Swedish Invasion

This morning we took two visitors from Sweden to the airport. This was the culmination of our participation in a Rotary Friendship Exchange. These exchanges take place between Rotary Districts. One district asks another if they can host a group. The hosting district then takes responsibility for arranging all the agenda, housing, transportation, and activities for the visiting group.

Since one of our goals in joining Rotary is to create opportunities for us to enhance our ability to connect when we travel, this seemed like a good step in that direction. Or it seemed so when we first agreed to participate in the Fall. Then as we got involved in the organizational aspect of how this would all take place, we began to have second thoughts. Despite the fact that Rotary does tons of these and has over many, many, many years, it seemed to us as if there was a somewhat haphazard nature to the planning. We kind of expected that leadership would just tell us what to do  when what happened was the group (many of whom where new to this) were asked to figure out what we should be doing. It seemed weird to us.

Without going to much more into that, we kept in the project and we picked up our guests, a couple  M (male) and M (female) on Tuesday evening. We almost immediately hit it off with them. There were aspects of life experience that we immediately bonded with. Over the next three days we took them to all the activities the group had agreed upon. Each night we would sit in the living room with after dinner drinks and get into a wide range of conversations.

The female M had a terrible cold and was going down hill on the first day. Wife researched what urgent care could take a foreign visitor quickly and I got her there and then to the pharmacy. We missed one program but got her back on track. The Swedish leader was super appreciative. It didn't seem like such a big deal to us. I don't know what host would not do this for their guest.

On Thursday the group was eating at El Pinto, a noted New Mexican restaurant. I used the occasion to take our couple plus one other and their host (who jumped in with way more local history knowledge than I have) to do a bit of NM history and culinary background. Our guests really seemed to appreciate that.

Yesterday we had our guests to ourselves as all the hosts were to take their visitors to Santa Fe. The weather improved and we had a nice day at the Plaza and Canyon Road before we drove down the Turquoise Trail to Madrid and back home. There was a big celebratory dinner at one of the hosts house (we gather this is very traditional for these things) and stayed up with our guests until Midnight drinking way too much.

In the end we had made some wonderful new friends and have a plan to be visiting Scandinavia hopefully next year just as we hoped.