Arriving in the Land of Lagom
Wednesday, 31. July 2019--
Just what does lagom mean? It literally translates to "moderate". It's the Swedish way of life... Inte för mycket och inte för lite, or not too much and not too little. I like that philosophy because that's how I try to approach my own life. No extremes, everything should be a balance.
After months of planning, getting my permanent residency card in Slovakia, and packing, Zuza and I were at last ready to leave and face the Swedes. Well, she's been to Sweden countless times: her sister Kata lives there with her Swedish partner and their two children. Taxi, then the bus to the Vienna airport, and finally airborne. Then we were over Copenhagen, and finally over Sweden. The flight had lasted barely 90 minutes and we couldn't see a thing on the ground for all the cloud cover. Only at about 500 feet were we able to see the landscape; flat with lots of greenery and lakes--Scandinavia at its finest. It reminded me of parts of Oregon.
The airport in Göteberg (Gothenburg in English and pronounced something like "ye-te-BOR-i-a" in Swedish) looked like a page from an IKEA catalog: simple, clean, modest, full of lagom. It was actually chill. Well, "room temperature", but because we were coming from Bratislava where it had been 30C (over 90F) with about 60% humidity, we were happy to cool off. We stood in a queue for unisex toilets, but it was not a long wait to use some of the cleanest toilets I'd ever seen. Kata was there to pick us up as soon as we'd collected our luggage.
We drove to Ljungskile, along the jagged western coast of Sweden, for lunch. At this point, Norway was far closer than Stockholm. I was relaxed by the peacefulness of everything, the modesty of the drivers, not aggressive nor flaunting themselves with expensive brand name cars. Even in the thick afternoon traffic of Göteberg, everyone remained calm and modest. Parts of the drive reminded me of Oregon, especially in the Coast Range. The restaurant was like everything else I'd seen along the way: not too much, not too little. We waited to be seated and the server brought the lunch menu--in Swedish. It wasn't hard to figure out. Was my first meal to be köttbullar (Swedish meatballs)? The restaurant smelled like the cafe in IKEA. No, instead, I ordered baked chicken with new potatoes and served with tomato-mango salsa. I tried Swedish beer, a 5.4% Eriksberg, a sort of amber ale. Very nice and not too hoppy. Following lunch, we partook in that most Swedish of rituals: fika, or taking coffee. Coffee is not really the shots of espresso the Slovaks like to drink. This is strong brewed coffee, served piping hot, but in larger cups, as I'm accustomed to drinking it in the United States. Like many things in this restaurant (and in others, as I came to find out), it's buffet-style or serve yourself.
Following lunch, we strolled along the rocky waterfront, admiring the Victorian-style homes of the early part of the last century which graced the shoreline. People really go for the robotic lawnmowers here, and several lawns had a small robot on wheels running back and forth. The homes looked like a scene out of Bergman's film "Fanny and Alexander", and I began to see why this area reminded me so much of Oregon: in the early 1900s, many Scandinavians (Swedes and Finns mostly) came to Oregon, namely Astoria, to work in the fisheries and canneries. They obviously brought with them the simple lagom style of architecture in the simple white only or red or yellow clapboard siding with white window panes.
Feeling humbled by the simple beauty of it all, we piled back into the car and drove on to Lysekil.
A house in Ljungskille
