Kotomi, Sparris and some other guests

This Monday I went to pick up Kotomi at the train station. She is a friend from Japan that's currently visiting me and some of her other friends in Sweden. After spending some days in the small and very rural town of Mora she came to the even smaller town Töreboda to stay at our house. In other words, the last days have been sightseeing and sightseeing only. It's very difficult to find things to do in this country that might be interesting for Japanese people. Especially when it's raining all the time. At Tuesday morning it was grey and rainy so we didn't want to go to the summer house or do some other outdoor activity. Instead we went to Mariestad with my cousin Per and my friend Lisa to eat the best hovers in the world. We also tried to look around a little in the city centre of Mariestad. Thinking about that town, everything but interesting sightseeing places for tourists comes to mind so it was really difficult to find a good place to go to. But we started out with the old church and the older parts of town, which are really neat if you just look at them with a different perspective. Something that's nice about Mariestad is also that it's situated just by the shore of the lake Vänern. A town always looks nicer when there's ocean or a lake in the hood. This day though, it was rainy and you couldn't really see the horizon because of all the fog. At Tuesday evening the weather got much better and we went to Storön (again). We managed to watch the sunset and also have traditional Swedish dinner with smoked salmon, potatoes and nice sauce. It was windy and the waves were quite fierce, but I bathed anyway. It was extremely cold and I almost died. But it was refreshing. I didn't know what Kotomi was going to think about our half finished summer house in the middle of nowhere, but she totally liked it. She was almost as fascinated by the night sky with all the stars that you can see at home. In Tokyo I could sometimes see one or two stars. But maybe they were just airplanes.

Today we went to Gothenburg. Despite heavy rain we managed to have a nice time with good coffee and lunch. We also spent some hours in H&M and Kotomi went crazy buying loads of stuff to bring home to Tokyo. I bought a white top. That's how interesting I am. When we got back to Töreboda, somewhat soaked and tired, two little guests had come to our house; my oldest sister's boyfriend Jacob and their cat Sparris. Sparris is a little cute cat lady with big round eyes. She's shy and maybe a bit uncomfortable here since our cat, Putti Putti tries to start fights with her all the time. Well, at least she can, like Kotomi, enjoy some country side life and have some vacation from the busy big city.