Sunday, May 18, 2008

Sweden, Day 2: Söderhamn & Skärså

This is a record for me: two blog posts in 2 consecutive days!

We spent a quiet day relaxing in Söderhamn. In the morning we attended the Pingst (pentecostal) church service which was conducted in an interesting combination of Swedish & English. The congregation includes so many refugees & asylum-seekers that the translation has become a necessary courtesy in order to meet the needs of attendees. In the afternoon, my host Aanette & I took a long leisurely walk around a little lake. After 2 days of sitting around in airplanes & airport lounges I badly needed the activity.

If we were able to burn off a few calories on our walk, we certainly put them back on over supper! We were taken out for dinner to a seafood restaurant in the tiny fishing community of Skärså. Incidently, the word 'Skärså' is virtually unpronounceable by English speakers. It's the 'sk' sound that gives so much trouble: there is absolutely no equivalent in English. I got a brief lesson while we were waiting for supper to arrive. You have to make a very deep exhale, right from the bottom of your diaphram, while your tongue sits tightly against the bottom of your mouth. My little Swedish phrasebook describes it as the 'ch' sound as in the Scottish 'loch' only made much further back in the throat. Maybe.

Anyway, supper consisted of [atlantic] salmon prepared 4 different ways, including smoked with pepper, raw, pickled & then smoked, & perhaps baked? All were delicious. We had some sort of pudding with cloudberries for dessert. Cloudberries was a new flavour for me. Apparently they are served sparingly because they are so hard to get: grown only in the north, on little bushes, one single tiny berry per cluster (i.e. there are no clusters) so they are very hard to collect en masse. The colour is like apricots & the flavour is possibly a bit like blueberries or saskatoons but much more subtle.

It will be an early day at work tomorrow, I must get to bed.

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