Kissing

Going for a fishy kiss

or as the French say "faire la bise", is an art that is not always so easy to master. I mean first you have the different regions where they either do two kisses, one on each cheek or you have areas where they do three and even some regions where they do four kisses. I mean one on one cheek and then one on the other and then back to the first cheek and finishing off back on the second. You really have to know and this is only in France; Heaven knows what they get up to in the other Mediterranean countries.

The other conundrum is whom do you kiss. Foreigners frequently make mistakes here and think you kiss everybody you know, but no no no. There is a protocol even here, but generally children always kiss adults as a greeting when they are friends of the family. You kiss your friends and family and sometimes your friend's friends.

In high school teenage girls kiss both their male and female classmates, every morning. Boys kiss the girls and shake hands with other mates, again, every morning. I used to be so intrigued by this, I would sit outside school for a while in my car after having dropped the kids off, just observing this little endearing ritual.

The same kissing procedure is also common in a workplace, where the female workers kiss each other and also the male workers, and the male workers shake hands. Of course you don't kiss your boss. I worked in a place with mostly foreigners and we sadly didn't kiss.

Here in Australia they also kiss but just once. However if you are family or close friends you can also kiss on the mouth. Obviously it is just a peck, not a long lingering kiss but still, I was quite taken aback at first. If you are of the older generation, like my dear departed father-in -aw, you tend to shake hands, I think. At least that is what he did with hubby when we were picked up at the airport for my first visit to Australia. I thought it was a bit cold at first, since they hadn't seen each other for years, but I guess it was a very hearty handshake and he had tears in his eyes.

In Sweden it is a little different. Of course you have the people who have traveled the world and who have adopted the cheek kissing or rather kissing in the air since most people don't even touch your cheek with their lips. But generally we Swedes, like the Russians, hug, mostly big bear hugs full frontal. Sometimes it's manly touching of the shoulder in a hug while also shaking hands, it depends. Hubby finds these hugs difficult and can't help himself going into Sheldon mode .

Here is another way of greeting each other, rubbing noses,
Maori style. It has not taken off in Europe yet though.

Let me see, what is there to tell otherwise. Oh yes, our Swedish friends, from the north of Sweden are here visiting their daughter and her family. They came to our house for a barbecue last week, on the hottest day for a long time. I think it reached +40°C. It was okay though, thanks to the pool, but I am not allowed to publish any pool photos.  I wonder why!

The parrot is King!

My tomatoes are coming on and the first one to savour one of them was this King parrot, who comes around now and then. I guess they have to eat too, but I wish they would finish their food. He just took one nibble and let it drop.

So, time to say goodbye. Thank you for reading. Wishing everyone a good week! Hope to see you back soon!

Two thirty

... or as hubby always says "Tooth hurtee. Time to go to the dentist.". This was very much the case with me the other day. I had had a toothache off and on for a while and the time had come to bite the bullet (silly expression in this case since I would probably injure another tooth) and go to the dentist. I just went to the closest one to where we live, and what a stroke of luck that was. It was a true gentleman of Asian descent and his surgery was topnotch. We had to decide on how to deal with this tooth, extraction, inplant, bridge, or a simple root-canal job with a crown. I opted for the last, wanting to hang on to my own stumps as long as possible, and then the fun started. He took some X-rays and showed me the inside of my mouth on a big TV screen - not a pretty sight.  Then he started giving me loads of injections which I love him for.  He also gave me a pair of chic sunglasses to put on (for the bright overhead light) and ear phones (so I wouldn't hear the drilling etc) and put a chick flick on the TV. All we needed was a palm tree and a pool, it was so comfy there in the lounge chair. Sadly, he finished before the end of the movie so now I have to go out and rent it.

Now over to King Valley where we went last week. It is becoming a bit of a tradition that we go away over a long week end once a year with hubby's old bikie friends and their wives. This time it was a seven-hour drive for us but of course less for them coming from Melbourne. The owner of King Valley Estate where we were staying was called Trevor Knaggs. He is a really pleasant and hospitable fellow. If you are a backpacker looking for farm work, give him a call.

Last night's pizza dinner made in Trevor's pizza oven.

Serious winetasting taking place.

When Trevor heard I was Swedish he gave me "the task"
of finding him a Swedish wife.

The time passed very quickly in King Valley with wine tasting and sightseeing. When we returned home we found that our French visitors had adapted very well to Australia. The day after our return we took them up to the Blue Mountains. There we met a lady who overheard us speaking French who was herself from Bordeaux but from Touareg origin.. She let me take her photo. She was dressed in a Touareg outfit since she was visiting Australia for some international project

It's time to say goodbye for now and hope you enjoyed your little read and that you will come back.

A good deed

....is sometimes quite difficult to accomplish. Take hubby's last effort for example. The following incident took place when I was in Sweden recently and hubby was on his own.

It was a very grey and miserable day, pouring with rain as he was driving to work.  A particularly determined fellow commuter passed him just before the two lanes narrowed into one, finishing by swooping into his lane a little too soon for comfort.  Hubby then noticed a bunch of keys dangling from the boot lock of the other person's car.  He flashed his lights a few times to try to attract the other driver's attention, but that was probably mistaken for a touch of road rage.  He hoped the person would turn into the road leading to his place of work, but no, the other person continued along the main road.

That's when the Good Samaritan gene kicked in, and despite risking being late for work, hubby continued along the main road to stop just behind the other person at the next traffic lights.  He hopped out of his car, ran up to the other driver's window, and tapped on it.  The other person, a woman of a similar age, overcame her fear of a road-rage attack and wound down the window.  Hubby said,"You have left your keys in the boot. I'll get them for you."  The last words must have been lost in the wind and rain, because just as he went back and took them out, the lights changed and the woman drove off.  So here he was, standing in the rain with a set of keys on a Hello Kitty key-ring, and a bunch of angry drivers queued up behind his car that now blocked the fast lane.  He got back in his car, and took off after the woman, after the next change of lights.

Five kilometres down the road he saw the woman parked at the end of a rest stop. She was walking back to the driver's seat, clearly puzzled by the lack of keys in the boot.  Hubby swooped into the rest stop, just as she took off again!  Back on the gas pedal, and a kilometre of light flashing later, she pulled over, and he could finally give her the keys.  She was very grateful though, and hubby was only half an hour late for work and soaking wet. And I guess he could look himself in the mirror the next day and feel proud.

I meant to tell you all about our weekend in the King Valley, Victoria that we spent with hubby's old bikie friends and their wives but I have to save that for next time. I just want to say that I highly recommend the Estate where we were staying.

This is the cottage where we were staying in the King Valley

King River Estate

Well, I am off now to take hubby to work so that I can have the car and take our French visitors to the fish market or somewhere else.

Take care! Come back soon!

You could always take up pole dancing...

This is what our son said to me the other day when we were sitting outside having a leisurely  lunch and discussing what I could do with my free time. To add insult to injury he added "I am sure they have pole dancing for the elderly".!!!!

He has been here quite a bit lately to fix up his jeep so he can sell it. It means that hubby and son have been bonding doing serious men things and having a few runs up to Aladdin's cave or Supercheap Auto, which is the real name. I went along the first time and quickly realized that it was not my kind of shop at all. Well, except for the diamond studded gear stick, that looked pretty cool, and the pink floor mats, but otherwise it is just boring car stuff. Hubby was in seventh heaven though and bought some fun things, one of them a (flame) torch that I believe he is going to use to get rid of weeds. Is that legal?

Speaking of activities, I have started pool walking with my next door neighbour. It is exactly what it says, you walk in a pool. We walked for an hour and it was roughly one kilometre. The pool was heated so it was very pleasant and since we walked together time passed quickly. It was just that when I got out of the pool I almost fell to the ground. My legs were just so shaky. I must have looked like the Australian swimmer, Chloe McCardel,  who swam around Bermuda. She looked pretty bad when she got out of the water and even had to be taken to hospital while her crew of supporters had the celebration party. Admittedly she had been stung by jellyfish and was also suffering from sunburn which was not my case.

This will be just a short little entry to touch base.  Spring is here so I need to go out and plant the veggies that I bought yesterday.

Hope you are all well wherever you are.

Back in Australia

I have actually been back for a few days already and it has been great. Beautiful and sunny, nice to be back. I got out of the airport so quickly that hubby wasn't even there yet, he was still parking the car. This has never happened before. I usually end up behind someone who is asked to empty out all their bags and it takes forever. We went to our son's new place and had a nice catch up and breakfast and since then on it has been all go.

Prague seen from the boat ride I
went on

The daughter of some friends in Sweden came for a visit and she is just about to leave as we speak. She is doing the one year travel/work visa experience and every time you hear about someone doing it you wish you were twenty  again. Well, almost, I don't think I would be game to carry my own weight in a backpack on the back nor sleep in some of the backpacker hostels. They can be quite crowded and noisy I believe, but I like the idea. Here is a link if you, like me, like traveling!

I visited the Ravensbrück work 
camp and was lucky that a Swedish
school class was there at the same
time. I followed them around and
listened to the teacher who was
extremely interesting to listen to.
I wouldn't be surprised if she had
a personal reason to know so much.

One of the beautiful bridges in Prague
seen from the boat that I took

Church in Dresden

Anyway, my trip down to Grenoble and visit there was wonderful. I saw so many beautiful places on the way and then to catch up with friends was fantastic.

The last day we had a delicious meal together with all the neighbours,
and also a chance to admire the new deck.

Salmon and lots of fresh herbs and 

mango, yum!

I made it

Yessss, I made it. It was a very long drive and I have had to more or less walk around barefoot with a big bandage on my foot due to a blister that developed while driving but otherwise all is well.

Grenoble is beautiful and sunny. On my way driving into Grenoble I stopped to see friends from way back. Our sons went to play-school together.

Then I spent the first day and night with neighbours planning their upcoming trip to Australia. It sounds like they are going to see more of Australia in two months than we have seen so far in four years.

Right now I am up in the Vercors staying with some other dear friends.

We went for a drive to a place where we were supposed to see all the mountains around here including Mont Blanc but just as we arrived there was a cloud cover which just wouldn't go away. So all we could do was to look at the poster to see where the different summits were supposed to be and enjoying our sandwiches in the sun anyway.

Tomorrow it is time to get down from the mountain and meet the rest of the neighbours and have a meal with them. I am very much looking forward to that. I have such fantastic memories of years gone by when we always had a yearly barbecue. Sometimes I wonder if the planning of these barbecues were not the best part. I was always the one who was supposed to bring the ice cream. Maybe I wasn't quite trusted with the other important ingredients. Trust me to get even that wrong the first time. I really got into the ice-cream shopping and bought all sorts of delicious ice-cream, praline and cream, cookies and cream, coffee, strawberry etc but what my dear neighbours only wanted really was lime sorbet. Guess why? Well, that is the one you need to make a Coupe Colonel, which is lime sorbet with, in this case, a very generous helping of vodka over it. You should try it, it is a great summer dessert and it hardly gets any easier than that.

More to come! Much more!

Almost there

Remember when the kids were little and you had to travel somewhere quite far by car with them and three minutes into the trip they started up with "Are we almost there?" Well, I feel the same right now. It has been a lot of driving and my knee and one foot are killing me.

On the bright side is that George Clooney has gotten married and I am happy for him. But, I am sorry girls, he is now officially out of the loop and this piece of news I understood in German from the car radio. I also think that I understood that the Lufthansa pilots in Frankfurt are going on strike tomorrow but maybe you have better check that somewhere else. It could have been something completely different. It is fun, though to have the radio on in a different language.

This will just be a short little entry with photos of my trip from Sweden to Grenoble so far since I am supposed to have an early night and get going bright and early tomorrow to reach my destination early afternoon.

Taken on the sight seeing trip with
Mary. The bridge to Sweden seen
from a different angle. I am usually
on it so I don't have any previous
photos of it.

This building is called Turning Torso
and I saw it in Malmö when my friend
Mary took me on a sight-seeing trip
before catching the ferry the next day
over to Rostock.

Family of Guinea pigs at the hotel that I stayed in in Rostock.
The couple who run it are both keen travelers and in the hotel,
which is an up-market backpackers you can find everything
you can possibly need. Breakfast was a delight with a nice
spicy Thai soup and other delicacies.

Beautiful boardwalk in Warnemünde, twenty minutes from
Rostock. Wish I could have stayed longer.

It is bed time and I don't think I will have any problems falling asleep, counting cars. Good Night or rather Bon Nuit since I am in Switzerland now!

PS I don't want to hurt my German readers feelings but I am sorry to say that the German food still hasn't improved or is it that the food you get around the Autobahn is particularly bad. Yes, it must be that. Maybe they have not had all the cooking programs that we have in Sweden these days. That is going overboard the other way almost. Every TV channel has at least one or two cooking and baking programs in the evening. You wonder a bit about what has happened. I will probably get back on that subject again but now it is definitely goodnight.

Power napping

... or cat napping or nana napping or whatever you call it, is wonderful. Especially now that I am retired. It used to be that we made fun of hubby and his power napping. We could be driving back to the house from somewhere and suddenly, only ten minutes from the house, he just had to stop and sleep for five minutes while me and the kids had to sit quietly and just contemplate the landscape. Then he would wake up and we would be home five minutes later.

Now than I am retired I realize how nice it is to have a quick nap whenever you feel a bit sleepy and when you wake up you feel so much better.  I know I am going to have to have a lot of them soon on my drive down to Grenoble from Sweden. I usually need one even when driving into Gothenburg from the cottage and that is only an hour's drive.

So today is the day before leaving the cottage and I am trying to get things done, laundry, defrosting of fridge, last-minute gardening etc but I am very good at procrastenating so here I am, dear friends, writing to you instead and Skyping with hubby.

I am planning to go a different way down to Grenoble this time so I am taking the ferry to Rostock and spending a day there looking around and then on to who knows where? It will be another blog entry later on.

One thing I have noticed driving around in Gothenburg is that they have quite a few of these nice plantations that the tenants take care of together. You can grow flowers and veggies etc and I guess they must have some sort of system of taking care of it. Yesterday they were making apple juice for example, all together. It looked like fun.

So my mother has turned ninety and apart from bad hearing and bad vision and lack of memory, she is in pretty good shape. I hope I will  be as healthy as that  if I reach that age.

Here is my mother with one of her
uncles

And here she is  with her brother at
the age of sixteen I think

So leaving Sweden and the rapidly approaching fall to return to Australia and spring. It is very weird and confusing! So long!

Back in the saddle

They say you should always get back in the saddle after falling off a horse, or in this case a lawn mower, and I did, both, fell off and got back in the saddle. So now I have mowed the whole 3000 m² and guess what hubby said when I spoke with him on Skype and showed him? " Why haven't you raked and picked up the grass"? How he managed to spot that all the way from Australia I'll never know!!

Taken from Trädgårdsföreningen, another little gem in
 Gothenburg that I strongly recommend that you visit.

I went in to Gothenburg yesterday to pick up my mother since the weather has been absolutely gorgeous the last few days, but Sod's law, yesterday afternoon it started to rain and has rained all night.

Our trusty deckbuilder is back though, since it is not raining at the moment and he says he wants to get as much done as he can because it is supposed to rain this week. He is a hard worker but he has a little quirky habit, he speaks to himself. Quite loud! As loud as you would if you were speaking to someone else. So I don't know how many times I have gotten up to answer him but realized half way that he was not talking to me.

Next Sunday is the election here in Sweden and it is all your hear or see at the moment. You can also vote in advance which a lot of people seem to do. My biggest problem is that the different parties all sound reasonable when you hear them talk, one after another (with some major exceptions) so how  on earth are you to make a choice? Also I am very susceptible to how they look and present themselves. I know it is shallow but I guess that is me.

Otherwise not much happening here at the moment. It is clearly going towards autumn and the colors are changing.  The forest is full of mushrooms but I am not very knowledgeable when it comes to that. In fact, yesterday, the neighbours came in with a whole basket to give us but I only took two big ones and now I don't know what to do with them. Do I put my life in my neighbours' hands and eat these darned things and maybe perish due to human error or do I sneak them into the rubbish bin?

Don't worry, I know that you are
 not supposed to eat these, ever!
 It is just that we have so many of
them around here.

Bye for now and thanks for stopping by!

Most accidents happen at home

Well, it just had to happen. I have always been afraid of mowing the side bit, on the outside of the hedge. It leans a bit - into a ditch.  However, a few days ago I felt brave. I was in the zone. I had done loads of stuff that I had been putting off for ages and now it was time to tackle the side of the hedge. But it was not to be, after only a few metres the mower started gliding down, and before I could hop off I was laying in the ditch with the mower over me. I wasn't hurt so after having rooted around a bit in the bushes behind me I found that I could slide out from underneath the mower and get up. But I couldn't get it back up on the road. So it sat there all day, until much later when a farmer came by and lifted it up!!! No help, no dragging with another vehicle, just pure muscle of which I have none, it seems.

Over to something else. When I drove back from my visit to my friends in Hälsingland I decided to go via Uppsala where we had lived. In fact it is where hubby and I met. By the time I got there I had already had two power naps and seen the sun go up.


I started the trip before six and I saw some beautiful areas and I also made a new friend.

I never got his name but he told me
his story and how it came about that
he now has thousands of hubcaps.
Somehow I don't think he is married!!

When I came to Uppsala it was "fika" time so I went to Ofvandahl's coffee shop and it had not changed much. The same delicious baked goods and the same oldie worldie interiour.

After that little sugar overload I went to see the Cathedral and the University building. It brought back memories.

So I have been waiting and waiting for the deck builders to turn up and it just hasn't happened. Luckily, our neighbour, who is temporarily out of work, proposed to build the deck. So tomorrow he is going to start, yeah!

And the last photo is from the Botanical Gardens in Gothenburg where I went with my mother the other day. They had a Japanese theme which was very nice and soothing, but I just love the place anyway. Don't miss out on a visit there, if you ever come to Gothenburg.

Thanks for reading and come back soon!

On the road again

Yes, I have been out on a little road trip. I went up to see our old friends who now live up in Hälsingland. For the non-Swedes reading, here is a snippet of information from good ol' Wikipedia. If you have a look at the map you can see that our cottage is down on the west coast in the part called Bohuslän and our friends live in Hälsingland, on the other side of Sweden, and MUCH HIGHER UP. The trip took about eight hours, excluding power naps.

On my way up to Hälsingland I stopped at Husaby church. They have found a bit of oak from year 1000 but the present church is from 1120. It is where, for the first time, a Swedish king was baptized as a Christian.

It is not just that Hälsingland is far away, but it is also very different. They have beautiful, big farm houses in this region and our friends themselves live in one of them. Many of these farms have been classified World Heritage and we went and saw some of them on one of our outings.

The flower of Hälsingland is flax (every 'landscape' of Sweden has a regional flower) and you make linen from it. We went for a study visit to Växbo; it was very interesting. I love clothes made from linen; it is a shame they are so darn expensive. However, my friend bought me a dish rag (!) made from linen and swore that it is the best ever. Apparently, I would never want anything else after using one of them. We shall see.

There were many looms in Växbo,
but in metal, and very noisy when
they were all running.

One of the highlights of the trip (since I missed out on the Jimmy Reeves museum and the hubcap museum on the way up) was a visit to the Lill-Babs café and museum. Lill-Babs was a very popular singer when I was young and she has had a long and active carreer. She comes from a place called Järvsö and we went there for a coffee on my second day.

I have lots more to tell, especially about the trip back, but it has to be for another time. It's now time for some gardening. Just wanted to show you what I came back to:

Nothing!

And this is what I left in Hälsingland, yum!