Gothenburg: Swedish comfort

After I played a morning with the gladiators in Rome and hang out an afternoon with hooligans in London I arrived in the pretty Swedish Gothenburg. This heaven had toilets that you could flush, there were machines that cleaned your plates and you did not die after drinking tap water. I stayed at a Palace by absence of the queen who is trying to find work for me in South America. I had a bed of three by three meters, woke up with avocado breakfast, could count cars from the balcony so my unique skill would not fade away and was led through the heaven by Sofia in a Volvo.

After four months I was very happy to see Sofia again and be able to touch her. Two weeks before I decided impulsively to book a plane ticket to Sweden. I realized that the longer I waited to visit her, the more volatile our contact  would be. If I wanted to work for a future with Sofia, I had to pick up the rusted shell of my water bottle and add a dash of water to the wine. From the beginning the connection was again very natural and I felt at ease with Sofia and her family. However, I noticed a big difference between traveling together with someone and living with someone. Sofia had her routines and obligations while I was as free as a bird. You spend less time with each other and have different priorities when traveling together, so the contact is less intense. Nevertheless Sofia makes me feel very at ease.

Since Sofia's mother did the accounting of grandfather's business during the day, the sister had the task to treat the vegetables in the supermarket with empathy and Sofia was juggling tomatoes I had to entertain myself during the day. I wandered around for hours looking for a museum to find out that they were closed on Mondays, navigated myself with a map that was rained out so that you none of street names were visible, tried to unlock my new phone which took a week and walked three times the same round when I followed my sense of direction. If I walk around Gothenburg without a phone and a plan you might have to pick me up in Stockholm at the end of day. It was therefore good that Sofia had many free days to prevent this.

I saw the restaurant where Sofia ran the legs from her body and I felt honored to get invited for the annual crab dinner. I was expecting to have to behave properly and had put on a shirt for the change that been unused in my backpack for months. The owner who was sitting opposite me and was full of good stories in which he didn’t avoid any sensitive details. As an actor they'd make a fake penis for him for some sex scenes. After the shooting, he had lost his trophy and accidentally a woman at the same table said she lately had seen the penis. Probably it circles around her group of friends now and Is standing besides someone’s bed.

I got a tour through the big company that Sofia’s grandfather started and is ran by him and his children. I asked Sofia’s grandfather what the key behind his success is, which he answered in a charming Swedish accent; '' You just have to be a little stupid to start your own company. ' He proudly showed me childhood photos, Porsche cars that his company sponsors and the factory where they make the mechanical parts for trucks. Despite his success he preferred nothing more than the food his wife made,  he patiently passes his knowledge on to his family and is always there to encourage Sofia's football team. Sofia's grandfather was a family man who remained on the ground with both feet, something I really admire.

We also celebrated Sofia's birthday in a club where the live artist managed to get a sound out of a violin that puts your hackles stiff upright, I lost three kilo’s of sweat after I sat for a few minutes in the sauna and was as shriveled as a dried tomato, we lived like a bat while we were hanging an afternoon upside town in Gothenburg’s famous theme park Liseberg and we visited a few islands on the west coast that teem in the summer and sleep in winter.

We also made a trip to Copenhagen. Right in town is a neighborhood called Cristiana, that is opposing to the Western society. You can buy weed in covered eateries, you should not run and making pictures is prohibited. According to the state of the houses the hippies probably live here for a few euros per month. If you leave Cristiana without being stoned you can make a trip through the city or shop till your exhausted. Or you can climb a church on a narrow staircase with spiral shape that curls around the church, making it feel like you fall 100 meters down if you fall of the staircase. I was climbing the church with three people that are afraid of heights, so  halfway they turned around with reddish faces and frightened eyes. The work of the architect gave also himself so much fear that his life ended by a jump from the church.

In a short time I became acquainted with many Swedish habits. They have ten proverbs to indicate that someone is not very smart, while those people probably don’t understand any proverb. They love potatoes and talk about it as if it were wine. A fountain on the road is used as a car wash, until a guard is protecting the fountain.. If the roof of a house is built, they celebrate it so well that the walls collapse the next day. The majority wears every day clothes like they go to a funeral, as if there is a a ban on wearing colorful clothes. Most Swedish people like to fit as many vika’s, a moment when you have a snack with your friends, as possible in a day. They won’t stop talking because they have an great skill of talking endlessly about the weather. Except in winter, when Swedish people live like hermits and climb into their hole after work with a bottle of wine and a few boiled potatoes. They wander around the stress again in spring and get burned if the temperature passes ten degrees. But what is most important to me, they have a lot of humor. If you give a Swedish person the time to defrost, you will have a lot of fun with them.

What happens in the future between Sofia and me remains difficult to predict. She is very special to me and I feel relaxed when I'm with her. I no longer have the urge to go out, visit all ten highlights of the city that TripAdvisor shows me and can enjoy watching a movie. It is very valuable to me that I lose my restlessness by Sofia and it strengthens me to maintain contact. But we are or in other stages of life, have other plans for the future and we live far from each other which makes it a difficult situation. Although it is difficult to make concrete plans we are determined to see each other again. Maybe one of us will make an impulsive move and we see each sooner than we think.

After two and a half weeks I left Sweden and Sofia with great memories but insecurity about the future. With pain in my stomach, I boarded the plane and visited sequentially London and Rome, before I was back in Santiago de Chile. In London, I stayed in a hostel full of homeless people that dry themselves with a hairdryer by lack of a towel. On the street they like to start a conversation, which I like, but it’s mostly full of swearing. The Italians were more civilized, but made so many gestures that maybe one of them meant that I was a bastard. Back in Santiago I am going to travel two weeks with two friends from the Netherlands. We drank an afternoon coffee in a strip club, tried sandboarding at night in the desert and found bins instead of waterfalls. Want to know more about this Dutch colored trip? Read my next blog.