This is a summer post, I thought you might enjoy during these long, dark days of winter.
I’d have to date this post, from my old blog Svengelska Hemskolan, to around 2006 when for a year or so we joined the local Swedish cultural and language school (in Milton Keynes) for bilingual kids on a Saturday morning.
Svenska skolan has finished up for the summer now, and by all accounts, it seems that most of our Swedish friends have somehow wangled enough holiday to spend the whole summer in Sverige!
When we lived in Stockholm we were amazed by the amount of shops which closed up completely for the summer, content to lose any potential tourist business, while their owners spent the summer in their sommarstugor in the Skärgården, or abroad. That would be completely unheard of in the UK! Of course there is no direct translation of sommarstängt in English because we don’t do it (close for the summer), as far as I know!
The most disappointing implication of the sommarstängt culture was that, when we spent the summer on Lidingö, we found that our local library was sommarstängt the whole summer, which meant we had to take long bus trips to the main library in Lidingö town. No great hardship, I grant you, but irritating nonetheless!
Perhaps it all boils down to jealousy? I rather fancy taking a couple of months off myself. I’d probably have to take the children along though. Hmm. Not much point really, might as well stay put.
Vocabulary:
Svenska – Swedish
Skola – School, definitive (the) school = skolan
Sverige – Sweden
Sommarstugor (plural of sommarstuga) – holiday cabins
Skärgåden – the Swedish Archipelago
Lidingö – a beautiful island just outside Stockholm, where we lived the second summer of our year and a bit in Sweden
Sommarstängt- Closed for the Summer
p.s. This edited archive post is part of my commitment to write 50,000 words in November for NaNoWriMo (normally reserved for novel writing)!
Little Bears Home Education 