Wilbur

Today I saw the biggest pig I've ever seen in my life! I went with two friends to this place, Vallby, that they call a kind of outdoor museum. We took their children (3 all together). I had to walk a ways to meet them at the museum, but the walk was beautiful, alongside the river here. And yet another beautiful day! Vallby is sort of a collection of things; many of the oldest houses and buildings in the city have been transported here. There are also several areas with farm animals: goats, sheep, pigs, chickens, roosters, rabbits, etc. And then Vallby has a lot of beautiful, small stores that sell hand-made crafts (silver, textiles, brushes, etc.), flowers, candy, and coffee. Vallby is free for anybody to come, and lots of school children take field trips here. Lovely. So, now for some weird/funny things about Sweden:

• Philip-you're right. Very Godless country. And just to illustrate the difference with one point, instead of celebrating Halloween, a holiday typically thought of as pagan to many, they have turned Easter into Easterween (that's what I call it, anyway), where kids dress up like witches with aprons and fly on brooms (although they are good witches).
  
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• Many of the cafes have outdoor seating for people that want to smoke. And, because it can be pretty chilly on many nights, they offer blue blankets for people to sit around outside all wrapped up like mummies. Looks pretty funny.
• 60% of Swedes have summer homes. Like my mom says, Swedes sure know how to live right. Except for the Godless part.
• The company that makes most of the toilets here puts its name on the button on the top of the commode that flushes the toilet. It says "IDo", so everytime I flush a toilet, I think to myself, and sometimes say aloud, "I DO flush the toilet."
• Entrances and Exits are called farts. Infart and Utfart. The signs are everywhere. Wonder what an in-fart would be in English?
• Once there was a Swedish king who was killed from poison put into his soup. So now, every Thursday, many Swedes eat pea soup and pancakes, in memory of him. This was like hundreds of years ago or something, but the pea soup continues.
  
• Today I observed a class of 5th graders during their PE, math and english lessons. There are some CRAZY good 11-year-old football (soccer) players here, by the way. For english, they read a story called Red Stains and then sang a song about it. The majority of the song was a repetition of this: "Trousers, shoes, and underpants, panties, socks and shirts--they all have red stains. Jim-where are you?" I almost peed my pants.