After a quiet day of comtemplating tomorrow's season opener, I took the opportunity to accept an invitation for dinner at the Hammarqvist's home in the small village of Finja.
Karolin, Henning and Johan Hammarqvist
If you do not recall from an earlier post, Johan is the Political Editor of the NorreSkåne newspaper. Karolin is studying to become a teacher and Henning is just all boy!
Karolin prepared a great salmon dinner with all the fixins, DELICIOUS!
We discussed the interesting Swedish protocol for maternity and, yes, paternity leave which is completely different from America's.
Here, with the birth of a child, the parents are entitled to 390 days of leave earning them 80% of their daily rate of pay! Each parent must use at least 60 days of this leave and you have eight years from the birth of the child to use up these 390 days.
If you have a second child, you get another 390 days. WOW!
Swedish Whiskey
Sweden is trying to cut into the Scottish whiskey economy with private labels such as this one. Karolin's father donated this bottle from his private reserve for the dinner.
It was quite good!
After dinner, Johan and I took a 15 minute walk to the local pitch to watch Finja IF take on Broby IF in a Swedish Division VI fotboll game.
Finja is rural and has horse stables
Finja IF, in blue, in action!
Finja IF was 1-0-3 coming into this game, as they made the move up to Division VI from Division VII, the lowest in Sweden, this season.
Broby IF's kit was quite fashionable!
Johan was willing to climb the fence to get an errant game ball
He is very community oriented indeed!
Magnus Andersson
Magnus greeted us as we entered the pitch and offered us some liquid mischief immediately.
Of course we said no, at least not until halftime with our coffee.
It turns out that his mother-in-law made the brownies on sale in the snack bar.
I had two of her brownies just to be polite.
They were perfect with our "coffee."
Markus Nilsson, Finja IF fullback
Markus is a good friend of the Hammarqvists and played very hard. He has played 25 seasons since the age of five with the various level of teams sponsored by Finja IF. Here he accepts some post-game cheer from Johan.
The final score was a dissapointing 0-4 loss for Finja IF.
This was my fifth fotboll/calcio/soccer game that I have been to in Europe. I have always rooted for the home team for personal safety reasons. Tonight I suffered my first loss ever using this system.
But no one threw a bottle at me.
The entrance to the Finja IF Pitch
Note the high security fence aimed at keeping crowd control issues to a minimum.
Electrified "fence"
Johan touched it and did get a very mild shock. The purpose of this security measure is to keep those pesky 550 lbs. wild boars that roam the area off the pitch. Note the use of my foot to give you forensic perspective.
Apparently it works, I didn't see one wild boar all evening!
Cool old milk jugs
This is now here just for show, but in days gone by local farmers would place the milk that their ten or so cows produced by the road and the milk trucks would come by and pick them up for market.
Life was so simple then.
All in all, a GREAT night that definitely took my mind off of tomorrow's Limhamn game for awhile.
TACK SÅ MYCKET
HAMMARQVIST FAMILY
4 comments:
Was the cost of the ticket for a Division VI game more or less than the cost of the two brownies?
PS ... no longer DPLassen on here because of a change of e-mail, but it's still me.
I think a coffee and a brownie equaled the cost of the ticket to get into the match.
Had a good time yesterday! The ticket was 30 swedish kronor and a coffee and brownie was 15 kronor. One US dollar equals about 7,75 swedish kronor.
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