Charlie around town Part 1

We spent the weekend out and about with our big boy! Charlie had us up early on Saturday and out the door. We swung by the recycling center which is luckily right across the street from our house.

We walked into town and headed straight to the bakery. We picked up some fresh bread and hamburger buns for our homemade burgers that we had on the weekend menu. Here is a picture from outside of the bakery Saturday morning. 

Charlie waited outside while we went in. He is a good helper!

On our way through town we stumbled across these neat benches.

After we got our goods we stopped by a park on the way home for some play time.

After a good walk and some fun play time, we made it back home!

Swedish Design

Our friend Niss loves design.  She likes to get design magazines, which give her ideas, then she executes her plans, and her house in turn looks like a magazine.  Of course, it doesn't hurt that her husband Sam makes beautiful wood pieces.  Christine followed suit and now her house too looks like a magazine.  Mine doesn't and never will, but I can go to design stores and admire.

For those of you who may not know, Sweden is known for it's design sense.  If you have been to IKEA then you have seen the beauty of Swedish design.  We ventured in a home design store this weekend.  The cool factor was off the charts, but the price tags easily kept us at bay.  I tried to take pictures to share, but the light was so bright coming in the windows, they didn't turn out that great.  I'll try better to capture the "coolness" in the future. Nonetheless, here are a few pictures.

This sofa was so comfy!  The seat was long which laid you back on the neck pillows!

We see a lot of really interesting lights here.  I'll have a post on lights soon.

The shade for this light is a bunch of clips with hand written notes in them.  You could get your kids to draw pictures and hang them up.  They could always be changing.

Every baby needs a designer crib!

Now that's a bassinet

Hopefully next time I can get pictures of the layouts.

Here are some chairs in the reception area for the company ESS rents its space from right now.  These chairs were the coolest.  The rocked and swiveled and were really comfy!

Hopefully Chris and I can save up to buy some designer furniture one day.  In the meantime, IKEA works for us!

Välkommen to Sverige!!

We got a welcome package in the mail from our Aussie friends Toby and Christine!  They don't leave packages on your doorstep here.  You get a letter in the mail box, and you go to the local grocery (where all the post offices are) to get it. It was really cool getting a letter in the mail saying that we had a package. To be honest Chris almost threw the letter away because he thought it was something else. Of course the mail to the house is in Swedish, so we have to take it to be translated. When the lady read it to us and told us we had a package, we were thrilled. Chris hopped on the bike and went to the ICA to go and retrieve it. When he got to the counter and told the lady he needed to pick up his package, she asked if  he had the letter with the ID number on it, he said yep. He reached in his bag and … *@&% he had left it on the counter in the kitchen. So back on the bike and back to the house. After burning twice the calories it takes to get to the store and back he got the package and it was worth it.

 It contained lots of food goodies and a blanket, an orange blanket =)

A quick breakfast is always handy!  Mmmmm, pop tarts =)

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!

ESS: Day 1

I started work on Tuesday April 2.  I am working at the European Spallation Source.  It is a yet to be built neutron source meant for scientific research.  It will be very similar to the Spallation Neutron Source where I did experiments at Oak Ridge National Lab.  Here I am.

I'm wearing 3 layers of black pants, two layers of gray sweaters, black coat, black gloves, and black and gray hiking boots, I should fit in just fine.  It's a 5 minute walk from the house (in the background) to the bus stop.  My boys have been kind enough to walk me there every morning!

The bus runs every 10 minutes and I catch the 8:03.  The 7:53 is no good, because it is jam packed with school kids, which leaves me no where to sit!  Since there is such good public transportation here, there is no sense in having school buses, so all the kids ride the public buses to school. My bus ride is about 30 minutes.  When I get off the bus there's a 15 minute walk to the office.  The cold is challenging, but the morning walk is in the sun, which is very nice.  I have never loved the sun more than I do now!  This particular morning it was 17 degrees. Brrrrr

I was at work by 8:50ish, which was just in time for Science Coffee.  Every Tuesday morning at 9:00 the day starts with fika.  Fika is an event involving coffee, company, and talks.  Just like you'd say, "Hey want to meant me for some coffee at Starbucks?"  Here it's just, "Fika?"  There is a fancy electronic coffee machine that will spit out just about any latte, coffee drink you can think of.  Only two flavors though, coffee or chocolate.  Most people don't consider this proper coffee, but it will do.  Sorry for slacking, there's no picture.  There is a picture of my office, though.

Yep, that's right, a MacBook!!  Yay!  I love Apple products.  The door to my office is a clever set up.  It is a door to the office and also a door to a coat closet.  So when I open my office door all the way it closes into a door frame that houses hooks for my coat!

office door open

closet door open

The desks are quite clever as well.  All the desks are adjustable tables.

You can push the button up or down to adjust to your wishes.  Lots of people have them all the way up so that they stand.  Toby, you need one of these!

The offices are on the end of the building which is round.  There are 4 floors that surround a spiral staircase.  Some offices look out onto the atrium/staircase area and some look outside the building.  Mine looks out toward the staircase.  Here's the view.

staircase

elevators behind/beside staircase

ground floor

The best score for the day was this,

unscented hand soap in the restroom!! 

All in all it was a good day.  I think I'll make it at least a little longer =)