Boxes from Leuven

Besides a little suitcase all my belongings are now already in Sweden. If I understood well somewhere in Helsingborg in a storage. Tomorrow I will take the airplane and on Tuesday it all will enter the farm.

I prepared the moving for 2 weeks. I had to pack the unbreakable things. The movers would pack the breakable things. Last Thursday somewhat over 8 the local movers came in. They started packing in an efficient way. At 12 all was packed.

Around 11 the Swedish truck with 1 driver came in. 

Att 12 I offered all of them a real Belgian frit (met een boulette, een curryworst en een viandelle). After lunch they started loading the truck. Impressive how they stowed it. And it turned out really to be around 30 m³. 

Loading the big aquarium. 

The truck is loaded.

At 3 o'clock they were gone and left a dirty empty house behind. 

On Saturday my youngest sister helped cleaning so now it's perfectly clean to receive the next renters, a sympathetic young couple. 

The first animal arrives

This Thursday Candy moved in. She is a 6 months old Rex rabbit, that will live in the stables next to one of the horses. It went so quick - from that we learnt that she was for sale (Tuesday) until she arrived (Thursday) so the last few days I have spent a lot of time on the web trying to figure out how to best take care of such an animal.

I have learnt that at least 80% of the food need to be hay, and they should not eat a lot of sweet things (like carrots and apples - only as a treat). Dark green stuff can be ok (like parsley or broccoli) - but not too much of anything. They should always feel hungry it said on one information site (poor things!) because that is what they are in the wild.

Since the children are away I will be the person to take care of her the first few days, which is a bit scary, since I do not really know rabbits that well. But this morning I felt confident I knew what to do. Rabbits want to use their teeth, so some  sticks and twigs from the garden could be a great way to entertain Candy maybe.

I went out in the horrendous weather. It was one of those mornings where the sky has fallen down to earth, and the wind is totally horizonal and the clouds cannot make up their minds about whether they should snow or just rain or send icy spikes on all humans they see...

But nothing could stop me. I went to the garden shed to get some good tools for cutting off medium size twigs, and then it was just to start. It was now I suddenly realized that I was not totally sure of which tree was the apple tree... But after some serious investigations I think I found one. The most important, I had learnt from my online readings, was to avoid cherry trees and plum trees.

Very proud I went to the stables with my collections of twigs. But, of corse, once I introduced them to Candy she just could not care less. She looked at me like "Who do you Think I am. A simple rabbit eating twigs?" Instead (or maybe because she had already smelt it) she quickly came close and tried to open my other hand, where I had the two small carrots for the horses... Smart rabbit! Poor horses... (But they did get some carrots too!)

 

 

Candy playing hide and seek with a box  early Saturday morning.

A sunny day

Now we are almost all in place. Just waiting for Johan who will come on the 22 of February. The children came last Friday and we have now slept 3 nights in the house. One of them said - It is like being on holiday! 

Well, a very different holiday - including the usual things on a farm. On Saturday we had a great morning, that changed into a struggle to find out how to restart the heatingdevice (värmepannan) and the water pump. Thanks to the very kind assistance on phone from the former owners we had water again by 14 in the day. So now I have learnt a lot about pumps and electricity. (Mind you - there is still a lot to learn!)

But today it has been fantastic! Unpacking boxes, baking bread rolls (bullar). The owen  here is really good! Just some images from this afternoon below:

Some Fika in the afternoon - homemade bullar with raspberry jam!

A beautiful day with a lot of sun and play outside

Detail of moss on one of the trees.

Found a big plant of thyme in the garden!

excavations

Uppåkra is one of the oldest settlements of Sweden. The remnants of the settlements are dated from 100 BC till 1000 AD (written on the billboards at the backside of the church).

I just have found an interesting link. There is a blog from the excavations in our neighbourhood. Fun to read about it. Or for the non-Swedish speaking ones, look to the pictures. Pity it was only active in 2009. 

the link: http://blogg.sydsvenskan.se/uppakra/ 

But you have to skip the first 2 or 3 frameworks. 

The excavations are just a few hundred meter from us (around the church).

There was even a minister (former minister of culture Lena Adelsohn Liljeroth) visiting the place. I put a picture on our blog taken from their blog. Just take a look there as there are a lot of nice and fun pictures. 

the drink on the website of the flemish government

I just got an e-mail from a colleague. He linked me to the website where there was a picture from the drink. Good picture to remember nice colleagues! 

You find it here: http://13.vlaanderen.be/bedankt/veel-geluk-zweden