Swedish Fika and Secret Handshakes

I'm not sure how it's possible that my last post was in October seeing as how it's already basically May, but time flies when you're having fun and all that. 

As for me, life is honestly pretty damn good. I started a new job in February as the Media and Public Affairs Officer for the International Rescue Committee (a humanitarian aid organization for which I have wanted to work essentially since the dawn of time) and wake up every day excited to go to work (I use the word go loosely seeing as how I work from home most of the time but that's okay with me because it means I never have to put on real pants). Ive spent three months at IRC and am pretty deep in the honeymoon phase - I get to write about things I care about and work with the world's best boss and a bunch of people who give a shit about the same things I give a shit about and it is pretty neat, let me tell you. 

Dani - unsurprisingly - continues to show me every single day what it means to have a partner who brings you unadulterated joy and makes you want to be a better person just by being who they are (I am aware this is cheesy but this is what he has done to me - I used to be a robot, remember?)

January was spent finishing off our holidays in California and Texas with my family along with a quick visit to Spain to meet up with my best friend Becka who I hadn't seen in two whole years. She lives in northern England so we figured Alicante, Spain was a fitting weekend getaway - yes I hear the bougieness in that statement. We took a trip to Palermo, Sicily (Italy) in March with Dani's parents bc that's what adulty people do, they take trips with their in-laws. And this month saw us taking long weekend trips in Sweden and Bosnia. Why? Well, we planned Bosnia a few months ago as a late anniversary gift to each other. And Sweden, well… Dani found RyanAir tickets for 20 euros round trip so like, legally we had to go.  Yeah… our bank accounts are hurting. But damn, what a year it's been. 

Stockholm was a pretty delightful and spontaneous surprise considering we booked the tickets like 10 days in advance. Of course, despite our late evening flight, neither Dani nor I managed to pack in advance and instead ended up throwing the same stuff we always wear into a backpack and running out the door. Dani spent most of the plane ride trying to kill our fellow passengers with his unbelievably toxic farts and before we knew it our bougie weekend-travel asses were in Stockholm, a city easy on the eyes and hard on the wallet.

We got our TWENTY EURO ONE WAY TRAIN TICKETS (i.e. the cost of our literal roundtrip ticket to get there) to head into town on the classiest airport train in the game ready to spend the weekend confirming our theory that everything in Scandinavia is simply better than everywhere else. After a quick stop for vegetarian Burger King burgers (nothing else was open leave us alone) we headed to our windowless basement AirBnb (windows are an expensive luxury apparently) and literally could not get into the apartment bc the key box was broken and it took about an hour to get a hold of the owner bc he did not give one hoot about us or our problems before finally getting into our cave of a room to unpack and pass the hell out.

So, my fellow travelers, I would 10-10 recommend a visit to any and all Scandinavian countries. With your parents. Bc coming here and paying for yourself is trash. We woke up at 9am in our windowless cave (had to set alarms or else we could have slept for days in that basement) and got ready much too slow for Danis taste bc - what a surprise - he was a very hungry man. So we headed out into town - our AirBnb was about a 30 minute walk outside the city center which allowed us to get a place with a kitchen so we could save money and cook for ourselves without fully breaking the bank - around the same time a light dusting of snow began to come down. This did not stay light and romantic. About five minutes into our walk, the snow was coming down so hard it was impossible to see and it was all you could do to hope you weren't about to walk off one of Stockholms many bridges and into the icy water. We did not, but it was a close call. And we were soooo not dressed appropriately. We ran (I mostly slipped) into a super cute cafe which Dani had found before we arrived in Stockholm bc he is adorable and looked up a whole bunch of decently priced places we could eat and snack. There we spent about 20 euros on a damn quiche and the best homemade berry pie thing ever made by the saleswoman herself (so naturally we got another piece).

We spent the day wandering the old town and the new town and the other parts of town, stopping into stores for warmth and book stores for souvenirs bc we continue to aggressively grow our book collection. We then enjoyed what is without question the best mexican food joint in Europe whose owners and employees are all from Mexico so we employed our flexitarianism (we eat almost no meat, except for special occasions like freaking al pastor street tacos ugh so good). The afternoon had us in Skansen, a neighboring island, until it started getting cold and windy and late and we took the long and winding road home with stops for cinnamon rolls and cute doggos. We grabbed groceries at Lidl bc Lidl is everywhere and headed home to cook our signature travel meal, pasta pomodoro, and play some cards. 

I woke up thirsty the next morning and took a sip of what I thought would be water on my nightstand. It was not. It was beer. What are we, 19? Dani got a good kick out of my suffering and I went to find myself some coffee. We spent our Saturday consuming copious amounts of coffee (which we couldn't tell whether it was free refills or not as the coffee pots sit in the cafe area freely but were also terrified to steal Swedish coffee by accident bc we are wusses). We wandered through all the parts of Stockholm we thought we might have missed and ate our fill of cinnamon rolls and funny looking swedish desserts before heading back to our new favorite Mexican food joint bc it was just that good (and well priced might I add - if youre ever in Stockholm I cannot recommend La Neta enough). We grabbed another piece of delicious homemade berry pie on the way back and got laughed out of a few establishments for wearing masks (they are too cool for that in Sweden) before making our way back to real life for our evening flight.

PS: Dani likes to write down all our ideas for what to do on a piece of paper, which is potentially the cutest thing ever and does well to remind me of my grandpa’s love of 3x5 index cards when planning a family trip.