The Viking is working a late shift tonight, so this morning as we shared breakfast, I asked him to start teaching me some Swedish.  I will take real classes of course, but I haven’t yet received the personal-number-thingy that will make me eligible for Swedish for Immigrants, and I suddenly got impatient to get a wriggle on.

I don’t know if this is breaking my week resolution about happy things or not, because we ended up laughing hysterically, but… well, it seems I pretty much suck at Swedish.  I optimistically thought that as I’ve heard it a lot over the past few weeks, my ear would be, I don’t know, tuned into it or something, but… not so much.  It was a little like this:

The Viking would say: Jag heter Regan (My name is Regan)
And I would basically say: flumph flumph ABBA
Then the Viking would say: Trevligt att träffas (Nice to meet you.)  (He wrote these out for me, BTW)
And I would repeat: flumph flumph IKEA.
Viking: Regan!
Me: Meatballs!

And he would start cracking up, and I would be like, “Dude!  I’m trying my best here!” And he would claim that wasn’t possible, and I would insist it was, but I would be laughing too.

Hmm, maybe I need to wait until I can start SFI after all, it seems I require the services of a professional.

Then he taught me the best word ever: snuskhummer.  It translates literally as “filthy lobster”, but means pervert… because lobsters are sleazy?  Who knows how Swedes’ minds work.  Whatever the origin, it is an excellent word: it sounds funny and conjures a great image.  I don’t yet know quite how I’m going to contrive a situation in which I’ll get to call someone a snuskhummer, but you can trust I will try my darndest.