The combination of cows, a car service, midsummer and the Swedish football team is a recipe for delay. That’s especially true when you have to visit the Systembolaget for your weekly shop. At least that’s my experience.
Midsummer, according to Anders and as mentioned ages ago by the Perfect Swedish Family, is the biggest day of the year here in Sweden. Normally there would be huge gatherings around maypoles, dancing like little frogs and community singing. That isn’t happening this year (as it didn’t in 2020 either) because of the plague. But it doesn’t stop people celebrating at home.
In fact, we have had our first invitation to join a Swedish family for a celebration. Camila and Anders, across the road, have asked us to join them for midsummer.
So, of course, families up and down the length and breadth of Sweden need to stock up on booze. Booze is an essential ingredient in a successful midsummer. And booze is only available at the local Systembolaget.
I joined the back of a queue which stretched from inside the shopping centre, out through two double automatic doors, across a pedestrian bridge and down a ramp. Fortunately the weather was good.
To be fair, the queue moved pretty quickly and was mostly in place because of the amount of people allowed in the shop at one time due to the pandemic. But, when I think about it, it worked a lot better than just having a huge free-for-all in the shop. I reckon they should keep the queuing system of one in one out.
When I reached the check out, I asked the assistant why it was so busy, suggesting it was midsummer. She told me it was worse yesterday and that it was partly midsummer and partly because Sweden was playing football tonight.
(Sweden played Poland tonight in the Euro 2020 competition. Sweden won 3-2.)
The other delays today were caused by a software update and traffic. The software update was part of Max’s service at the local Mini Service Centre and the traffic was normal peak hour affecting the bus we had to catch to not collect Max. This was established by the announcement that “Some bus services could be delayed by queues” on the indicator board at the bus stop. Except, when I translated the message using Google Translate, it said that the delay was caused by cows.
The words for delay and cows are very similar: köer = queues and kor = cows. Because I haven’t worked out how to put the two little dots over the ‘o’ on my phone, the translation went for the bovine option.
The thing is, we were expecting to pick Max up at 4:30pm and were on the bus when we found out he wouldn’t be ready until tomorrow because of a software update that would take an hour and a half. Had we received the call before boarding the bus, we would have just turned round and gone back home. As it turned out, we decided to stay on the bus and have linner at Toscanini’s.
We haven’t been to Toscanini’s for ages, but the head waiter guy still recognised us and greeted us warmly, like old friends. It made for an unexpected treat.
