Living in Goteborg

front door and balcony.

Our new little home is great!  It’s on the third floor of a very nice apartment building at the end of the street.  There is a code that must be entered before the front door will open.  Then its up three flights of stairs to our own front door.  The key is a regular castle key.  Once inside the apartment is functional and nice:  an entry, a bathroom to the left, a living room straight ahead, a bedroom ahead and a little to the right, and a kitchen to the right.  The living room has a nice little balcony where we can sit and enjoy the sun and the fresh air.  There is also a planter to hang on the railing, but I have found no plants to put in it.  (I will keep looking!)  The floors are all bare, in the typically Swedish fashion — either oak flooring or tile with area rugs scattered here and there.  All the rooms have big windows that open to the fresh air (no screens, but suprizingly few flies.)  There is no laundry room.  The bathroom is strange.  There is no shower stall or tub.  The far end of the room is cordoned off with the shower curtain and there is a drain in the floor about as big as a saucer.  Amazingly, the water doesn’t splash all over at all — it flows down the drain and stays behind the curtain. It took a lot of getting used to!

All the apartments in our part of the building share one laundry that is in the basement.  A special key gets us through all the doors to the laundry room.

Our apartment door

The typically Swedish bathroom

Kitchen

There is a board on the wall beside the door where one signs up for a three hour block in which to do the washing.  There are two washers and two driers, one normal and one that is a big closet with bars where you hang things that you don’t want to tumble dry.  None of the appliances requires any money.  Next door to the laundry room is a “mangling room.”  I didn’t recognize any of the machines in this room.  When questioning some of the young adults here at the center about a “mangling room”  they assured me it was for ironing clothes.  It contains a huge thing with rollers that apparently rolls items like table clothes and pillow cases and trousers to stretch and smooth them.  When I explained what mangling means in English, they understood my confusion.

We already consider Kondesorgatan 23, apt. 3021 as home and love to get there at the end of the day.

Around us are many more apartment buildings.  Each morning we go for a walk passed them all.  The outsides are different colors but they are all the same height and about the same style.  There could be as many as 2000 apartments in them!  The walk takes us about 20 minutes so it must be about 1 mile.  The Swedish people love nature and each building has flowers and grass and a minimum of pavement.  (When they mow the grass, they do not mow anyplace where flowers are growing in the lawn — even if the flowers are dandelions!)  And any rocks that are naturally in the landscape (we are talking big rocks.  Apparently the whole country is a giant rock island with soil on top.) are just left there.  One building that we pass each morning has imported a few fake rocks that are molded to look like sleeping ducks!  They are about 4 feet long and 2 1/2 to 3 feet tall and very interesting.

Our place is very conveniently located.  The access to the road we take to the center is just at the end of our complex and there is a large mall and grocery store just a kilometer in the other direction.  We can finally get to either place (center or stores) without our liahona.  Our community is actually called Vastra Frolunda, with two dots above the first a.  (West Frolunda)  But Goteborg is very much like Salt Lake with all the little communities around it having their own names but still being referred to as Salt Lake.

Our stake is probably as big as Utah County, with 7 wards and 2 branches.  Our ward building isn’t far from our apartment.  It takes about 5 minutes driving through residential streets that are windy and just about one car wide.  Everyone is amazed that little Genola with 1100 residents has 3 wards.  Well over 1,000,000 people live in the Goteborg stake.

Hope this gives you a small picture of where we live and what this place is like.  Next time — the center!

Bedroom with desk and bed