Hey!

At least that's what the swedes say instead of hello! I am typing at the hotel and I can honestly say this keyboard is definitely different from the USA.
< comes up where our shift key is, there is also: ö ä ¨¤ å in strange places, so it is taking me longer than usual to type.
We finally made it here 3 pm Tuesday. The Virgin Atlantic flight was äwesome. Each seat had it's own video monitor with movies, music, games and t.v. shows. Needless to say the boys were busy for half the time playing and watching. I passed out thanks to two cocktails (free) and a xanax.
When we arrived in Gothenburg we looked around expectantly for our driver to take us to Trollhatten which is about an hour away. To our surprise there was no one with a Saab sign- lots of Volvo customers- but no one for us!
Jacob made a grand entrance into Europe by knocking down a large metal garbage can on the marble floor- it echoed as the people around us stared. I pretended not to know him.
Thank God Jack activated out phones for international calls, because after 20 minutes of calling and even having another driver of the taxi company call, it appeared no one was even close to coming to pick us up. The information desk at the airport finally reached a hotel in the city that we were unknowingly transferred to- hmmmm- and the lady in charge at Saab is on holiday this week!
Bleary-eyed and exhausted we finally got to the Hotel Eggers- it's the oldest hotel in the city and is smack-dab in the center of everything.
Dinner was included with our package so we didn't have to make a choice as to where to eat. The menu was very small and the waiter informed us of what we would be having- I guess that dinner didn't include whatever we wanted.
We ended up eating shrimp on toast- it had green mayonnaise on it and a hard-boiled egg. The main course was something called seawolf- a fish with mustard potatoes and a piece of something like beef jerky. Very strange!
The boys ate a potato pancake with bacon on it served with berries all around. The bread was good- and came with caviar butter. John and Jacob didn't find out until the next morning what caviar actually was- their faces were very amusing once I told them it was fish eggs!

June 14, 2006

I will tell you what happened today- but might need to break since Jack is coming downstairs with the boys any minute.
We had an awesome breakfast with everything and anything you can imagine on a buffet- pickled herring and pickles included. Jack went for the salami and brie cheese on bread. The boys ate a new favorite: yogurt and granola.
Our driver to take us to the Saab dealer was there on time- that was good- because things went bad very quickly once we got to the car place.
A salesman brought us to a backroom that had six Saabs parked there- one had a cover on it. He ceremoniously pulled the fabric off and there was the car Jack has obsessed about for nine months.
As Nicholas showed off how the roof retracts and he pointed out what the features were Jack made the discovery that Saab had forgotten to install a GPS system in the car. This was something he really wanted- and was not a cheap accessory either. Nicholas looked stumped. Paperwork was checked and double checked. It appeared that Saab did something that has never happened: MADE A HUGE MISTAKE! I've never seen anyone looked so puzzled as that salesman. Jack asked him what the procedure was when this happened- he didn't know the answer- he just replied that it has never happened. Unless this is standard reply for Swedes- he was really perplexed. He left to make phone calls as we sat around in the new car waiting for something to happen. The car is actually made in Austria, so it's not like they could send it back. Although they have 1600 cars on the lot there in Trolhatten, we have to take the one with our vin #. Things were looking pretty grim. The part would have to be ordered and the mechanic spent about 20 minutes looking at the car to figure out if it could be installed here. Nicolas called Saab and to order a whole new rebuilt car would take until September. We were all pretty annoyed at this point. Nicholas gave us another choice: take a rental with no GPS or take our car with no GPS- we didn't like either choice. Driving around here is intense, and not to have the GPS would require a lot of navigating by me and yelling by Jack- at me when I screw up. I will tell you the rest later. John says hi and he loves you.

Lisa

P.S. Mary Jo you will be happy to know that your Ferragamo flats you gave me a couple years ago have been stylishly hitting the cobblestones, and the duty-free shop in the airport has a big Jo Malone store.
Lauras: There is a department store here called Laura. There are big signs on all the bus stops.