Lima for Easter

I had originally prefaced this blog, saying it would be a quick note. But since it has turned out a bit longer, here is I guess a standard update. :)

We made it to Stockholm, no problems, and had a fantastic time there. We stayed with Kristoffer's friend Anders for the weekend and enjoyed the company of many of K's old friends.

Saturday we had a day out on the town. We ate at a fancy Swedish restaurant, went to the Opera, had coffee in the swanky part of Stockholm, and finished with a night out on the town.

Sunday was more laid back. We had brunch at an all-you-can-eat buffet, with live jazz music. The food was a mix of Swedish breakfast and lunch foods, and of course the meatballs were the best. That night, we had a big dinner party with K's closest friends (who are mostly vegetarians so we had very good vegetarian food) and played Swedish Trivial Pursuit, which, yes, is in Swedish.

Now this is actually the second time that I've played swedish TP, and it went pretty good the first time; people just have to translate the questions for me. The only problem is some of the questions are pretty Sweden-centric so I'm no good at all with those. This particular time playing it, the questions were really dumb and almost totally about sweden, so it wasn't very fun. But the rest of the evening was great.

Monday we took the train to Lima, which is usually about a 4-5 hour train ride. Unfortunately, our first train was late coming into the half-way station, so we missed our second train by 8 minutes, and had to take a greyhound-style bus the rest of the way. So we left at 1:44pm and should have arrived in Lima around 6:30, but instead we got there about 9pm.

Today we went to a meat buffet for dinner with K's parents and grand-parents, which was very good.

One of the funny things about Lima is its so small-town that everyone is curious about an American coming around. On the bus ride here, a woman asked me where I was from, and it turned out she was from Michigan, but had married a swede after studying abroad and had lived in Sweden for 30 years. Then today at dinner, a couple sitting next to us asked me where I was from because they had done a lot of traveling in the US. They had recently been to DC this last July, and of course remarked at how hot it was there! Anyway, my American English attracts some attention.

Tomorrow, we may do some cross-country skiing (there's about 2 feet of snow here, definitely still winter), and Thursday we are going to K's parent's "summer house" which is about a 20 minute drive away, but it's "farther in the woods and on a lake." So that makes it a vacationing spot. :) Small country.