Moose!

Wow. So my landlord, Bjorn, and his two sons Emile and Rickard are just about the friendliest people you will ever meet. Bjorn is my landlord while Emile and Rickard are the landlords of other floors in my building. All three of them enjoy talking small talk to my roommate, Dani, and me whenever we see them. The only problem is... we can BARELY understand each other. I have this thing where I only let myself say "what" twice and then I giggle and say "Ja!"... hope that's been working.

So about a month ago Rickard and I were having a weird moment in the hallway where we were both awkwardly smiling and frantically thinking of small talk that could get us out of this awkward silence when he informed me that he shot a moose, "two hours north of here" where, I assume, Santa lives. He offers to let me try some moose meat in the future and I tell him that would be very nice.

Today, Bjorn knocks on my door at about lunch time and tells me he's got some moose for me. WHAT?! He brings me upstairs to a massive fridge with hundreds of labeled bags of meat. It looked like something straight out of CSI, but Bjorn is a big teddy bear and I trust he wasn't going to give me human meat. So Bjorn hooks me up with some ground moose meat, ligonberries he handpicked "two hours north of here", and some moose meat he already cooked the night before. So here I am eating moose meat and ligonberries in my apartment...

WELCOME TO SWEDEN.