A week in...

Hej Hej,



This first week seems to have flown in, and it seems that Karin and Anders have deemed Marion (whose name is not Mia!) and I trustworthy enough to housesit while they go to the summerhouse for the weekend.

The days have been filled with berry picking (cloudberry, blueberry and strawberry) and, likewise, my stomach has been full with the fruits of our labour! (pardon the pun). No sightings of bears yet, which is fortunate I guess, but part of me still wishes to see one before I leave and maybe even get it on camera? The blueberries have been made into a simple blueberry cake (traditional drunk with milk) and blueberry porridge (also eaten with milk mixed in). I’m going to come away with a plethora (great word) of new recipes to try out!


When Karin has no more jobs for us to do, we usually end up in the garage again; organising, sorting and generally cleaning the place up. I swear Anders has about 10 of every type of tool imaginable!


I realise I talk about food a lot but I can’t really help it. I love cooking and it seems Marion and I are bonding while pouring over recipe books and deciding on the menu for a small dinner party tomorrow night. Today we took a trip to a nearby shop. Anders had mentioned that they sell only the basics and that they have a café but other than that we weren’t sure we’d find anything we were looking for. The shop, however, sold all types of jams, marmalades, cordials, tea, coffee etc, made from fruit, flowers and herbs from the local area. All we really needed as honey, but came away with birch preserve, cloudberry cider, rhubarb tea, blueberry and vanilla tea and fresh rhubarb from the patch outside the shop.

The rest of today has been quite relaxed. Earlier in the week we painted most of the windows, which is strangely satisfying. It did, however, involve a lot of walking into open windows and spillages of white paint, which still lingers in my nails, now mingled with the black of soil!


As I mentioned earlier this week, last night was the first night of a music festival in Piteå. The four of us and Julien, a French wwoofer who was staying here a couple of weeks ago, went along. There were multiple stages, kind of like any other festival, as well as fairground rides, beer gardens, markets, restaurants etc. The festival is actually set within the town so people can watch from their balconies. Marion, Julien and I wandered from each ‘scene’, dancing to folk rock bands and DJs and watching old bands like ‘Over The Rainbow’, hilarious metal bands like ‘Dead by April’ and children wearing massive sunglasses, who most of the time were more interested in waving to their parents in the crowd. A great night…relatively mosquito-less too! Hurrah!

If the weather allows, tomorrow will be another day of window painting and then cooking before Julien and the others at Rupert’s farm come round for dinner. Look out for new photos. I took a walk the other night which provided me some interesting photos and sadly a whole load more mosquito bites. But enough grumbling!


Time for bed…goodnight x