Hej!

GSE Team Sweden 2009 with the Wahlberg family

Well, we’ve made it!

We all received a very warm yesterday when we arrived in Göteborg and last night we stayed at the beautiful in Borås, Sweden. It has so far been wonderful and we have met some incredible people. We have the most gracious hosts, the Wahlberg family, who runs the beautiful bed & breakfast Börshult Gård. Peter took us on a very informative and gorgeous (and wet!) hike through their forest lands. The fuzzy mosses were especially interesting!! We also met Bo Westling, the Distrikit Governor, and Christina Reumark, the GSE Chair and our guide. Kara got to ride in a natural gas powered car! We also met Martin, one of the Sweden exchange students that will be traveling to Minnesota in April through the same program, and were interviewed by Ingemar Brink of the Borås Tidning (the Borås newspaper). We are learning so much about Sweden already.


The food so far has been spectacular; I wish I had more time to describe it, but yesterday we ate reindeer – not the Bambi kind but the big kind! As if all of the hospitality and food were not enough, we were each given a beautiful journal, complete with hand-painted watercolor Swedish landscapes by a local Rotarian Dawn Chisae Yoshimura – thank you so much, Dawn! We also got a Swedish and American flag pin to match our GSE pins, and we also received fair trade tote bags and our itinerary – it looks like we have a really great month ahead of us!

Us with Christina and Bo

We have been able to find some access to the internet (thanks to our gracious hosts) but our schedule is pretty full so we don’t have much time to be online and will try posting as much as we can. I posted my impressions of Swedish sustainability so far on my other blog if you’d like to see them – it’s amazing what is commonplace over here that we don’t incorporate regularly yet in the US. Vi ses! - Alison