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Life Through A Lens

Wednesday, April 3, 2013

Passing Over and About

This holiday I have been at a number of different places, experiencing a number of different things. From family feasts to hysterical expats, here is a short review of my past week.
Easter itself I spent with my grandmother and my uncle and aunt and their two little kids. With my parents and siblings currently in Africa it is good to have relatives that are only a days travel away. It also being my grandmother's birthday it was a perfect time to head up and celebrate it all together. Always nice to catch up on Swedish happenings and vocab and eat well with my uncle and aunt, and listen to old missionary tales from my grandmother. Of course it was lovely to see two of my smallest cousins as well. The amount of energy that can be kept within two little human creatures is indeed amazing, and there was never a dull moment with them in the mix. Reminded me a bit of how it was back in the day taking care of my two younger siblings, except that my siblings were about twice as crazy and wild when they were that age, which made things much easier this time around. Still love you guys, I learned loads of patience from you two Jennifer and Joel  =)
Cousin bonding time

Flying back to Warsaw after my time in Sweden I bumped into a fellow classmate taking the same route, and we were both just as taken back by the snow chaos that welcomed us in Poland. One should never experience more snow on the destination than the origin when flying out of Sweden of all places. It is April now, mind, enough of this snow already! 
Making my way through a snowy Warsaw I arrived at my B&B to find it closed and all the lights switched off. Marvelous. Fortunately this is the capital of Poland, and not Bethlehem, so there was lodging for a weary traveler elsewhere (perhaps wrong season for that reference). 
In the morning I went to the embassy of Sweden to pick up my new passport. It is not that grand of a place as one might imagine. It is very Swedish though, I'll give it that, reminded me of the old church house (missionshuset) in my little village of Hagafors, at least on the inside, maybe not so much on the outside. 
Hagafors Missionshus

As I was waiting for them to get my passport ready, an elderly man stepped in, and started conversing with the receptionist. What caught my attention was that he spoke his English with a distinct South African accent, but was still reasonably fluent in both Swedish and Polish. Naturally this multi-ethnicity was bound to have a great story behind it, and being the curious person that I am I was meaning to ask him about it. Good thing I didn't, because what happened next was something I've never witnessed before. He was struggling with the forms, not getting anywhere. He started getting really annoyed at the receptionist as well, and made a lot of noise. I was still sitting there at the back, feeling very uneasy at having to witness this increasingly awkward situation. His frustration eventually turned into a full blown nervous breakdown and the old gentleman almost started weeping and was very distraught. There is nothing quite as socially awkward as a grown man crying and making a scene about having to fill out forms, nothing at all. Eventually he managed to collect himself and settle down, and everybody could continue on with their now slightly scarred lives. In the end, he came back and apologized to the lady, explaining he was suffering from some sort of memory loss which made filling out such forms quite the ordeal. All I could think of was I wish I had some sort of disease that would delete that particular recent memory. Perhaps a distasteful thought given he might actually have been telling the truth. As such, his potentially exciting background story was replaced with a rather unwanted experience. 
Oh well, I guess one can't always win.

Cheerio.