Day 22-25/188: Sweden (Lund, Arild, Malmö) — Seeing (the world) 2̶0̶2̶0̶ 2022!

I’m writing this post at least ten countries and two months late, but still our time in Sweden is one of the top stops in our list for the whole family. We did have a cheat there. We stayed with awesome friends who we know from their time in Colorado a few years ago. They were there for about a year for work/sabbatical, but they ditched us and went back home to Lund at the end.

We’d always planned on visiting them on our trip, and we’re so glad we made it happen. All four of their family members are fun, intelligent, and interesting, so it’s always a joy to hang out with them. On top of that, they live in a beautiful house in a beautiful town, so the time there was hard to beat.

…space saver when you don’t! Why are the Scandinavians so much smart than us?

We were only there for three days, because of the whole visitors-and-fish thing, but they were the coolest hosts ever. Sweden should appoint them to the PR team for the country. The first day, we took the short train ride over from Copenhagen. It’s less than an hour, basically crossing a big bridge from Denmark into Sweden.

They picked us up at the train station and drove us through the adorable town of Lund to their home. There, they made us a fantastic dinner and taught us this ridiculously fun, surprisingly complex yard game called Kubb. I’ll forever have this quote from Plato stuck in my head that I learned in college while studying Therapeutic Recreation: “You can discover more about a person in an hour of play than in a year of conversation.” It’s so true, and playing that game together was the perfect re-ice breaker for the kids. Just a few rounds in, and we were competing and trash-talking as if we’d never been apart.

We stayed up way too late chatting and catching up, and we all slept in, in our very comfortable beds. (We also decided that we’re a great match of families for travel and visits, because all eight of us are night owls who like to sleep late.)

The next day, they drove us just a bit up the coast to this crazy scultpure thing called Nimis that you can climb in and on, assuming you aren’t worried about broken necks or tetanus. Just kidding, sort of. It’s nutso and definitely not something that could exist in the U.S., but it’s really cool and a lot of fun to explore. Once again, this was something we would never have discovered without the help of locals, so we are grateful to our friends for getting us out there. We walked through it and got to the rocky coast, where we sat on big boulders and ate sandwiches. The temperature was perfect, and the scenery was gorgeous.

A little further north along the coast, we stopped again in this seaside village called Arild that looked like a postcard. We had coffee, and the kids caught crabs in buckets. These weren’t crabs to eat. It was purely entertainment - mostly for the kids, but also for the adults watching, and even a little for the crabs who were definitely excited to eat hot dogs.

Back at home, we had another amazing dinner followed by a snuggly movie night for the kids and too much wine for the adults. It was perfect.

On our last full day there, we took the train to Malmo and explored Lund itself a bit more. Malmo is a much bigger city than Lund but not enormous. We took Story to a big park that was very cool but used to be even cooler. Evidently, some a-hole had burned it down a few years before, and they didn’t build it back the same way. Such a bummer, but we still liked what was there.

Sagan skated his heart out at this big skatepark right in the middle of the city. The rest of us watched and cheered him on for a while.

Our friends told us all about Sweden and what real life is like there - the good and the bad. To us, it seemed 100% heavenly, but we all know that no place is perfect. The universal healthcare and education is fantastic there, but the price you pay for that is the inability to achieve great financial success and move forward in life. For instance, he is a cardiac surgeon. She is a high-level attorney. But the idea of them buying, say, a modest vacation home is out of the question. Their house is beautiful, but it took them years to afford the renovations to get it to that point. (There’s a reason he worked for a year in America - the pay was great!)

There have also been issues with rising crime in some of the bigger cities. The Swedish government was very welcoming to refugees from other countries, and they have provided income to the refugees as well. This is wonderful and kind, but it has also led to some chaos and cultural clashes. It’s hard to get that right, no matter how you work it. (Our hometown has similar issues with homelessness, for instance. We can’t ever seem to find the right blend of compassion and practicality, leaving everyone unhappy with the state of things.)

In proper Scandinavian fashion, our friends weren’t whining about these issues. They were just explaining the realities of daily life. They’re happy where they are but not unrealistic about problems that exist.

For us, of course, Sweden was all rainbows and unicorns. Lund is now one of the many places Story is “definitely going to live.” She tried learning some Swedish after we left, because it was more necessary than we’d expected (that’s not to say we couldn’t get by without speaking it, but we weren’t hearing English everywhere). She wants to go to college there and, I don’t know, train dogs to ride on horses or something? We’re in full support of it, though. We only saw a tiny part of a large country, but that alone was enough to win us over. Hopefully our friends will be on board with us just moving in with them. They’d probably be too polite to kick us out, right?

Below are some more random pics from our time in Lund. Grocery stores are always fascinating to me. I still don’t know what the phones were for, but I’m super jealous of the Quorn selection. So many options for vegetarians! Quorn, hook us up in the States! Mayomix: maybe we can get that in the U.S. but it still makes me laugh when I see it. It’s a yummy combo for fries! Oh, and the berries…I took that picture because evidently the berries in Sweden are healthier than ours. I have no doubt it’s true, but we also thought it was a funny brag. ;)