Your guests arrive. You pick them up from the train station. It’s lunchtime, so both you and they are starving. Anikó Mészáros shows what (not) to feed them.
– What do you want to eat?
– Something typically Swedish.
Yeah, this is the answer you didn’t want to hear. You’ve been living here for sooo long that you’re not interested in Swedish food any more at all. Well, OK, they are your guests so let’s eat something Swedish – in a way that’s good for you as well. And the 4-day-long deception starts.
Day 1
First you go to ICA together. As your guests are in a new country with a lot of unfamiliar things on the shelves, they want to try most of them. Moreover they are still hungry, so at the end you do enough shopping for a week. The only thing you have to do now is to go home, put everything on the table and let the guests feast. Moose sandwich, jam made of some special berries, fish from a tube… meanwhile you can eat your regular meals, they won’t recognize that you’re cheating.
Day 2
Probably you do sightseeing the whole day. Probably you have school in the morning and they do sightseeing meanwhile. Probably when you finally meet and you ask them about their lunch plans, they will say they already had lunch at McDonalds. With the reason to compare the prices with the ones at home, you know.
Now for dinner, how to avoid meatballs? Try the flatmate trick! Organize a big dinner – as usual – and cook something typical – typical for another country, to show how multicultural you live. Or you can make a game of it: ask the people in the room what they would do with each ingredient – and do it. This game has surprisingly delicious results! Play it with “Swedish ingredients” (fish or shrimps for example) and it will immediately become a Swedish dinner. Not for a Swede, but for your guests sure!
Day 3
Again, you do sightseeing the whole day, but now you do it together. When everybody is already frozen, let’s say, in Helsingor, you go to a bakery for a hot chocolate and for some sweets. That’s how the best meal they will remember from their Swedish trip is “that Danish cake”.
At the end, when your guests do the souvenir shopping, pay attention. It will turn out that after three days they know things better than you did after half a year…
