Saturday, July 6, 2013

My vacation: part one!

As a part of AgriVenture, for every two months I’m here I get one week of unpaid holidays. So right now I am using up my 2 weeks of holidays!

DAY 1

I started on Saturday morning by taking a flight from Visby to Gothenburg. Then I met another Canadian trainee named Whitney and we spent the day together. We spent a lot of time exploring the city and grabbing fika! Gothenburg is a much younger town that most of the rest of Sweden. The oldest building was built in 1648! We went to a couple of cute cafes in the area. I had a chocolate muffin! So healthy right!?

We met another Canadian trainee, Kirsti, and organized a bit of what we would be doing for the next few days. We got to sleep in a relative of her host family’s apartment while in Gothenburg which was super handy!

DAY 2

Sunday was spent walking (I walked 18 km)! We visited a really nice church and took a walk by the city harbour. There was a huge sail boat that they had turned into a hotel! We took a nice walk through the Botanical Gardens and had lunch there. We walked through another park and got some ice cream! There was a performance going on but we got there as soon as it was over.

We walked to Liseberg, the famous amusement park in Gothenburg. But it was close to closing time and cost 90 kr just to walk in and look around, so we decided to walk back. We found a great little (expensive) seafood place. There was a pond right in the middle of the restaurant with fish in it! We even got to drive a boat with shrimp on it to our table to eat. We ate prawn, crab, muscles, shrimp and salmon! It was very delicious. But it was a well deserved meal; some of it was so hard to crack open and get into before I could eat it!

DAY 3

I was very happy to be spending Canada Day with two fellow Canadians, but I was still disappointed to not spend it in Canada.

I tried marmalade and cheese on toast, total yum! And totally Swedish. I apologize in advance for grossing you out with my “weird” food habits I will be taking back with me...

We met Kirsti’s host dad’s sister (host aunt?) for fika and a walk in the park. Then we took the Tram (street car) to the harbour. From there we took a ferry to Branno, an archipelago on the west coast of Sweden. There are many other islands just like this one. There are no cars allowed on the islands, so everyone has a bike and/or moped with a platform for storage in the front. There were only a few restaurants, one grocery store and the tiniest hardware store. Since you can’t buy anything else on the island, we saw loads of people bringing over things on the ferry, from windows to fridges! There was an awesome lookout point that we visited. We were able to get a great view of Branno and the surrounding islands!

We went to an American type buffet for supper and had some greasy food! (Kind of Canadian?) And on our way home we got some donuts for dessert. This was the only Canadian way we could think of celebrating Canada Day abroad...


Overall the first three days of my trip were great! Next we headed on to Malmo... Stay tuned!

No comments:

Post a Comment