Modig means courageous

by Aleksandra Krupińska (Poland)

Making a local connection Sweden

I was sitting on a pebbled riverside of Kalixälven a few kilometers away from the northernmost point of the Baltic Sea. In the river, one of the coldest and most fast-flowing in Sweden, I could watch a Polish and a Hungarian girl and a Colombian boy swim. Their belongings were laying right next to me. My decision not to take a bathing suit to the north of Scandinavia, so rational back home, seemed not rational at all in that heat. But then all of a sudden, I heard a feminine voice from behind that distracted all of my thoughts. -They are so courageous! I would never swim here! – shouted a lady in Swedish. I turned around a little puzzled, but quickly picked myself up and approached her. She repeated the same phrase and what else could I do; I gave her her due. They were courageous. We started talking and after a brief while, I realized that the lady was simultaneously chatting on the phone. Ok, I thought, women are reportedly excellent at multi-tasking. I had my proof there. I wasn’t though prepared for what followed. In no time did the lady hand her phone over to me and said it was her friend. It turned out that the other woman was somewhere in the vicinity and was also awe-stricken to see someone swim in the river. We chatted in a language that I had only been learning for 10 months, but my new friends didn´t appear to care. The lady from the riverbank came from Finland but lived in Sweden for over thirty years. She cycled to the riverside directly from a nursing home she worked at. It helped her relax after a tough day. After she asked a few questions about where we were from, what we were doing in the town and the reasons we learn Swedish, she showed me a photo of her son. Then I got to watch an “Idol” performance of a rising star of the Swedish music market whose doppelgänger the son supposedly was. When my friends got out of the water, it turned out that not only her offspring resembled a celebrity. Our Colombian friend became Antonio Banderas, or rather Panteras, as she said. This multinational blend got created within only half an hour. A couple of days later we returned to the spot. My friends for swimming, I - for keeping an eye on their belongings. On our way to the small headland, we noticed two silhouettes and a bike. A woman and her bike, we knew who that was. When we approached them, we got immediately greeted by our Finnish friend and soon presented to the other lady, the one I talked on the phone with. Only at that moment did I realize that strangers on the other side of the receiver are also real people and they sometimes substantialize in our lives when we expect that the least. And that the idea of meeting a stranger one was talking to on the phone with is not that unfounded as it seems.