Swedish Bethel and the Infamous Surströmming

A Bethel trip is always a memorable and worthwhile experience, and since we were only an hour from the Swedish “House of God” we had to go. Zoltan entrusted us with his car and GPS, and off we went. We arrived around 10:00, and just caught an English tour departing. (In our group touring there was a couple from Germany, a couple from Demark, and us from America. The only common language we had between all of us and the Swedish guide was English. I thought that was neat to have friends from different areas touring together. –Eric) First stop was the tiny dining room, with seats for 100. We then saw the Recording Studio, where the one of the fall issues was being read. We met Berit’s niece there, who was in charge of making sure every word was correct. (When we were in the room and they said we were from America the sister asked if either of us were Tracey’s boy, slightly surprised I said yes I was. Then she said how she and my mom used to be pen pals some years ago. Small world huh? –Eric) They then showed us the translation department, the main function of this Bethel, where 20 Bethelites work in teams of 3 to accurately translate the information from English to Svenska. We also got to see the old printery(all is done in Germany now), the Ministerial Training School, and the Shipping department. We saw a map of the delivery route, and our tour guide Peter said that every couple months he gets the assignment to drive the north route, which takes him about 5 days to complete, staying with brothers and sisters along the way. Finally at the end we got tea and cookies and found my families names in the guestbook from a few years ago. We went back home and had some superb ham sandwiches and leftover pizza for lunch(the bachelor lifestyle is a perfect fit for us:) We were supposed to go on a bible study with Zoltan, but the person was sick so we just relaxed in the afternoon. We had dinner with a few friends in the evening, which was an interesting meal to say the least. First we opened a can of Surstromming, fermented herring, which has a distinctive odor which I’m sure Eric would love to tell you about. (Actually the smell was that bad. It definitely doesn’t smell good but I’ve smelled worse things in my life. A bullet wound though the large intestines is a shocking smell. –Eric)<--Yes I agree it actually wasn't too bad, last years was much worse for some reason, if you're curious that can be found here. We ate a little of it while sampling about 6 different Swedish beers. This was followed by traditional herring and new potatoes, and the main course of steak, chicken, and shish kabob. (Guess who got to grill…. Me! Yay! –Eric) We went back home to pack once again, for there was other adventure in the morning.