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