At the end of last year, I started teaching my kids (and myself) about my Swedish heritage. When I was growing up, I didn’t know many details about my Swedish heritage (besides that my grandma’s parents had emigrated from Sweden) but over the past several months of learning about my ancestors, a dream grew inside of me to go to Sweden and experience things for myself.
And that dream came true! We just got back a couple weeks ago from an amazing trip to Sweden (and a bit of Denmark). I’ll be sharing all the details here over the next few (or a million?) posts. 🙂
Here is my journal entry from the first day of our trip!
Our first flight was about 3 hours long… from Salt Lake to Chicago. Then we had a pretty quick layover in Chicago before heading to Copenhagen. Our flight to Copenhagen was about 8 hours. I slept for maybe half of that time since it was the middle of the night by then (according to my body’s clock.) Scandinavia is 8 hours ahead of Utah, so when we landed in Copenhagen, it was about 1:30 pm.
We got off the plane, went through customs, exchanged some money, and then rode the shuttle to the car rental place. Luckily getting the rental car this time was MUCH faster than getting the car when we went to Iceland.
We got the car and still had about 2 hours before my parents were gonna land so we decided to drive around and see some of Copenhagen.
There were so many people riding bikes everywhere. It was fun to drive down the streets and see all of the cool architecture and such.
We found a park and got out and got out and walked around for a while. In this park we saw a really cool windmill and some neat older buildings.
After the park, it was time to pick up my parents from the airport. When we finally got in contact with them, we found out that my mom’s luggage was missing. It would have to be dropped off at our Airbnb. Lame. But not the end of the world.
After picking up my parents, we crossed the boarder into Sweden and drove about an hour to Lund. Lund University is where Swen went to college. Apparently it is a pretty famous and prestigious university and is consistently in the top 100 universities in the world.
We drove around the university for a few minutes, trying to find the main, iconic, white building, but couldn’t find it. … so we decided to get some dinner instead since we were all hungry.
We wanted to start off this trip by getting some Swedish food, but there weren’t many eating options near by. We saw a little pizza place and figured we would try out Swedish style pizza (my friend heather, who served her mission in Sweden, told me we should get pizza since it’s different in Sweden.) so that’s what we got. I didn’t really know exactly what I was ordering because the menu was in Swedish, but I ended up getting a pizza with tuna on top. Not my favorite, but not bad. Jershon’s had French fries on it. Haha. They also gave us this cabbage salad stuff to put on top of the pizza.
While we were sitting there eating, I felt so tired. The jet lag was catching up to me.
After dinner, we decided to go try to find that main white building one more time. Luckily we were able to find it this time and we ended up spending a little while walking around the main area of the university. It was so neat to be there and think about Swen and how he accomplished his dream to attend college… even though the odds were stacked against him. More of that story here.
Lund University is a prestigious university and one of northern Europe’s oldest, broadest, and finest universities. It was established in 1666 and is consistently ranked among the world’s top 100 universities.
Knowing these facts about the university makes it all the more impressive to me that Swen was able to get accepted and do really well since he didn’t come from a well educated or well funded background.
Lund University is such a beautiful campus. I loved the historic buildings and all of the architectural details.
After Lund, we drove about another 45 minutes or so to our first Airbnb. It was dark by the time we got here, but we still found it. I am excited to see what it actually looks like in the morning. It’s cute on the inside though. Definitely Scandinavian style.
