Poznań

This week I went to Poland for a conference. The city Poznań, to which we went, was established in the 8th century. The city had a turbulent history, involved in multiple wars. Below is an image of the city in 1617 just before the Swedes invaded it (and burned and pillaged it quite extensively).

As with the rest of Poland, Poznań, was invaded, occupied, looted, recaptured and burned by a variety of other European countries (apparently this is why the rest of Europe, including the now peaceful Swedes, think of Poland as the doormat of Europe). However, the city has survived and traces of its history is a observable in its buildings and statues.

Communist architecture.

Statue commemorating the famous enigma machine (note the statistician and computational biologist to the right).

The town hall in the square with the clockwork goats, fighting every day at 12pm (again some computational biologist in the foreground).

More pictres of the old town and some computational biologists.
An interesting fact is that the farm where Carina grew up, Posen, was named after the town Poznań. Posen is the German name for Poznań. A polish citizen came to South Africa and named the farm when he owned the land. Later Carina's great-grandfather, Karel Krause, rode more than 60km with his bicycle on dirt roads to buy the farm in 1916.

Please let us know if we should continue the blog and if the material is still interresting with regular comments on our posts.

R&C

Maybe not the bestest news after all... but some new unfailable bestest news!

Everyone have been asking about how the Boerewors project turned out. Well.. I suppose I expected to much. Let the pictures tell the story...

On our way to a real boerewors braai picnic in the forest:

Armed with our new acquisition:

And this ingenious little device sold in supermarkets - a forest grill (Skogen means forest):

And all the necessary picnic 'bykosse':

Preparing the grill:


And braai-ing our wors:

... but something looks awfully wrong about this wors:

OH NO!!





Our verdict:

To be fair to the company (Ronnie even emailed them to thank them), the sausage was very tasty, like a Russian with lots of paprika and a little chilly - really very tasty, but its just not boerewors (Dis nou maar wors ouens... :-) )


But now for the newest bestest news that will for sure not disappoint... I was walking in the local supermarket and what did I see...


Yes indeed, Mrs Balls has come to Sweden! Swedish people rejoice!


And to all South Africans...

MAY THE WORS BE WITH YOU


:-C

The bestest news

I am so happy tonight, the best news in months... I was browsing through some grocery store ads we receive everyday through our door (postbox) and what did I see...


BOEREWORS!! I could not believe my eyes, boerewors, here in Sweden! Many evenings I have been craving a lekker stuk boerewors with Mrs Balls (this may sound very weird to the non-South Africans but I am sure my fellow countrymen will know what I am talking about). The best of all is that we still have a little bit of chutney left that Cindy sent us. So guess what we will be eating this coming week. I just hope it is half as good as the plaas boerewors I once have been used to. If this turns out to be a good replica we will make full use of the opportunity and buy a stockload - since this is a limited edition in celebration of the world cup. Here is the link to the website (in Swedish - you can use Google translate if you are interested in what the Swedes say about our wors).

C

Moving Part II

After a busy week of moving in and furnishing our house, we took today (Sunday) off and just took it slow. Below is a video of our new home (35 meg, 2 min 20 sec).




C&R

Moving Part I

This week were spent moving (mainly Monday afternoon, Tuesday and after work the rest of the time). As we had almost nothing this was not a problem.

All the stuff we had a week ago.

That is until we went to IKEA and bought all the necessary furniture. Below are a few pictures of our initial living conditions. Note that we now live on the 3rd floor but there is no lift. Also note that all of the furniture needed to be assembled (see boxes).

We will upload more footage of our furnished apartment.

R&C

Still here

This short post is just to assure everybody that we are still here, living happily in Sweden. There was not that much going on the last few weeks except for nose-to-the-grindstone work, but we are still enjoying our life here. The snow has now almost completely melted, here and there you may see a little ice heap where a few weeks ago was a mountain of scraped snow. It is beautiful to see the flowers come out. Everywhere you can see bright coloured tulips and other bulbs sticking out their heads. The birds are also coming back and a cheerful colourful spring is starting everywhere... the quiet, white winter wonderland is just a far off memory now. We are looking forward to some exciting developments and happenings in the near future so stay tuned. We are moving in a weeks time to a new flat which we need to furnish from scratch. To move house can be a bit of a predicament if you dont own a car. But we will tell you everything about our 'setting up house' adventure in our coming post. Coinciding with our relocationing is a big festival celebrated annually in Sweden but especially in Uppsala - Valborg (aka Walpurgis Night). I include a link to the Wikipedia article about Valborg if you want to read all about it (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walpurgis_Night). Our coming blogs, however, will have first hand footage.

C&R

Påsk i Sverige

Easter in Sweden is celebrated more seriously than in South Africa. The reason for this may be the long tradition of pagan festivals predating the christian festivals. These festivals are in celebration of the coming spring and the re-emergence of life after the long dark cold winter. The festivities starts on Skärtorsdag (Maundy Thursday) with children dressing up as witches (see picture below) and going from door to door collecting candy in metal teapots. This is based on the myth that all witches flew to the mythological island Blåkulla to dance with the devil.

Långfredag (Long Friday), is traditionally a very somber day and celebrations are frowned upon. We spent the day cycling to the city to feed a colleague's cat, stopping with some coffee to enjoy the scenery.

Saturday is a normal day and most Swedes are out in preparation for spring and summer. This includes cleaning their gardens, wiping away the last bit of snow and ice and buying or dusting their bicycles.

Påsk Sunday is spent with the family with a traditional Easter dinner. An important part of the dinner is food that signifies the re-birth of life and the coming of spring such as boiled eggs with caviar and lamb.

Today (Monday) is also a holiday and people can recover from the Påskafton gluttony. We planned (as many Swedes probably also did), to have a picnic to consume the leftovers and watch the last snow melt away. However, when we woke up this morning we were greeted with a beautiful new coat of snow. We decided to spend the day indoors with hot coffee watching movies, which is just as nice.

Still looking forward to spring.

R&C