People have been extremely invitative, so we have experienced a whole raft of new and exciting cultural norms in the pa
st week or so. We spent much of an afternoon out in the forest to collect mushrooms while on a ‘team building’ exercise for staff. Actually, the truth is that each semester (six months) everyone in the university is expected to participate in some sort of outdoor activity for the day; hence the mushroom collecting expedition with two staff members. We have also been invited to two dinners with friends; one dinner was to celebrate the custom of eating of a type of freshwater crayfish at this time of the year (no matter that the crayfish now have to be imported from China seeing as they are hard to come by locally), accompanied by schnapps and Swedish drinking songs and funny bibs. Seeing the Red Pig cant sing, it was up to Guy and Hilda to do the necessary, but they failed miserably in the pronunciation of the Swedish renderings and couldn’t remember any English versions as those days are too long gone. In retrospect, we could have managed ‘you are my sunshine’ but now aren’t sure that that would be counted as a drinking song.
The other dinner was a much more sedate affair in the most beautiful apartment five floors up and overlooking the lake. Now I know what is raved about Swedish architecture and design – it’s clean simple lines, light, bright and cheery. Maybe it needs to be to fend off the darkness that is already threatening to overtake the world here.
st week or so. We spent much of an afternoon out in the forest to collect mushrooms while on a ‘team building’ exercise for staff. Actually, the truth is that each semester (six months) everyone in the university is expected to participate in some sort of outdoor activity for the day; hence the mushroom collecting expedition with two staff members. We have also been invited to two dinners with friends; one dinner was to celebrate the custom of eating of a type of freshwater crayfish at this time of the year (no matter that the crayfish now have to be imported from China seeing as they are hard to come by locally), accompanied by schnapps and Swedish drinking songs and funny bibs. Seeing the Red Pig cant sing, it was up to Guy and Hilda to do the necessary, but they failed miserably in the pronunciation of the Swedish renderings and couldn’t remember any English versions as those days are too long gone. In retrospect, we could have managed ‘you are my sunshine’ but now aren’t sure that that would be counted as a drinking song.The other dinner was a much more sedate affair in the most beautiful apartment five floors up and overlooking the lake. Now I know what is raved about Swedish architecture and design – it’s clean simple lines, light, bright and cheery. Maybe it needs to be to fend off the darkness that is already threatening to overtake the world here.
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