Whodunnit

Well, survived another birthday intact. Pretty quiet affair, really. My brother in law and mother in law arrived round for eftermiddagens (afternoon) fika. Fika is a strange word. It literally means coffee break. But it tends to apply to any type of morning tea, afternoon tea, snack, brunch, or nibble. Any type of food intake that is not covered by breakfast, lunch, or dinner. It includes coffe, of course. And Swedes all appear to drink only black coffee. I don't know, maybe milk is an English thing. But it doesn't stop at coffee. On no. Nope, a fika break always includes several varieties of sweet cakes, bicsuits, buns, and breads. At this point it has progressed way past the point of snack. It's now an officially sanctioned meal. A good rule of thumb is, if you get wind that there may be a fika coming up, starve yourself for several days prior to the event. That night we went out for the evening. Just the 2 of us. which was nice. With work, commuting, language school and horses, we never seem to have a lot of time together apart from collapsing in front of the tv at the end of the day. So it was nice to be almost semi normal as a couple. There's a strange place just outside of our town. Officially it's a Wild West theme park. As one would expect to find in Sweden. Sweden is the home of dansband, so why not. Anyway, they have a large saloon type hall which they use for concerts, shows, corporate dinners, etc. On Saturday night it was a combined dinner and theatre evening. I've always loved live theatre, and Swedes are so enthusiastic actors. Not a lot of Oscars to be won, but they do give it their all. The show itself was a "murder/mystery" evening, played by an acting group touring from the south of Sweden. Just the 5 of them, and one lot of scenery. They played out the performance in 5 parts, stopping for 15 minutes between each part to allow for the next course of dinner to be served. During the break prior to the final act, every member of the audience was given a piece of paper and a pencil, and asked to guess who was the murderer. The true identity was revealed during the gripping final act. All rather exciting. I was really impressed with myself in that I was able to pretty much follow what was going on. Not every word, but enough to comprehend what was being said and what the significance of it was. Well enought to even have an idea about which one of the five actors was the dirty rotten evil scoundrel. Which amazed me. I think it was largely due to it being live theatre. Because actors in theatre performances tend to be a bit over the top with actions, and tend to be quite definite and crisp with the words, it was a lot easy to follow in Swedish than normal conversation. So there's a tip for all fellow new players out there. Go to a Swedish live theatre performance. Just sit there watching and listening for a couple of hours. Between over the top body actions and the slow booming dialogue, you might almost make sense out of it. It's certainly easier than trying to listen to the half dead news presenters on television.