Waking up to the smell of bacon and scrambled eggs this morning, we had a big American breakfeast with the addition of Swedish sour milk and cereals. Soon after the meal was finished, the grey skies outside the window started to release their payload in form of snow. White, wonderful snow in masses. The first real winter sign of the season was finally here.

The last few months, Sweden has been really warm and green. Usually the thermometer is below zero degrees Celsius between November and March, but we have only had boring rain and high temperatures. Snow was a dream I didn’t even dare do hope for, perhaps global warming had begun to show the signs already?

Well, finally the moment of winter came and after briefly visiting the A6 shopping mall outside Jönköping we had “fika” (sort-of-coffeebreak in Swedish). The snow was still falling heavily and had built up a coat of a few centimeters over the town, so we decided to finally go out and have a real snowball war. Rachel and Greg, my two Californian friends, have practically never seen snow before, let alone had a snowball war, so we had a lot of fun “dressing up” for the fight. Annette borrowed us some good snow gear, and we ran out the door to the backyard.

The concentration of snow in the air increased for about a half an hour, while snowballs were flying all over, but everybody got exhausted quickly of all the “fighting”. We had a really good time and everybody got their share of the icecream from heaven.

The afternoon ended with chicken stew w/ rice followed by Starsky & Hutch (the movie). We also found two airzookas in the house, all it takes then are a few twenty-year-olds and the Schneeballschlacht continued using air.