Sweden

Hello Everyone! Laba diena!

Some afternoon sun has broken through our overcast. It's beautiful!

We came back to Vilnius last Friday afternoon after several days in Sweden.

A Reader Advisory - today's post is pretty much about old friends, kids, grandkids, and so on. So it may not suit your taste - but you're welcome to take a look!

We flew Finnair from Vilnius on Monday, February 4, through Helsinki and on to Arlanda (Stockholm) airport. We were met by Per Forslund, and he took us to his parents' home in Uppsala, about 50 miles north of Stockholm.

Eskil and Gertrud Forslund are some of my dearest old friends, dating back to Peace Corps days in Ethiopia, 1966-68, when they were missionaries in the same village, Mendi, in western Ethiopia. Our families have stayed in touch through the years - Liz and I came to Uppsala in 2007 - and it was wonderful to see them and their children once again.

That first evening Per brought his family over for supper with us.

Per and his wife, Paula, with daughters Magdalena, 12, and Amalia, 15. (To the Swedes reading this: I beg forgiveness if I get spellings and ages wrong!)

Per is a captain for an air charter company flying out of Oslo (he does a long commute from Uppsala!) and Paula, after getting her degree last year, is an international student advisor at Uppsala University.

We enjoyed some delicious meat loaf, potatoes, vegetables and salad, with cake, homegrown blackberries, and vanilla sauce.

This was the first time we had met Paula and the children.

On Tuesday Eskil took us on a walk in the neighborhood and showed us the construction site for the apartment building they'll be moving into - as soon as it's completed - perhaps by the end of the year.

It snowed the whole time we were there -

perfect Swedish winter weather!

Anna, Eskil and Gertrud's oldest, lives about three hours away in Motala, but she took time off to come up for a visit on Tuesday and Wednesday.

Anna with her oldest son, Markus, who's a student at Uppsala University.

Anna and Ingvar's second oldest, Anders, has just left on a four-month journey, with a friend, in southeast Asia. And Peter and Rebecka are still at home. Ingvar is a surgeon at the university teaching hospital in Linkoping, and Anna is a nurse at a senior center there.

That evening, Tuesday, we had dinner again at Eskil and Gertrud's, with Anna and Markus, as well as the Forslunds' youngest son, Lars, his wife, Emma, with son Melvin, 10, and baby Himla.

Both Lars and Emma are in the construction business (though Emma has been on maternity leave) - Lars is a carpenter and general craftsman and Emma is a bricklayer and tile setter.

They have a really lovely home not too far away,

along with another small house on the property. Markus lived there for a while before moving to campus.

On Wednesday we walked a short distance over to Karin's house (Forslunds' other daughter - two years younger than Anna).

Karin and Anna.

Karin is a midwife, and she and Per-Inge, an engineer, have two children, Erik and Frida.

On Wednesday afternoon we said good bye to Anna

and that evening the four of us went to the Mesob, a great Ethiopian restaurant.

We ordered the Mesob Mix, a huge platter of doro wat (chicken stew), tsiga tibs (BBQ beef), yatkilt wat (vegetable stew), etc., with lots of injera (a unique Ethiopian flat bread). It was an evening to remember. And I slept well - maybe it was the ice cream at home which cooled my insides!

Thursday morning I took an early, snowy walk, then came back and shoveled - perhaps the fourth time. It just kept coming down! We had the usual huge breakfast -

yogurt or filmjolk with corn flakes and jam, bread, crackers, cheese and meat, fish (for those so inclined), hard-boiled eggs, etc.

And then we headed down to Uppsala cathedral -

which we know very well but always enjoy seeing again.

 A special focus of my visits to the cathedral is the tomb of Nathan Soderblom, Swedish archbishop from 1914 to his death in 1931. In 1925 Soderblom convened the first Universal Conference on Life and Work, in Stockholm. The agenda of the conference centered on bringing all churches together to try to prevent another war like the one that had devastated Europe a few years before. This group eventually united with the conferences on Faith and Order to form the World Council of Churches. Nathan Soderblom was awarded the Nobel Prize for Peace in 1930.

That morning I had seen a photo in the newspaper of a taste competition involving some delicious-looking pastries, so Gertrud bought some and we had them for lunch -

a semla - a cream puff-like creation especially connected with Mardi Gras - like the Austrian krapfen we found in Salzburg.

Thursday night we had another nice meal - goulash and rice.

Per-Inge and the kids biked over - Karin walked. It was amazing to see so many people out on bikes, riding through several inches of snow. Per-Inge regularly bikes to work, no matter what the weather.

Friday was an early breakfast and off to the bus station for the trip to the airport and flying back to Vilnius. At our intermediate stop, Helsinki, we weren't sure if we'd be able to go on to Vilnius - the captain of our prop plane, an ATR-72, kept telling us we had to wait for another runway sweeping. But finally, about an hour late, after the usual de-icing, we took off and were home by about 7 pm.

What a blessing to be here, so close to good friends, and to be able to go see them.