiful kebab :D he, of course, had to have hot dogs. Haha. 

We've been training hard (ish) haha, for the upcoming half marathon. I had to stop and take some pictures of the forest while we were out practicing the course! Look at Jonathon and Sinead go ;) the race is this Friday, ahh! 

My beautiful self-portrait pizza ;)

Jonathon's lovely portrait!

It seems like everything we do revolves around food...so We had a Picasso pizza night: self-portrait edition! Our buddies and some friends on the floor came over and we each made our own pizzas. They weren't so cute...but they tasted yummy! :D 

Photo credit: Jonathon Orwig

Sunday we went on a quiz walk in the woods with our friend family. It was a cold, drizzly day, but we ventured into the forest and tried to decipher Swedish quiz questions. I've never seen this done at home, but basically you go on a 3k or so walk and look for questions. You're given an answer sheet and you record your answers to the trivia questions, then walk until you find the next one and so on. A friend that we made got all of the questions right, whoa! I only got 7/12 haha.

Beautiful trees on the way to town!

Everything in Växjö seems to be blooming; there are colorful flowers everywhere and blooming trees as well!

While most of our experiences here have been great, we have had a couple of not so fun ones. Last weekend my bike was stolen out of the bike cage, and then this weekend Jonathon's was! We've both gotten new ones since, as it is difficult to get to class without them.

In a couple days it'll be Jonathon's birthday! I know he's missing his friends and family, so if you see this, please send him a nice birthday message :)

In a week we will be headed to Norway on our first big travels here so far! After that we will go visit my sweet roommate at SNU in her hometown of Bremen, Germany! I'm sure I will have lots of pictures and separate blog posts for those travels. We are definitely excited for them!

We are getting ready to come home, as we miss all of our friends and family. Only one month and a little less than two weeks! I hope we'll be ready for the Texas sunshine ;D

Sincerely,

Laura. 

Castles and Crafts

Hello! 

How's it going? :) It's been a cold and dreary week in Sweden, but we didn't let that stop us from having a good time. We went adventuring and learnt new things.

We ended last week with a geocaching excursion. It was much colder than the beautiful 50 degrees that we had the last time, but it was still fun! 

Antonia's first find! Woo! We spent so much time on this one. 

My super cute fiancé with his find. 

Greig's first! Adventured to "Bee Paradise" for this one. 

Yay, I found one too :) 

 We got to end the day with some good ol' fika at Vallgatan. 

Växjö is nice, but Jonathon and I decided that we needed to go explore a new city. We took the train to Kalmar, a town on the east coast by the Baltic Sea. The train rides here are an adventure in themselves, as everything is in Swedish. "Jag talar inte svenska!" (I do not speak Swedish. :) )

Yeah, that's a real castle! The first foundations of the fortress were built in the 12th century when they constructed a round tower as a lookout. The rest of the castle was produced in the 1500s by King Gustav Vasa. (Wikipedia) It wasn't open, bummer, but we still got to view it from the yards. It is located on its own little island, with a moat and land moat as a defense system. There are four round towers covering the corners of the island. 

Kalmar Domkyrka - the cathedral. 

This island, which still has remnants of an ancient wall, was a vital part in defending the castle. 

We also spent time at the Kalmar Läns Museum. There was a whole floor dedicated to the warship the "Kronan", which capsized and exploded right outside of Kalmar during the Battle of Öland. Over 800 men died due to this tragedy. The ship's ruins were rediscovered in the 1980s, and volunteer divers have been bringing up artifacts ever since. The water is very cold and the ascent back to the surface takes a whole thirty minutes. 

We also visited the Ben and Jerry's (; we had to, right?! So yummy ice cream was also part of our Swedish adventure for the day. 

Today after church, our new friend and translator Jörg and his wife Annette had some of us international students over for lunch. We were blown away by how amazing the lunch was! He worked all morning to create this wonderful three course meal. Everything was complicated and served beautifully, from the starter Thai soup to the homemade coconut and lime ice cream. He also had a couple massage chairs... let's just say I spent some time on those. We had a wonderful time getting to talk with everybody and learning about everybody's cultures. It was also so nice to be in a home!

The lovely main dishes! Photo credits: Jonathon Orwig

From lunch, I met Antonia for a crafting experience in a restaurant's basement. Haha. It was interesting! We made our own tea bags. Mine were quite ugly, but hers turned out nice! Then we went for yummy fika :) always one of my favorite parts of the day haha. I tried a kardemumma muffin, which is super yummy! It was great to get to talk with her and have a nice, relaxed time. :)

I'm hoping this next week will have plenty of wondrous moments in store, as this one was great! I hope that everybody at home is doing well :) I miss and love you all. I'm definitely jealous of your weather, too. 

Sincerely,

Laura. 

Adventure is out there!

This last week was the best of all that I've spent in Sweden so far. I think. :) I spent lots of time adventuring and being with great people! You might know that Up is one of my favorite movies in the whole world. I love the motto of chasing adventure and making every day a new memory. Plus, who doesn't love a silly movie with a cute dog and a cranky old man? Not to mention Russell or Kevin.

Okay, enough with Up. To start out our week, Jonathon and I had a lovely dinner with our Swedish family. Theo, their son, cooked us a delicious Italian meal. We had fika afterward; I can now say that I'm a fan of Vietnamese coffee! 

The next day, I talked Jonathon into coming with me to the city library. :) We got library cards (nerds, I know). I guess you could say it made me feel a little Swedish ;) haha (the card, not the nerdiness). 

Then, on Friday night we got to have our Swedish buddies over for an American dinner! Jonathon and I made sweet tea, hamburgers, french fries and chocolate chip cookies. Mmm. We ended up talking forever, hopefully they weren't too annoyed ;) I've been told recently that I talk...A LOT. Hahaha, I guess I knew that.

The next day we got to do another dinner, but this time for our floormate/friend, Greig's birthday. I baked four loaves of bread. Yes, four. Talk about an arm workout! He made us a Scottish soup (since that's where he's from), and a trifle for afterward. They were both delicious! 

Finally on Sunday, I was dying to go out for an adventure. The weather was beautiful! It got to 51 degrees and the sun shined all day. Jonathon and I met up with our family again and they showed us a beautiful park area (like a state park back home). We biked around the trails; I can't wait to go back and run them! Zum, our "mom", and Per, "dad", brought fika along and we ate a blueberry pie and drank coffee on a bench in the shining sun! It was a beautiful afternoon. I'm so thankful for my Swedish family and buddy, they really are great and I love spending time with them!

The adventures weren't over yet, though. We got back to Vallgatan (our apartments) and headed off for a geocaching adventure with some of our floormates. It was the first time for all of them to find a cache, so it was super exciting! We all biked to the first cache, which took a long time to find, then to some more. The Vallgatan 6 (our logging name) found four caches and we're going to make it a weekly tradition. Woo!

Oh! And here's a pic from Sports Saturday last week; we look pretty intense (; 

Photo credit: Andrew Doering of VIS

Thanks for reading and have a great week!

Sincerely,

Laura.