Foong visit Sweden

More and more foreign tourists choose to travel to Sweden. It’s beautiful, it’s clean, it’s safe and in the summer it is daylight 24 hours a day! Picturesque about some of our red cottages with white knots and many are fascinated by our beautiful nature. It’s easy to get home blind and we Swedes probably do not understand how nice we live. Sweden is amazing and has so much to offer. Around midsummer is very popular to eat herring and potato and some insist  eating sour fish that stinks. Others take on hilarious hats and shout silly songs when they are sipping on boiled crawfish.

With gentle paddles they move slowly over the calm water. They are a little uncomfortable, may bee difficult with the coordination in the beginning, but after a while it’s going to be really good. In spite of life jackets, our Asian friends seem to be a little tense, certainly with an uneasiness for the risk of capsize and falling in to the water. In Kuala Lumpur it is a long distance for water to paddle kayak and kayaking is not a common activity in the town. The air in Sweden is fresh, we are in the early summer, birdsong and here is almost blue skies. Our friends enjoy the taste of Swedish nature.

We slide slowly on the calm water through the Schedevi canal between the lakes Åsunden and Ämmern.

Little bit later, we enjoy our homemade picnic in the green grass, while we look over the mirror-blue water.

-”You have a high standard of living in Sweden”, says Foong

He told us with great irritation about the ongoing corruption scandal in Malaysia. The newly appointed prime minister, Najib Razak, has systematically robbed the population for many years. For the money, about 3.2 billion dollars, he should have, among other things, bought luxury apartments in Manhattan, New York, Picasso paintings, yachts and in addition bought a huge collection of jewels to his wife. On his private account was over $ 680 million. In his home, 284 boxes of money and jewels have been found.

We paddle back to the starting point and change paddles to bikes. We bicycle through smaller asphalt roads through our countryside to a small farm shop in Valla village. The farm shop is always open, year-round, because it is self-service with mobile or cash payment in a open box. Yean thinks it’s a little strange with self-service and with money that are visible. Here you can find vegetables and miscellaneous flowers after season.

We taste locally produced cheese cake and ”kalvdans” served with cream and jam.

It’s a lovely summer weather and it’s a enjoyable bike ride, one of the longest that Yean has performed in her life. Outdoor life gives a little bit of pain in the muscles both here and there, but exercise is good for the health. In the evening served barbeque on the veranda  and of course according to the swedisch tradition with both crawfish and  herring.  We take swedish snapps and shout together ”skål” and ”Jamsiiiiiiing”.

We all hope that both Foong and Yean have had a memorable experience in Sweden.

Foong and Yean live in Malaysia, we met them randomly on one of our travels, in a homestay in the Mekong delta in Vietnam, in December 2008. One year later we visited them. They welcomed us with a great hospitality in their house located in an outskirts of Kuala Lumpur. During some intense days we were guided by Foong with various sights and we met some of their friends.

Now nine years later we have the family Foong in Sweden. Really fun that they are here and together with Christoffer, Lovisa, Martin and Maria, who also visited the Foong family in Kuala Lumpur, it is a great honor for us to show a bit of Sweden. With a joint planning, it became a full program for our friends from Kuala Lumpur. A few days in the royal Swedish capital, visit to Trosa and Söderköping. (Smultronstället). A couple of intense days in scenic Kinda countryside and ending in Linköping. Then bus to Stockholm and flight to London, after four days i UK back home to Kuala Lumpur.

Hope to see you soon again family Foong and thank you for the deliciously fried anchovy.