One year in Sweden

I don't have anything really interesting to write today, but it was a year ago today that I arrived in Sweden, so I thought a blog post was necessary to mark the day.

We spent the day in Stockholm taking arm-length and tripod-staged engagement photos. Kind of joking there...we'll get real engagement photos taken some day. Hopefully before the wedding. :)

We tried to check out some wedding dress stores, only to find out that most of them closed exactly 30 minutes before we arrived. It didn't matter when we arrived, they all closed 30 minutes earlier.

The high point of our day, if you can call it that, was trying out a new Mexican restaurant. It didn't really occur to us a year ago, but there isn't much of a Mexican influence in Sweden, and consequently, there are no good Mexican restaurants here. We knew we'd have to live without Taco Bell, but living without good Mexican food in general came as a big surprise. They do have Taco Bar here, which tastes good, but it's about the same quality and taste as taco day in the school cafeteria. Even though it was the best of the school lunches, it doesn't really count as Mexican.

So we rode the subway out to a distant suburb to find the newest Mexican restaurant in the country, Serrano. We read a good review that said this was a chain that quickly rose to huge success in Ireland, so this is one of their first expansion restaurants. It was pretty much the Chipotle/Panchero/Qdoba style, with the option of a normal or a large size burrito. The normal was probably the perfect actual serving size and the large was probably 80-90% of its American counterpart, which is probably a good thing. We both give the Irish/Swedish Mexican restaurant a good review, with one exception; they didn't have a steak burrito option. I settled for ground beef, which was a mistake. It still tasted okay, but when you have rice and beans, ground beef just doesn't do the trick. Miranda has warned me that her craving for good Mexican might take us out there again, but I'm okay with home cooked tacos in the meantime.

That's life in Sweden. Exciting...right?

Oh, and another thing, I have a new favorite beer. Erdinger Dunkel Hefeweissen. We were introduced to it down in Berlin and I was lucky enough to find another bottle at the state-run liquor store last weekend (it's normally sold out). Erdinger's normal hefeweissen and kristall (crystal) hefeweissen are good too, but you must try the dunkel (dark). Mums!

Bad news for you Iowa and Minnesota beer coinessours, I just checked the John's Grocery and the Surdyk's websites and was not able to find Erdinger's Dunkel Hefeweissen on their beer lists. John's Grocery did have a number of other dark German wheat beers, so if someone is willing to give those a try, be sure to send the review my way.