360 days and 8 1/2 hours to go!...

And I'm now approaching the end of my mission's first week...

I can't really say that it has been a highly impressive first week's work, but, well, considering the circumstances, I'm quite happy with myself. My life seems to be a continuum of "shouldn't-have-happened-this-in-this-precise-moment"s, so I guess that it's time I start learning how to handle my personal chaos so it doesn't have to get in the way of my plans - sometimes, you just have to make time to have time! (Does that even make any sense?...)

Chapter nr. 2 of my Swedish textbook is called, as I think I've mentioned, "Tack För Maten!". For those of you who happen to find yourself reading this post and who don't happen to have any Swedish knowledge, it means "Thank you for the food!".

Though I don't really have anything in particular against the author of this particular book, I must say that I had a bit of an anger fit when I read its sub-title: "It was a lovely meal!". Let's hope that they didn't mean it to be a translation of the Swedish title! Really! Still, for an inattentive or less knowledgeable Swedish learner, it might raise a bit of a vocabulary confusion.

But moving on - and mentioning what I'm counting on having done by the end of the coming week - this chapter is composed by 3 dialogs, complete with "true or false" questions and new vocabulary listings. The dialogs are then followed by a "Vad ni behöver veta" (= what you need to know) section, giving... hmm... useful... (we'll surely get back to this one soon!)... information about life in Sweden. Then comes the grammar (grammatik) and the exercises (övningar) and, finally, a text.

So far, I have dealt with the first 2 dialogs - which basically means that last time I heard of the Taylors, they were famished and ready to dig into whatever the Svenssons were serving them for dinner. :-S

And we should start exactly there - dinner! Supposedly, dinner in Swedish is middag. I mean... really?... I don't even need to bring up the etymology of that word to tell you how wrong that just sounds. :-S

As for what was served, here goes the menu: inlagd sill (= pickled herring - for starters), kyckling (= chicken) with dillpotatis (= potatoes cooked with dill), grönsaker (= vegetables... or, even more interestingly and literally translated, "green things" :-)) and sallad (= salad). For dessert, smultron (= wild strawberries.... hmm...) with grädde (= cream).

For those of you who were never really in touch with the Swedish language, I must tell you that Swedes have the particular oddity of having 3 more letters in their alphabet (å ä ö) and, seemingly, making near on no use of the letter Q. Instead of using accentuation, they decided to create 3 new letters and to add them after Z - Å Ä Ö. So there goes the expression "from A to Z!"... Somehow, "from A to Ö!" just seems less pronounceable... :-S

Then I should also tell you that Swedes have what they call "soft letters" and that I truly believe it actually means "totally random way of confusing foreigners when they think they finally know a word or two in Swedish"... :-) One example of this is kyckling - in which the K isn't read as you'd read it in "kid" (or "kick"... ) but, instead, it's read as a "sh". Yes, life's hard on me!... ;-)

Leaving the "green things" detail aside - which in itself, and in my somewhat often distorted mind, can lead to many "laughables" - we'll now move on to smultron, which, if I should be honest, I have no idea what it is. I know it's supposedly a smaller sort of strawberry and I think I've laid my eyes on it, but they don't exist here, so it kind of adds them to my mental "odd things list", along with lingon berries, for example.

The very particular thing with lingon berries is that they're made into jam that is, in turn, added to several Swedish dishes. For a Portuguese person (like me), the first time someone puts jam on their plate, not with toast or bread, but along with boiled potatoes, meatballs and brown sauce, is... well... a very unforgettable moment. I could tell you that this happened exactly on my first trip to Sweden and that I was seriously confused with the whole business. A rule of thumb seems to be just staring discreetly at your neighbouring dinning companions to see how they respond to the oddity placed before them, and as everyone seemed to be just fine with the fact they now had some sort of red jam on their plate, I assumed I should act natural and don't go all hysterical pointing at it, while asking "What's THIS doing on my plate?!". Or even taking the all-so-missed Mr. Sandberg's approach (while everyone is "yumming" their food and congratulating the cook): "I'm so sorry, but what's THIS?!". (Aww... Sweden will never be the same again without him...) *deep sad sigh*

All these years later, I just don't even react anymore to the "jam effect"... I guess it's not even there anymore... and I'm part of the group of those that are looked at sideways when they're spotted eating their meatballs and boiled potatoes (though people here seem to prefer them with French fries, which also might come as a terrible shock to all the Swedes out there...) with lingonsylt (= lingonjam) in IKEA.

But let's move on to the grädde now... If it's dessert, it'll invariably be accompanied by either cream (grädde) or vanilla sauce. That's another of those things I seem to have vaccinated my "mocking brain" against, so I don't go all "grins" (anymore!), while pointing to a typically Portuguese dessert and asking "Shall we put some cream or vanilla sauce on it?". :-) Just yesterday, for example, we got strawberries for dessert, and... - Swedes, this is where you gently close your eyes for a little while -... I didn't have grädde to them, but chantilly instead! Ha! :-) No, not the city (whichever one you're thinking of - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chantilly), but the sweet and much nicer whipped cream than grädde. :-P

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Yesterday's afternoon's activities comprised some vocabulary exercises with Mr. B.. Basically, he picked two of my vocabulary cards piles and we did some spelling, translation, gender, etc., exercises. I've reached the brilliant conclusion that I know 99.9% of the words in them, guessed about 95% of the genders right, got pretty much all the spelling right and... will definitely make sure I eliminate the words familj (= family) and ingenjör (= engineer), for I have ruled them as unpronounceable! I guess it doesn't help that I have one - family, I mean - that is engineer-filled. :-(

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Portugal, as you might now, is a country in which the majority of religious people is Catholic. Though I was baptized as a Catholic and somehow brought up surrounded by mild Catholic celebrations, I confess that I am not, nor was ever, a religious sort of person. Still, with the 13th of May (the day of Our Lady of Fátima) and its celebrations, along with the fact that the Pope has been also visiting Portugal, Catholicism seems to be in the air and, so, my 5 y.o. has been all over me and her father with questions of various sorts, all about religion.

Yesterday's evening, we had a religious parade passing just outside our door. People spent most of their day decorating the street's pavement with flower carpets - and eventually driving anybody wanting to move about by car insane. Little Miss B. wanted to go out and take part of the parade, holding a candle as anyone else. Since one of the things we always agreed upon on the way of bringing up our child, was that we'd leave her all the margin to learn and get involved in whatever she'd want to try and that wouldn't be harmful - we were out and about with her, following her and closely monitoring the movements of that often wild candle in her hand.

I'm not quite sure what she got out of the experience - we haven't yet had the opportunity to discuss it... - but she seemed quite happy when she got home. If nothing else, we got to see some of the flower carpeted streets - they are always quite artistic, though my current health condition doesn't really allow me great walks and we didn't see a great deal of them. I'll leave you with some of the pictures... and do have a great Sunday!