What likes Swedish dried flat bread, is fast, and says bah bah? Sheep!

11/10/2012

Today Hanna let me sleep in very late, I did not wake up until 1:30, though it was a gyrating week so I did need the sleep. After breakfast Hanna and I headed over to Ida's house. From there we walked down the street to William's house. William has his drivers license and was able to drive us to Ida's friend, Matilda's house. Matilda lives just outside of Sala in the countryside and her family owns sheep and chickens. When we got there we were met by her mom and their two seven week old kittens. They were adorable and they reminded me of when my family adopted a stray cat who gave birth to three kittens in a box in my parents closet. They were so cute and were at that stage where they wanted to explore everything. One of them even ended up on Ida's shoulder like parrot.

After playing with the kittens for quite a while we continued on to the sheep. Her family rises a special old Swedish species of sheep. Their fur is very thick, very long, and a mixture of different browns, blacks, and whites. We fed them Swedish dried flat bred and petted them when they came close enough. They were adorable! Ida decided that she was going to try and catch the smallest of the sheep. We spent several minuets running back and forth across the pasture trying to pin the sheep into a corner so we could catch it, with no luck. Sheep are fast. Some close friends of my families own a sheep farm in Wales. When I was very young my family went to visit them at their sheep farm over spring break. Lambing season is in March and we happened to come just in time to see the lambs being born. It was an incredible site, to see the babies trying to walk for the first time and the mothers licking them clean. At one pint during our stay we had to move some of the mothers and their babies to a different pasture. In order to do this we had to catch the mothers and put them in the trailer, the babies usually followed their mothers so we did not have to worry so much about them. We spent ages chasing the sheep around the pasture before we finally managed to get them into the trailer. It was quite a workout and an adventure.

After chasing the sheep round some more we went to see the chickens and then headed back into the house to warm up. We sat down in some very comfortable couches and played with Legos! I had not played with Legos in ages and we had a lot of fun, Ida even built an airplane equipped with everything you might need, including an umbrella. We ate a wonderful dinner of spaghetti and meet sauce at Matilda's house before heading back to Ida's house and then to the Rec. Center to play two hours of floor ball with Ida's youth group. Floor pall is kind of like indoor hockey and is played with shorter plastic hockey sticks and a wiffle ball. It was extremely fun to play!


After floor ball William drove Hanna and I home so that we could take quick showers, eat a little food, and then head back into downtown Sala to Ida's church. There we heard a short sermon and then split up into discussion groups. After about 20 minuets of talking we all gathered together to play a game. Ida's parents had set up an obstacle course called DTCH5 (or something like that). To complete the obstacle course you had to fill your mouth with pudding, climb over two chairs, onto a saucer, around a stool, around a group of cones, crawl under a table, climb over a set of chairs again, hop in and out of two hula hoops, and then spit the chocolate pudding out into a pitcher. The winners were the ones who's pitcher weighed the most after five minutes. However there was a trick: you could not let any part of your body touch the obstacle course directly, there always had to be a dish towel between you and the course, feet, hands, knees, everything! It was very fun to play and even more fun to watch. It would be a good idea for a pep rally; hint hint, wink wink, nudge nudge, student council. After the obstacle course we played a quick game of sardines, a version of hide and seek, before returning home, watching a movie, and passing out in our beds. Today was a tiring and amazing day! Tack, tills imorgon!