One of the best things about working in Sweden is the vacation time and the holidays. For a country that really is not religious at all (only 5% of the population consider themselves religious), they sure do take a lot of religious holidays off. And if we had known about them in advance we probably could have planned some our trips and recent guest visits a little better. For example, Byron and Abby were here May 15th-19th, and then Chad and Laura were here the 24th-30th. But we didn’t find out until the week before that we had the 21th-22th off for Ascension day.
What is Ascension day you may ask? One of Blake's co-workers described it as "The day Jesus flew away." While describing it to Grant, he translated it as, "The day Jesus donned his rocket pack and blew this mortal popsicle stand." And in case you actually wanted to know why we got a 2 day holiday for this, "The Ascension implies Jesus' humanity being taken into heaven. Ascension Day, celebrated 40 days after Easter, is one of chief feasts of the Christian year." (Thank you wiki). Anyways, the whole point of this is that we went to hang out at my friend Ida's family cabin in the archipelago. And by cabin, I really mean compound (see picture above)- her grandparents used to live here and now the whole extended family shares a whole chunk of an island. The place is adorable.
It only takes an hour bus ride and then a 15 minute boat ride to get here, so we were able to leave Stockholm in the late morning and still have time to enjoy most of the day Thursday there. And the weather was great Thursday, so we took one of the boats out to a small uninhabited island for a lovely fika (coffee break).
When we got back from our little expedition, we enlisted Ida's dad to help us put out the nets to see if we could catch some fish overnight. Throw a net in and leave it overnight? This is my kind of fishing.
The rest of the evening while we waited for innocent yummy fish to become magically entangled in our net, we passed the time with a sauna (they just love their saunas in Scandinavia!), which was followed by a jump into the ocean ( And yes, it was cold. Very, very cold.) and a lovely dinner. After some delicious food (and admittedly a lot of wine) we had fun with our cameras and exposure time:
(Editor's Note: Notice that these pictures make it look light outside? Yeah, it was about 10 or 11 pm. The sun pretty much doesnt set here anymore, which is really trippy. I am sure I will discuss this later on my blog at some point. It's crazy.)
The next morning we were ready to see what we had caught. Unfortunately the weather wasn’t too great but well, umm, hmmm....I'm not sure how to finish that sentence. Anyways... we caught a lot! 3 large Pike (which are nasty looking things with teeth), and about 10 Perch.
That was the fun part. Then we had to get them out of the nets (Again, Pike have teeth, and Perch have sharp poisonous dorsal fins), and then they needed to be killed, gutted, and the Perch had to be filleted. All of this took a few hours and it was cold and rainy outside, which did not help our epic struggle vs the fish. I had to pass on the whole killing and gutting part... turns out I have a weak stomach when it comes to that sort of thing.
I was able to help filet the perch after Ida and Blake did the really gross part though, and we had enough fish left over after lunch (which was soooo good!) that Blake and I were able to bring home 2 Pike, some perch, and some roe from one of the pikes. And just last week I cooked the Pike and it was surprisingly a success! It is pretty awesome to go through the whole process of catching and killing your own food to preparing it and eating it- this is a first for moi!
After a late lunch we hoped on a boat and then a bus and we were home for at least 1 relaxing night at home before the craziness that is our life continued!
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