Today, the café on Notholmen was serving saffron muffins. This happens around this time every year. The fantastic cardamom buns are replaced by the saffron variety and, it seems, the same goes for muffins. It’s a Christmas thing.
Evelyn, our first Swedish friend, told us all about how she spent last weekend helping her mum with the Christmas lights, something the Swedes take very seriously. In our neighbourhood, for instance, the houses without thousands of tiny, twinkling lights are either ours or empty.
Evelyn, I should explain, is the young woman who serves us at the Notholmen café every Sunday, except for last Sunday. We all swapped names today. She asked so we told. This has now made her our first Swedish friend given we’ve also known her for the longest of anyone here.
Which nicely segues into the fact that today marks our 50th day in Sweden. And 52 days since we left the UK.
We were both a bit worried about moving to a country where things are so different but, as it turns out, we love it here. And the people we’ve met have all been really friendly and welcoming.
As to that, I mentioned to Mirinda this evening, as we wandered the black streets of our immediate neighbourhood, greeting fellow walkers, how I found people very friendly, regardless of what they were doing. There’s a lot of stroller pushing and dog walking around the streets, and they all say “Hej, hej!” with a smile in their voices. It’s too black to actually see them.
The weather was a bit grim today with a rather chill wind with water on it so the café was largely empty. Of course, there were small groups dotted outside because the Swedes are a hardy bunch.
Today for brunch, rather than the usual soup of the day, we had a rather delicious open sandwich with a beetroot salad topped with cold meatballs. Evelyn told Mirinda that it is a traditional Swedish Christmas sandwich. It was rather pink, and decidedly mumsig.
Following our filling brunch, Mirinda left me on a bench to read while she went in search of an elusive walk which remained elusive. We eventually met back at Max and went for a drive instead. Of course, the girls didn’t enjoy that as much as the elusive walk purported to be.
Our drive took us out onto a peninsular – we turned right out of Tyresö slott rather than left – along the coastline to Brevit and, eventually, the lovely little isolated ferry dock at Trinntorp.
We parked, first, in an oddly crowded car park that sits above the pier. I say odd for two reasons. Firstly it looked like a load of commuters yet it was a Sunday and secondly, because half of the spaces were limited to 72 minutes. We both thought 72 was a rather arbitrary time limit.
Given it was a Sunday and there wasn’t a lot of traffic (actually none) we drove Max down to the dock level so Mirinda could walk out along the pier.
At the end of the dock, as you can see from the above photograph, is a little shelter. Mirinda found a couple of ladies sat there, staring out to sea, chattering and giggling. She said hi and asked if that was their place. They said yes though they couldn’t smoke and could have done with a coffee. Mirinda told me that it was a lovely spot but she’d definitely take a thermos with her.
I waited in the car with the girls for no other reason than because the girls were in the car.
We then drove slowly home via our local ICA and the weekly shop where I found, remarkably, roast chickens.
We haven’t had a supermarket roast chicken for years. It used to be a bit of a treat and a night off for the chef but then Farnham Waitrose opened their sushi counter where the chicken rotisserie once was. It was a mixed blessing of a day. I love sushi but it meant no more supermarket roast chicken.
We had the chicken with a rather odd mix of Danish red cabbage, tomato, mushroom, cheese and Brandy soaked herring. It tasted a lot better than it sounds.
