Tubular!

I think we both have to agree that the day to day getting around has not been a big deal. This is easy to say now that we have been here almost two full weeks. Our bus stop is about a 4 minute walk from the house and in the mornings and "rush hour" afternoons the bus runs every 10 minutes. Otherwise it runs every 30 minutes, easy enough. Here is a picture of Michelle getting on the bus in the morning headed to work.

So the common language in Sweden is Swedish. Luckily for us Sweden begins to teach English in schools at a very early age. So for the most part people in there 30's and younger speak good English. In fact we have been told that most Swedes are excited to practice there English so we haven't really had problems communicating.

But back to the issue at hand, Grocery shopping! With the fact that the official language in Sweden is Swedish, that means everything in the stores is also written in ... you guessed it Swedish. This in lies our problem, the labels do not speak English. Luckily we have a smart phones and there are fancy apps that help us translate. It definitely takes us a little longer to get what we need and out the door, but at least we know what it is we are buying and more importantly what we're eating.

We have seen some things that look familiar.

Here is something interesting, the soda of chose in Sweden is Fanta. Who would have thought, but we see this soda being sold and consumed everywhere. 

The Swedes also love the candy and sweets. This is no good when dieting so you can cram yourself into skinny European jeans. They eat their sweets in moderation, typically Saturday is set aside for sweets in Sweden. You do however see these giant candy stations in all the grocery stores. I have never seen a candy station that didn't have at least one person digging in.

We also have discovered several different types of candy bars here. Here are two Michelle and I tried. One is called Starbar and the other is called Sport Lunch. I know what a weird name for a candy bar. I sure don't associate sports or lunch with candy bars. I will blog about candy bars in more detail later after I have sampled several. This of course will be after my "skinny jeans still don't fit" blog post. 

But the Fanta fetish is not the strangest thing we've seen. We saw this when we visited back in November, but had know idea to what extent the Swedes would and could go to putting anything and everything in  a tube. We have seen evrything from rice and baked beans in a tube to bacon, ham, and even shrimp. There really needs to be an intervention with theses people I feel that it is out of control.

Here we have Bacon w/ cheese,  Ham w/ cheese, and Pepper cheese.

Roasted turkey w/ cheese, Crawfish, Roasted shrimp, and cheese in a tube.

Here we have two different shellfish blends w/ chesse, Wild game w/ cheese, and Chorizo sausage w/ cheese.

Mayonnaise in a tube. It's like caulk. Not good. 

Tube display in a store.

 

Another display. Some are smaller than others, but they are always there. 

All sorts of side dishes in tubes.

The translation here is "Brown Beans", I assume these are baked beans.

 We have had the mayonnaise in the tube and were not impressed. We have not been daring enough to try anything else at this point. When and if we do I will be sure to promptly report our findings. If I run across some more off the wall tubes I'll be sure to let you know.

Tack tack! Hej då!