Getting to Stockholm was totally painless. Getting to Sikeå (which is the name of where I am, not Robertsfors as previously thought) was...not totally painless.
My flight got into Stockholm at 8pm, and then I needed to take a bus to Umeå, which left at 9:45pm and arrived in Umeå eight hours later at 6am. After which I needed to take another bus to Sikeå, which left at 8am. Aside from not sleeping at all, the first bus ride wasn't so bad.
There was one point where it almost became much worse, when I awoke from a half-sleep to find a handful of people getting off the bus for what I thought was a gas/food/smoke/pee break, so I followed them off the bus. After ten seconds of standing outside, the bus at my back, just kind of waking up and admiring how in-the-middle-of-nowhere we were, trying to figure out where the gas/food mart was...the bus started to drive away. Was he re-parking the bus? my mind tried to compute. No, he was heading for the exit. Ehhhh.....dude?
So I ran across the parking lot and managed to flag him down, and got back on (we exchanged no words), and from that point on managed to be slightly more thankful to be sitting upright and awake in the almost-dark at 3:30 in the morning surrounded by dozing Swedes.
+++
Upon arrival in Sikeå, things improved dramatically. I'm staying with Anna and her mom, in their extremely attractive and spacious house that their family has lived in for the last 20 years or so. Of course there was Swedish breakfast, featuring the standard cast of 15 or 20 characters (among them, knäckebröd and caviar in a tube):
And there were some new friends as well: homemade gravad lax, which I was nominated to slice since Anna's brother Gustav was sleeping. I didn't do too badly, but only managed to take a photo of the scraps.
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