Day 4

Hej. I am typing this, my first blog post, from a seat at the Espresso House, the Swedish equivalent of Starbucks. The Swedes have something called fika, which is basically the smartest thing ever, and which means they take several breaks per day to have coffee and pastries. Fika can last for five minutes or five hours; it's up to you. Despite the obvious intelligence involved in this, the Swedes must also do this because their coffee is so much better than coffee in the U.S. Even better than coffee here is the cup I had at the Frankfurt airport: the creme on that thing was truly heavenly.

Here are the lattes we had on our first night in Sweden, just before we went on our first wine bender:

Here is Erin mid-bender:

Despite having had amazing coffee and more than one glass of wine each on more than one occasion, we have had some challenges in our first few days in Helsingborg. Our biggest issue has been with housing; our apartment will not be ready until April 1, so we were booked to stay at a temporary apartment in Hotel Tournet until then. Let's just say that Hotel Tournet is not quite as nice as those pictures would suggest. They moved us to a second room, which was about 10% better than the first, and then we moved to Hotel Duxiana yesterday. We will move to an apartment within Hotel Duxiana tomorrow. If you're counting, that means four moves in five days.

This is what we have to move each time we go to a new room:

We have had some successes too, though many of these have come about as the result of failing to do something right the first time. For example, last night we took the train to Landskrona, where Erin is now working, to have dinner with her colleagues. We were proud of ourselves for successfully paying our fare and getting to the destination on time. Over dinner, however, Erin's Swedish colleague explained that while we technically paid the fare, we never actually got our tickets and basically robbed our way to Landskrona. Luckily, we were not caught or fined for being thieves, and now we know what to do. Success!

On Saturday, we will return the rental car -- a Mercedes station wagon with a handmade label marked "diesel" over the gas tank -- to Copenhagen, which is just across the Oresund from Helsingborg. You can see Denmark from here in the same way you can see Camden from Philly (but I probably don't have to tell you that Denmark looks a lot nicer than Camden). I'm sure we will bumble our way to Copenhagen and back, arriving at our temporary apartment with some more Scandinavian war wounds and at least one or two more successes. Until then, here are a few pictures of Helsingborg, with more to come.

If I have any say in the matter, those last two will be joining us for dinner tonight. Until next time!