So that was Easter, did you have a good time? We spent the weekend at a friend’s stuga. I can hear minds ticking over so its best that I say a stuga is really a summer cottage kind of place were Swedes escape to at the weekends and summer vacations. Tucked away in deep in the middle of what seemed like nowhere really this was a particular nice place to escape to. Apart from the small stuga community there was no one else around. Traffic couldn’t be heard not even as a distance hum, just the breeze in the trees and the birds singing away. Bliss. Well it would have been if I hadn’t chosen this particular day to have a bad stomach. If I ever win the Stryktipset (football pools), and frankly after this weekend attempts its not likely, a little stuga would be high on my purchase list. A little place to escape to and let the rest of the world rush by on its own. A second home when we would want it and the rest of the time we could have a little side business hiring it out to tourists. If it was a big win maybe I could start my own little chain of stugas….

Swedes celebrate Easter slightly differently, for starters at the beginning of January you wont find a whole supermarket isle packed solid of thin chocolate eggs dressed up in colourful tin foil. The Swedish approach is to exchange an eggshell made of paper filled with pick and mix style sweets. Another tradition is Påskris. This entails acquiring some small twigs about to come into leaf and bringing them inside to be dressed up with feathers and other little hanging things. It seems a bit harsh on the poor trees and its slightly ironic the rebirth is celebrated by killing off parts of a living tree but that’s tradition for you. And finally there’s also something about witches, I don’t really understand why and no one has been able to explain it adequately either, but there is something about witches, honest.