Day three

I was going to post this last night but something happened to the ethernet cord and we haven't been able to get it to work with my computer anymore, it's not fixed yet so right now I'm just borrowing Jox's mom's computer for a short while. This means I can't upload photos either, but hopefully we can figure out what's wrong tonight when Jox's dad gets back from work.

xxx

Today we went to the Christmas market and zoo at Skansen, it's also an area where they moved and fixed a lot of really old houses and now they use them as old-fashioned shops and cafés. We took a lot of photos and I bought some stuff but I'll edit this post with the photos later.

They had a lot of booths selling various things. Mostly handicrafts, Christmas decorations, meat, and cheese. There were booths selling knitted items and sheepskin items, one booth sold "home brew" in a big vat, some just had coffee and bread products, and some sold the traditional Christmas drinks like glögg and Julmust and such.

I paid for a five crown (73 cents) raffle ticket and the ticket won a mini cheese grater. I also managed to buy some dried reindeer meat (totaled something like 225 crowns or $33), "meat chips" which is just various types of meat like deer in small, dried bits (four for 100 crowns or about $15), some Christmas decorations, some matchboxes (5 crowns each), and we bought a "mystery gift" but it turned out to be a glass spice container for holding food and stuff so we gave it to Jox's parents because we don't need it.

There was music playing at one point, and I think all of the shops set in the old houses do things traditionally, so there's bookbinding, bakeries, glass-blowing, I think there was also carpentry or metalworking or something. We saw a squirrel climbing up and down a tree and got a short recording of it, and bought some cinnamon roll things that were freshly baked and really good except for the pearl sugar on top.

I got some photos of some of the people I bought stuff from because they were wearing traditional clothes, and most of the booths had old-fashioned signs too so I got a lot of photos of them. I didn't really get photos of what the booths were selling though because there were so many people around that it was impossible.

My feet got really cold as we were walking around so once we stopped in an old house that was set up like how people used to live (you could see a kitchen and stuff but it was roped off) and they had a fire going in the fireplace but no other source of light. So I sat down there and warmed my feet. Couldn't really take any photos as it was too dark inside.

We also stopped inside a café in the end and I got hot chocolate, it was pretty disappointing though because it was just powdered chocolate mix that you mixed yourself and it was in a disposable cup. I think it was 25 crowns or about $4, but Jox's dad paid for me.

As we were trying to find out way back to the car (it was around four or five and already dark at that time) we wandered into the zoo section and glimpsed some mooses and one was making some funny sounds so we got a short recording of it that I can upload later. We also saw some tame reindeer but it was really too dark and they were too far away for me to really see anything. We saw some seals too. We're going to go back again, probably on Wednesday, to see the regular stuff they have. The Christmas market is only open on the weekends so we mostly went to see that today.

I learned a lot of Swedish today!
tamren - tame reindeer
väska - bag
jacka - jacket
kan du ge mig... - can you give me...
ren - both reindeer and clean
papper - paper