After visiting Denmark for four days, our group headed north through “Viking County” toward Frederickshavn, where we boarded a ferry for a three-hour trip across the North Sea to Gothenburg, the seaport on the southwest side of Sweden.

 

It didn’t take us long to meet one of the new faces of Sweden. She wasn’t blond nor blue-eyed, as you’d much expect with the homelanders.

 

Sitting next to us on the ferry was Dorin Samana, her six-month-old daughter, Angelina in her arms.

 

Dorin, like her four siblings, had been born in war-torn Mosul, Iraq, but escaped in 1993 with their parents, a hairdressser and maintenance man, to Sweden.

 

There, a good life awaited them. The parents were able to secure work and raise Dorin and her siblings She grew up, went to college and secured an architecture degree. Her husband, Martin, a fellow Iraqui,  worked as an engineer. Married for a few years, they waited until age 30 to have their first child.

 

“More?” she asked, regarding children in response to my question. She smiled, “Maybe.”

 

Life for these refugees has become very good, like many their welcoming government sees to each year.

 

“Is it true your government rents out second homes from their owners and turns around and rents them to Middle Easterners?” I asked.

 

“Yes,” she responded. 

 

She reported the government charges her  $100 a month for unrestricted child care support. She continues to receive  one-year paid child care leave.

 

 

Health care is free, schooling is free, she reported. 

The Swedish also operate with a socialistic government system, whereby all throw most of their money into the central hat and it is used to finance needs of all.

 

Their tax rates are abominable, like their Scandinavian neighbors; people pay two-thirds of their wages to the system.

 

Yet, we didn’t expect to see riots in the streets - and we didn’t. Eighty-six percent of Swedes favor the system, a survey shows.

 

Government does control their capitalistic economic system; some merchants are told what to do and when to do it.

 

Government subsidizes farmers to keep them in the fields. Farming is hard in this land; many would just let their land under plow become forest again (for healthier timber profits) if the government didn’t step in.

 

Back to Dorin. Her life is good. She lives next to the sea, around friendly people and life is more diversified.

 

She’s leery of American President Trump. “We should be building each other,” she said. “He is blind-eyed. A lot of racist opinions.

 

“I don’t know if I would go to the United States.”

 

But… a final friendly thought.

 

“My future? Soccer. To be a soccer mom.”

 

Our transfer from the ferry to the bus and the hotel was just minutes away.

 

As we rounded a corner, our guide announced the Gothenburg train terminal.

 

It was through this station that over a half-million Swedes migrated to the United States in 1980-90’s.

 

My grandmother, Ida Mae Hedlund and her parents and two older brothers, were among them, coming down the tracks from their Northern Sweden home, Gasajo, Jamtland. Then they got on the board at a wharf not far from where we had just been and sailed to America.

 

 

 

Two years later, she married Gustav Peterson in Dassel, MN. To their union were born eight children, including their seventh, Ethel Selma Evangeline, my mother, in 1915.

 

We spent two evenings in Gothenburg and each night I walked the short city block to visit the station, to see its many train tracks and lots of passengers coming and going. Ninety percent of them were young travelers. Many, many young travelers. Too many of them with a cigarette hanging out of their mouths.

 

Through those corridors that day 120 years ago, my Grandmother Ida, her brothers Nils and Otto and their parents embarked on a new world.

 

I never met Mom’s mother; she died of diabetes in her ‘40’s, just before I was born. But I knew her brother, Nels. He was the one who invented the butter churn and became wealthy - and essentially paid for my college education in the 1960’s. 

 

The Other Minneapolis

You’d think we were traveling Minnesota for the next 10 days; all those Swede and Norwegian towns that have “younger sisters” in our part of the world. 

 

 

Stockholm, a million-people plus and the capitol of Sweden, is a beautiful, well-kept city built on 14 islands of the Baltic Sea.

 

Looks like Minneapolis. Feels like Minneapolis. Better get that turned around, Stockholm was there first.

 

The architecture and the feel to the city bear a tight resemblance to our city in Minnesota. Good reason. Those immigrating Swedes included a lot of good architects who carried on their lives here.

 

One evening in Stockholm our small group opted for a steakhouse. I ordered the steak.

 

Every morning, every evening, every noon luncheon  - salmon - salmon - salmon. A quite regularly, herring, and some more herring.

 

It’s a fish society.

 

But they’re in better shape than we meat-eaters.

 

A small number of our group opted for a friendly meal at a cramped neighborhood restaurant our last night in Stockholm. 

 

Salmon, by the way.

 

When we got  outside, our guide asked us if we’d like to take a walk in a neighborhood cemetery.

 

 

Ten minutes later, as the shadows were casting long shadows across the lot, we came upon a quiet but large tomb.

 

It dawned on me we were face to face with the most important person - of all civilization - in the last several hundred years.

 

Alfred Nobel, 1833-96, rested there. On one side of his tomb was the name of a brother; the other side, the name of his nephew.

 

Nobel was the noted scientist who changed the world - he had two brothers who became much richer in the oil fields of the Middle East. He never married. The brother whose name was next to him was “just closer.”

 

The nephew? He was the young man who fought off the wishes of family members to divide the Nobel  fortune so they could live better.

 

The fortune was preserved and to this day, many generations later, serves as a self-perpetuating fund to finance the annual Nobel Prizes, six of which, recognizing excellence in economics, medicine, physics, chemistry, the arts and literature,  are given in Stockholm, and the Nobel Peace Prize, given in Oslo.

 

Our guide reported each of the seven Nobel Prizes given annually carries with it a cash stipend of $8 million.

 

And it will live on for all time? Let’s hope so.

 

Our final two days in Sweden were on the road, northwesterly to a trip-concluding date with Norway.

 

 

They do have a military draft; in 2010, all men served for 11 months. It was dropped, then started again. But their service is pretty much within the nation; you don’t find Swedish soldiers too often in the Middle East, or the Ukraine.

 

Oh by the way, no cops. No police anywhere. No potholes in the roads, either.

 

One evening at dusk, I sat on a park bench watching the passers-by. A smiling gentleman, Ylg, approached me for conversation. He was 66, the retired owner of a manufacturing company.

 

We talked about him, his dog (who he said helped him in deer hunting.) I wonder how that would play here?

 

His conversation got around to Trump.

 

“I voted for him,” I said.

 

“He wasn’t my first choice, but he wound up being my choice.”

 

 

 

Like our tour guide suggested, the Swedes think “America is not wrong, just different.”

 

And that’s the way we left it, after 30 minutes of chatter. (I think Ylg felt we “were wrong.”)

 

Sweden is a worldwide leader in manufacturing. That’s why the Nazis left them alone in WWII. They had more important things to offer the Reich than just occupation.

 

“They were not a friend,” our guide said. “They were a business partner. They needed steel.”

 

They stay away from war. Their last war was with Denmark in 1814.

 

They graduate 50% of their students from college, heavily now into IT and shopping research centers. A typical family makes $85,000 a year. Scandia (trucks), IKEA, SAAB and HEM (textiles) are major industries. Unemployment is at six percent. 

 

As we travelled our last miles in Sweden, northwesterly to Norway, the sounds of ABBA came across the bus PA system.

 

Among the favorites?

 

I Love You. You remember the lyrics . . . I do, I do, I do, I do. I do.”