Grocery Shopping!!!!

Great day today!! It was badminton club time which is always fun.  Today, we only had 4 women playing but we had a great time and we are really starting to learn the rules and play some real games.  

Suburbia

We live VERY centrally in downtown Stockholm but I have to take the subway out a bit to a near in suburb for the badminton stadion.  It is interesting just to note the differences in building size, spacing, age, architecture, etc, just from this little bit of distance from the center of town.

Downtown

I left badminton just a few minutes early to meet up with a group of fellow expats and a Swedish cultural trainer/language instructor who had agreed to take us all to a big, local grocery store and walk us through, to translate and show us everything that we were looking at and for.  It was soooooo helpful and I learned so much!  I think that I can now find almost everything that I want!  The differences in cultures really comes out in food, so just understanding what some things are and when you would eat them or prepare them was fascinating!  The number and types of buttermilk itself is mind-boggling!

The variety of fish and how they are prepared is also incredible.

And the tubes and tubes of caviar that the Swedish people eat with everything was astounding!

So, interesting!  And, along the way, I met a French woman.  We had a great time chatting about France and food varieties there.

After our long grocery store tour, we were starving, so I then went out for lunch with two good friends, followed by a little window shopping.  We are starting to get our ideas on how the Swedish decorate for, and celebrate the Holidays.  Should be fun!!  One interesting, Christmas note is that many Christmas decorations are in the shape of a red heart.  Christmas is definitely a time for love but hard for me to not think of Valentine's day rather than Christmas!