We took it easy and got up pretty late.  I made pancakes for the crew using a mix that Christine picked up in Seattle.  I even picked up some real maple syrup in the supermarket.  It didn't go over very well, but the pancakes were well received.  Caroline has never liked maple flavor and Christine thought it was entirely too sweet to put on pancakes.

However, as many of you may know, Caroline likes ketchup on her pancakes.  I know, this is weird, but she grew up in the LA area and there are certain things about her that are completely strange.  I knew that before I married her, and did it anyway.  But it gets better.  Christine had some green ketchup she picked up in Pittsburgh. Imagine a perfectly good pancake with British racing green ketchup squirted all over it.  I hope you aren't reading this over dinner..

Christine went to the university in Uppsala.  It's pretty easy to see that it was one of the  happiest periods of her life by the way she reminisces about it.  The setting for the university is on a hill overlooking the rest of the town and river.  This is a very flat part of Sweden so any hill stands out quite a bit. The view from the university over the cathedral is really great, especially during those moments when the sun comes out.

We headed down to the most spectacular cathedral we had seen so far in Sweden.  It's well over 400 feet to the top of the twin spires.  And it's all brick which somehow makes the awesomeness seem a little less imposing and friendlier.  

As we were walking around the inside of the cathedral there were a bunch of people doing some kind of vows ceremony with a microphone.  We could hear everything, but to Caroline and I it was unintelligible.  As we got closer we realized that the person conducting the ceremony and wearing the collar was a woman.  That's when it really hit us that it was a Protestant cathedral.  It looked like a catholic place, and when it was built it was a catholic cathedral.  The tone of that still exists in the various windows and iconography.  But the female priest definitely brought me back to reality.

This particular set of murals was quite impressive.  They are above the main altar in the church.

After the cathedral we headed for the castle.  It was a pretty plain structure and that's why I didn't bother burning any disk space on it.  It overlooks some really nice gardens, and as you would expect in a place that spawned Linnaeus, everything is tagged with it's proper name and origin.

We toured through the old part of the castle that had a real dungeon and some relics from the olden days.  It was definitely not a good idea to upset the king.  Life was quite miserable from the looks of things, and the concept of rehabilitation was left to the afterlife.

When we were finished with the castle we headed back to the part of the old town that was having a fair.  The fair was in conjunction with the graduation festivities.  It was a lot like the fairs that we have except there were more booths selling things and less emphasis on rides and games of chance.  We walked around a while people watching, tasting some goodies and then headed home.

Christine had invited some friends of hers over for a BBQ.  We had to get some comestibles for the BBQ on the way home, which gave me another opportunity to check out Swedish goodies that we don't get in CA. 

The BBQ was great.  We played an old Viking game whose name I can't pronounce.  Basically it's game where you take some sticks and try to knock over a bunch of wooden blocks from a distance of about 25 feet across from each other.  You play in teams.  It seemed like a cross between horseshoes and steal the flag.  In end you have to knock over the big block in the middle, claim the territory, kill the men, rape the women, and have a feast. 

OK, we only did the feast part, which was good since I was on the losing team.  Caroline turned out to be a pretty good little Viking conqueror herself.  It must be the latent Gunderson genes expressing themselves.

There were several guests for the BBQ.  And one was a two year old and his Mom, not pictured here.  He was a cute little guy, and gave Caroline more fodder to bug me about the power of the Stork.

We ate, talked, ate and drank, drank some more, and were very happy that the guests had such great language skills.  It was just another great Swedish day for us that left us going to bed exhausted, happy, and at peace with the world.