Saturday, September 18th, 2021, around 9 a.m.: The ferry enters the port of Gothenburg. We stand on deck and watch what is happening. We both can’t realize that it’s really going to start now. Somehow a strange feeling – anticipation mixed with a little fear, after all we don’t really know where and with whom we will be tonight. When we leave the ferry, we are stopped by the security: „Do you speak English?“, „What are you doing here?“, „Are you in Sweden for the first time?“, „How old are you?“ and of course: „Do you have alcohol with you?“, „Really not? If I searched your stuff, I wouldn´t find anything?“. Fortunately, the evening before we had decided against bringing wine to our host family. That could have been problematic now, because in Sweden you are only allowed to buy alcohol when you are 20 years old. So we are allowed to leave the port without having to unpack and pack again and take the bus to the main station to get rid of our backpacks there again. This time, however, it turns out to be a little more difficult than in Germany, as we had some troubles convincing the machine to accept our credit cards. In the end it worked, we had breakfast, we were upset about the events from our high school year chat, took a stroll through Gothenburg, bought Lina a new hat and finally got back to our backpacks.

From now on it should have been really easy: get on the bus to Borås and let Jenny pick us up there. Unfortunately, the app failed at the moment we wanted to buy a bus ticket. We almost had to take a bus later, but luckily three nice Swedes and the bus driver, who somehow managed to arrange for us to buy our tickets on the bus, helped us. So we arrived on time at the meeting point and were picked up by Jenny and her two small children.

Arrival at Jennys & Wictors

Logically, we arrived at the farm the same evening. We have a small, nice room in the family home. Jenny and Wictor have three small children (1, 2 and 3 years old), 4 dogs, lots of horses, 3 ponies, 3 cats and lots of chickens, that we always have to feed. The farm is somewhere in the middle of nowhere, the next village is about 5km away, but that’s what makes it so beautiful here: the quiet (apart from the three small and very noisy children) and the fact that you rarely see cars here.

I could tell a lot about our first days, but here only the short version: We have already been mucking out the two chicken coops (that was literally a shitty job); have been riding, once even in the dark; We almost lost a horse, but luckily we were able to catch it again with apples and treats; went for a walk to a lake nearby; took care of Victor’s three year old son and went riding with him; have cleared the meadow of apples and made applesauce from those from the tree and baked apple pie and of course learned some Swedish!

We really like it here. We settled in quickly and gradually know what to do. Every evening we fall into bed really tired by nine o’clock at the latest, exhausted from the day and, above all, from the energie of the children.

We’ll probably stay here until the end of October before we head north :).

And finally, a few more impressions: the farm and its surroundings, one of the chicken coops, the beautiful lake, in which we will definitely go swimming and me with a horse :).