The students and families of Swedish School and SWEA were invited to take part in the special day today that was the Swedish House Party day, down at the Destination Village by the Breakwater.
We started out by taking a good look around the Swedish SCA pavilion. SCA is a leading global hygiene and forest products company, and they have a boat in the competition, with an all female crew. They chose to have a female crew, since 80% of the products they sell are for women.
Lucas checking out their model of the SCA boat, made out of Lego!
The 11 women strong crew come from Switzerland, USA, Australia, UK and Netherlands.
Us adults got to take part in a very interesting presentation upstairs in the pavilion where they talked about SCA, their boat, the race and the crew; and we got treated to some lovely snacks. In the meantime the kids got taken care of and played with downstairs. Superb!
After the visit at the SCA pavilion it was time for the highlight of the day for many of the kids - they got to participate in a football workshop with the Swedish professional footballer Christian 'Chippen' Wilhemsson, who lives here in Dubai.
Linnea wasn't too interested in the football though, she preferred looking for pretty sea shells on the beach with her friends.
The kids had a great time with Chippen! Since there was a lot of them they had to take turns playing, but did so very well. They were all very patient. Lucas mostly did the goal keeping.
After their game they had a bit of a Q&A, and Lucas' question was: "Are you friends with Zlatan?". Yes, he was! :)
The Swedish School teachers in our new school t-shirts! We were so happy that so many of our students came dressed in them today, it looked really nice!
After the game it was time for Chippen to sign autographs on caps and t-shirts, and pose for pictures for all the mamarazzis!
Later in the afternoon we were all invited for lunch at the Skyline Pavilion. The Swedish celebrity chef Anders Dahlbom (currently one of the judges in the Swedish version of Masterchef) was cooking up a storm. We got treated to a beetroot wrap, a crispy salmon seasoned with orange and a venison served with artichoke pure. All very yummy!
Us girls celebrated the lovely day with a bit with some prosecco!
And the smaller girls had a bit of a boogie to the Swedish music!
Again, it is really so so so nice to be able to just hang outside at the moment! I LOVE this temperature and I try to remind myself each and every day now how lovely this is; because before we know it we will be heading into the hot season again...
In the meantime, we had such a lovely time just hanging in the sofas, listening to music and enjoying our afternoon!
We saw this guy who was really clever on his flyboard:
In the afternoon there was an Ambassador's race, which was won by France with South Africa close behind. Here's the Swedish Ambassador Jan Thesleff, who also participated, with Chippen:
It was a truly great afternoon, and there was so much to do and explore down at the Breakwater. There was f.e a whole "Kids Village", where Adventure HQ had built up a ramp for the kids to bike or skateboard on, they could climb the big wall or do the horizontal bungy which Lucas became a fan of.
We finished the day with another smiley Watson family selfie on our way out! We're on a roll! :)
