Välkommen till Sverige!

I'm trying to pick up on as much Swedish as I can here, mostly by listening all the time and reading as many ads as I can. I've picked up on a couple of unimportant words, such as "fish", "honey", "free", "new", "coffee", and "and". It has been eye-opening how impacted the learning curve for a foreign language is by living in a country where that language is dominant; even though I went to China, it wasn't really that helpful in learning the language because I don't recognize the characters and there is no real word association from English. Swedish, however, is a Germanic language and is therefore closely associated with both German and English; for example "alle" = "all"; little things like that make a huge difference when learning a language. The biggest things throwing me for a loop right now are pronunciations the "new" letters å, ä, and ö, and the word/prefix "farten", which is just hilarious. (It relates to speed/velocity, if you're interested.)

We had to wake up at about 7:30am this morning, which was a shock considering that we're still adjusted to Indiana time, which means we were going to bed around 5pm and waking up at 1:30 in the morning. We're slowly starting to adjust, which is good because we have big plans for the next few days. Back to the reason to wake up at 8am, though: even though church starts at 11am, there were a few of us that were going to be playing music for the service and we needed to rehearse, and those people had to take public transportation to get to the church. Since my mom wasn't feeling well, it ended up being Jordan on keyboard, Dad on guitar, Jim on bass, and myself on Bongos. That's right.... bongos. Musical talent put to good use.

At any rate, the service started at 11am, and ended around 1:15pm. The majority of the time was consumed with the sermon, which was delivered in Swedish and translated to English... this took about an hour, but it was really interesting. There were about 30 people at worship, and everyone sat at little tables that had coffee and tea.... very different from a traditional church service, and since almost everyone attending the service had a different nation of origin, a very eclectic group. It started to get quite warm during the service, and there is no air conditioning in the building; it wouldn't make much sense to have any considering a day like today with 80-90 degree heat occur only a smattering of times throughout the year.

Talking with the Brinsons and making observations from our little stay in Sweden have unveiled some interesting differences between Sweden and the US:

1. As occurs in all higher or lower latitudes, the sun is around much longer this time of year; last night the sun set around 10:30pm and rose around 4:00am. It was very disconcerting.
2. The government in Sweden is very centralized and verging on Socialist; there is a 50% income tax and a 25% sales tax, and they provide free healthcare and education.
3. However, all these taxes go to good works; Sweden is fairly clean, and the city is in good shape even though it is very, very old.
4. Gas is very expensive (about $6.50/gallon), so mass transport is dominant, along with bikes and walking; in addition, much of the electricity is generated by trash incinerators that is supplied by the waste generated by the citizens, with minimal electricity imported from several other countries. (Note that their citizens pay by the kilo for trash removal, so minimal waste is encouraged.)

These are just a few of the things I've picked up on about Sweden, and overall I'm very impressed with the system. The people are happy with their government, but yet have a knowledge of its activities and elect their officials, and don't seem to just to follow it blindly.

After the church service, the church served a meal, which basically ended up being the Swedish version of sandwiches, just open-faced sandwiches with butter. That ended up being our entire day, and after the meal we just headed back to the Brinson's house. Other events of note: I was able to take a walk and take some beautiful pictures of the suburban area where they live (Landvetter), and we explored a candy shop in downtown Gothenburg where I got a 0.5 liter bottle of "real" Fanta, made right here in Sweden.

Final note: the native name of the city is Göteborg, pronounced Yo-teh-boreh.