More fun.

I was doing something online and a thing came up which reminded me of Sweden. So I Google Mapped some places I lived, whose addresses I could still remember, two of my favorites, actually. Brought back memories. I probably did this already here, but since I'm getting older and repeat myself and I'm getting older and repeat myself it would be rude to interrupt me or to interrupt me.
My apartment on Happiness Way in Kristianstad, Sweden. Our bedroom/living room/family room/den/everything is the bottom right window. The kitchen is next to it. The toilet was in a small closet in the "front hall". There used to be a tree in front of the window where the crows all gathered before sunset to caw when it came up at 3 am in the summer. There is no A/C in the building and no screens on the windows. You just open the windows and let the skeeters in. To silence the crows, Elder Bennion kept a pile of stones on the sill and when they started in, he'd grab a stone and throw it into the tree. The crows would scatter for about ten minutes. It was like our snooze button.

Sweden provides an apartment and free booze and a little food to alcoholics who can't or won't work. They lived in the rooms across the hall. Every day they would complain that we smelled like soap since we showered every day and they had a nurse come in and give them a sponge bath about once a week. Trust me, soap smells better than week old urine and body odor, and a life time of cigs and booze. They said it was unhealthy to bathe as much as we did...

The nursing students upstairs bathed much more often, which was a problem. The shower was a shared one in the basement. That window is not glazed. It did have a little dirty curtain over it, at least. Moldy, actually. The shower was an ancient porcelain bathtub covered in moss, with a wooden crate in it to stand on. The shower head was in the wall above it. You had to wear flip flops down there or risk being dragged into the underworld by demons with tentacles.

The only time we were allowed to be alone, of course, was for bathroom duties, including showering. It would not look good for us to head to the shower together. So we went one at a time, praying that one of the nurses would not be there, too. If we heard the shower going, we came back up and waited 15 minutes. But a few times, you'd go down there, no shower sound, good, and then all of a sudden one of them would exit the shower room in a towel. "Hi!" she'd say with a smile, and "hi" we'd gulp.

Weird apartment.

My apartment on Bell Tower Street in Kalmar Sweden. We had one small window in the kitchen on the far left (back side) of this building, which you can't see. The front door of the building is bottom center. This street had no bell tower. It's literally "clockhouse" but there was no clock house, either. Mainly just Greeks, Serbs, Maltans, Croatians, Turks, and two Americans. Mostly likely, the only two legal residents are us.

We had tracted out nearly every apartment on the street, and nobody spoke English or Swedish. I got there in September, when the trees were still green and left the following June. By then I had tracted out every single apartment and house in town. I had people recognize me from the previous fall, and so they yelled at me twice by name.

That white line is where the snow came to in one night on January 3, 1979. Three to four feet in about 8 hours. I remember going to bed at 10:30 pm with less than an inch on the ground and a few flakes falling. I woke up at about 1 am to use the bathroom and it seemed bright out. I looked out the window and there was nearly a foot on the ground. Oh, crap. We were a bike area, no bus passes. I could tell we'd have to buy bus passes, which meant less food. Or at least wiping out our snack budget.

When I got up at 6:00 am, it looked like this:

We had so much snow, we could not get the front door of the building open. We pushed and almost broke the hinges. Other residents came and tried, too. No luck. We all waited a day for the maintenance people to shovel their way to us. They must sleep with snow shovels. I never did find out how they got out, themselves.

When we got out, there were only pathways between buildings and then some desperate people had trudged down a path to the little store beneath us, to buy cigs and booze. (The poor souls who had jobs and could not get them free.)

After about three days, there was enough space to get out and tract in our neighborhood. We got in every door, despite the lack of a common language. The kids all spoke Swedish and were learning English, but we had no Book of Mormons in Serbo-Croatian, Greek, Turkish, or anything besides Swedish and Finnish. We would teach the ten year olds and they would try and translate things like "atonement" and "pre-existence" in their native language to their parents. Needless to say, we ate a lot more than we taught. But the kids and their parents learned that the Mormons were pretty cool. At least, WE thought that.

Once, when the snow had finally melted down to about 2.5 feet and the street was semi-open, we went out and heard the following conversation between the ten year old southern European boys:

"So...what do you want to do?"

"How about playing football?"

"We can't. Look at the snow."

"Oh, yeah. So...what do YOU want to do?"

"I dunno. I guess we can't play until April."

We looked at each other and simultaneously started making snowballs and putting them in a pile and then building a snow fort wall for protection.

When we had about a hundred balls, we threw them rapid fire at the boys. They were at first scared and then mad, and then this giant light bulb went on over their heads. One yelled to get behind the cars. The World's Best Ever Neverending Snowball Fight Commenced.

From then until the first week of April when the snow finally all melted, we had to exit the building and look around for the little monsters.

The white is about what got covered by the snow.