Last Swedish post

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This is a runestone with old Norse stuff on it, there's a lot around Uppsala. Jox said when he was a kid they had to learn the alphabet used on the runestones and then they walked around outside and were supposed to copy down and "translate" what they could understand from them without actually studying much else.


Key to the runestone.


20% off for all in the store (or something like that).


Payphone.


We tried one of those star-things, it was dry and thin and crispy.


You can buy special stamps and put it in this box and then the post office ensures that it gets delivered before Christmas.


On the right is a traditional Swedish dress.


Saw this in the basement floor of a secondhand store.


In a secondhand bookstore. I looked for a price but it didn't have one on it so I thought it wasn't for sale.


We bought some of these, not from this store though. We have Cinderella, Snow White, Sleeping Beauty, and some other random ones.


Bus transfer ticket.


The long one to the left is a round-trip train ticket.


We got to ride on this real train, it runs on train tracks and everything! And someone even came around to check our tickets after it started moving! It was super cool.


We found another Christmas market and walked around it. More photos in the photo gallery!


We ate at a Chinese buffet (they don't have these in Iceland) and it was basically the same as American Chinese food, the only difference I noticed was there was really no spices or spicy sauce or anything available.


This is the screen for a ticket vending machine, we bought our bus tickets here.


A recipe for rice porridge on the back of a milk carton! Jox and I eat rice porridge all the time.


Christmas beer(?) can, I saw this in the sink and thought it had a cool design.


I forgot to take photos of Swedish money until we were in the car on the way to the airport, sorry!


Children's play area inside the Swedish airport.

Skansen photo post

These are photos from the day we went to Skansen, a zoo that also has a bunch of old houses.


Stairway in Jox's house. The house used to be super small and Jox's parents have expanded it and fixed it up a lot.


Pajama drawstring pants I bought.



Dining room window.


This is the biggest hunk of cheese I've ever seen! To the right of it is pomegranate juice.


Dining room window.


Dining room light.



The milk cartons have a lot of stuff on them, like jokes, recipes, the meanings of obscure/new words...


At Skansen with the Christmas market, there was this little tram thing that you could ride. We didn't go in it though.


"The Santa happy and nice fetches everything.
Eve for everything
Eve for Christmas baking"
Eve is apparently that product down below, maybe it's flour?


Some kind of tobacco machine in the middle of the street, I don't know if it actually had anything in it or was just for decoration.


"Open"



"The Big Swing's Christmas food"


"Stockholm's City Savings Bank"


(to the left) "Turkey"
"Spices"
(on the spice jar) "Wormwood"


More Christmas goats.


"Christmas presents"


Two ladies that I bought something from, wearing traditional clothes.


Sign on one of the booths.


"Waffles with jam and cream"


Marzipan pigs are pigs made out of marzipan and they dip half of them in chocolate. The pigs are traditional for some reason, but we saw a lot of other figures too.


I bought the blue and white one with swirls on it for my great-grandparents. You fill these with candy or nuts and hang them on the Christmas tree. You can still see these in a lot of shops in both Sweden and Iceland. The ones at this stall were based on old designs and use fabrics and ribbons that are from around the same era.


"Reindeer meat
Salted, dried and smoked lamb meat" (all-in-one smoked, dried, and salted - not separate types)


"Christmas presents"


Sugar-roasted, pan-fried almonds. I really love these, they have them in Iceland too. I want to learn how to make them.




Dried reindeer meat stall. This lady is wearing Sami (Lapp) clothing, which is like the clothing of "native" Swedes/Norwegians/Finns and in some parts, Russians. Sami were like nomadic people who herded reindeer and followed the reindeer as they migrated but now their population is small and the people who speak the Sami languages are even smaller than that, in part because the government makes it really hard to learn Sami languages and even harder to be officially recognized as Sami (you have to fulfill a lot of requirements to be recognized as Sami, such as speaking Sami and owning reindeer).


"Christmas's pantry"


"Coffee
Glögg
Buns"


"Cheese lottery". I won a mini cheese grater here.
Everyone has this kind of "babywagon", or baby carriage in both Iceland and Sweden. It looks pretty old-fashioned to me, but I like them.


"Sausage/hotdog lottery"


"Food basket lottery"


You could pay a little and ride in this horse carriage around the zoo.


Both Sweden and Iceland used to have a lot of turf-roof houses.


These "Wild Chips" are made of various kinds of meat like horse and reindeer I think, I sent a packet to a couple of you guys. I think they taste good but I didn't like the dried reindeer meat that I also sent to a couple of you. On top of the brown bag is sugar-roasted almonds.


This is the stuff I bought at the Christmas market. There's some matchbooks with blue-tipped matches, a metal drum ornament that you can open, a paper book ornament that you can open, the mini cheese grater I won... the brown thing in a long, rectangular box is something I sent to my great-grandparents along with the candy/nuts cone. It's a Christmas tree decoration that looks like the candy they used to wrap, the fabric is from around the same era as the design is and it's all recycled stuff in that way.


Jox's family had a cow sandwich griller! No, we didn't buy this.