Karstad, Sweden

September 6, 2009, Sunday
Karstad, Sweden

Been a day of screw-ups!! First I set the alarm so we would get out of bed at a decent hour but not too early. Well, it went off and we got up and got ready to go to breakfast and suddenly I realized that I had not set the time back when we came back from Finland, so we were up an hour earlier than we had planned! Morning person that I am, I was NOT pleased!

Then we drove on in to Karstad and asked for directions to a laundromat and they told us that they do not have one in the whole city!!! This is not a tiny burg, it is a fairly sizeable city and no laundromats! I really don’[t believe the hotel girl but we went out walking and we looked all over the place and didn’t see a single thing that resembled a laundromat. The girl at the hotel told me that I could use the hotel’s washing machine but they do not have a dryer and I could just see us trying to pack up tomorrow with a bunch of damp laundry. So we will try to do laundry tomorrow in Oslo.

We walked to the city center, a square that is the size of one of our city blocks. It has benches and right in the middle is a statue of a woman with her hands raised in victory and her foot is squarely planted on a soldier’s head! I thought it might be in honor of WWII but I was told that it is showing that there is no more war between the Scandinavian counties. They squabbled and fought each other ofr hundreds of years and finally they are at peace.

Then there is another statue of a man standing on a table and also on the table is a bottle of beer. This is commemorating one of their poets. My thought on this is that they must have a wild man for a poet for him to be standing on table!!

So while we were out, I decided that we definitely needed more Swedish money. So I went to the ATM and took out the max. Now that we ae back, I realize that we leave Sweden tomorrow and I have no clue what we will do with all this money! Duh!! I guess I’ll just hold it until we come back through and I’ll pay cash for everything!! Since most of our hotels are pre-paid, I may wind up having to take it to a currency exchange and that will make me very unhappy as they take a big hit when they exchange your money.

Don thought that he had spotted a flea market when we came in to town, so we had to walk over to see it and lo and behold it was some fellow who had set up 4-8foot tables and they were covered with all kinds of mushrooms and toad stools and fungi of all
types. English was carefully labeled with the name of the fungus and the Latin name. Since he didn‘t speak English I couldn’t really ask him what he was doing but it was kind of interesting. He did manage to tell me that there were only about 6 types that were edible. There were no prices on the labels and it didn’t appear that he was selling them, so I don’t know what on earth he was doing. I thought it was all very strange but Don was enthralled.