Little Sweden

Yesterday I handled in my last summative essay for this year in the Social and Cultural Geography module. It was about 'race' and racism, which I have found very interesting. Sometimes you struggle with an essay to fill out the words you need, but this time I really had to limit myself as five pages is not that much. There were lots of things I could have expanded and written more about, but in the end I'm really satisfied about it, and that's what counts the most for me! So after that I gave myself a bit of reward and took the train to the Newcastle Metro Center to visit Little Sweden, Ikea!


It was the first time I visited an Ikea store abroad, and I must say it was a really weird experience in a way! I have heard, and seen big posters in Bukarest, that all the furnitures and stuff have the same Swedish names as at home, but once I started to walk around looking at everything I got a bit overwhelmed with all of a sudden all the Swedish around me! Kind of an linguistic overdose! Then when I checked the book shelfs I found that all of the books also were in Swedish (even Nick Hornby!), so shocking!!


I was there by myself, as it wasn't gonna be for a long time, so had really no one to share this crazy experience with. I felt like I was sneaking around and knew this secret that no one else knew. Almost wanted to jump up to people and yell like "I know what all the words mean!! You want me to tell you?! Or maybe read one of the books in the shelfs! I can read it, I'm Swedish!!". Of course I didn't, would had been a bit inappropriate, so I had to curb my enthusiasm a bit.
My main purpose with this trip was to visit the Swedish food store they have there, and I had hoped they had frozen reindeer or elk meat, but they only had small sausages so I bought a lot of meatballs instead. So tonight I'm gonna serve Swedish meatballs with potatoes in cream sauce with pickled cucumber and lingonberry jam, with a bit of reindeer sausage and knäckebröd with snaps cheese and of course ginger cookies!!