JJ Friends : Gustav from Sweden

My iconic hat I think a lot of people remember was originally an inside joke. This emoji was really popular in the Swedish continent.🦞🦞🦞

patch trade. I wasn’t as prepared as I should’ve been in some situations. I wasn’t prepared that another addiction where going to be born. It all started in Busan where I visited the culture village of arts I found IST’s from the Netherlands that had clomptoffels as decorations for your neckerchief to trade with. Trading patches was even more of an addiction when the jamboree had officially started in Sae Man Geum. I used to take walks just to look in the tunnels filled with people who had whole setups of patches. To hear history about every patch is also super interesting because every patch has a different story to tell.

history. My Unit visited a lot of museums. In which we learned a lot of the Korean War and what happened during and after World War Two. What the imperial army of Japan did to the Korean Peninsula was brutal but it is still interesting to see the more brutal side of what the human being can do. We went to the border to North Korea, visited a UN museum and went hiking a bit in Busan where I for sure learned more about the Korean culture.

Alcohol in a 7-11? I actually knew that other countries had liquid with alcohol in it in supermarkets. Just to inform you internationals it’s a fact that in Sweden the government has a monopoly over a majority of alcoholic liquids. That’s because the man in the house easily could get his outcome from his job in alcohol. This wasn’t good for the household’s economy so the government created a monopoly. Now that I saw Swedish vodka in a Korean 7 eleven brings a weird feeling that’s just absurd. I had to take a picture.

Hello!!! My name is Gustav Morghult and this is my second blog post, but this time as a GG friend, yeah!!! If I’d introduced myself shortly It would have probably been formed it out like this. A slightly edge to the line to become an emo hipster but I’m not there yet. My main dream for now is to create sustainable and unique stuff out of thrifted textiles. We now live in a world where the material isn’t endless so we must take care of the things we’ve already made. That’s why I’m into up cycling. I believe in buying expensive, quality and sustainable made stuff or recycling stuff rather than cheap things that’s probably bad for the environment and bad for the ones who create the resources and sews together stuff to our own newly made fast fashion clothing today. But that’s my opinion and it doesn’t need to be your’s either. Let me know what you think down the comments.

I come from Upplands Väsby/Sweden. It’s basically north of Stockholm. It’s the same place where the pop-rock band Europe was formed. You know the song “The final countdown” right? Yeah, that’s them. I maybe live like a kilometre away from the singer’s childhood home. That’s the main celebrities we have by the way and there aren’t really any more global things we’ve been established in Upplands Väsby. Other parts of Sweden? Well. We’ve been dominating with music since the 70s, but that’s a story for another time.

I am a member of the scouting community in Sweden and go to meetings with the local scouting every Wednesday to either plan for a hike or just doing fun activities. On Mondays I help with the younger scouts and try to help educate them more about Swedish nature rules and what could be important when you’re on a hike. It’s fun but it’s also a bit of a different compared to other leaders experience. It’s because I’m only sixteen and I’ve been asked several times “aren’t you supposed to be with the older scouts?” Children can be so honest sometimes…

In my previous blog I focused on spontaneous things that I think were funny and enjoyable about Korea. Now I want to let a lump of stress and anxiety out. It will be some funny and quirky moments afterwards to recover. I was enjoying a matsha ice cream in a big street of central Seoul waiting for my friends to get done in the clothing stores. I didn’t want to go in with the ice cream because I was trying to follow social norms. I took a picture of the ice cream half way through because I I’m not good at taking pictures… After a little while I got a middle aged man sneaking up to me. He probably saw that I was a foreigner because of the way I looked and he gave me a wood beed bracelet and some kind of medallion with Buddha on it. I was mostly happy because I thought he was giving it out for free but then he gave me a skiss paper and a pen. I was supposed to write my first name and nationality first, it took a while because his English weren’t very good. And then there where a column I didn’t really understood but with rough understanding I thought it was that I had to pay for the stuff or something, the scary part was was that the previous people who signed the same paper payed absurd amounts of money. Tens if not hundreds of dollars. My head started spinning of thoughts like… “You don’t have money for this” “But it’s a Buddhist, he is going to give it to charity right?” It ended up with my friend dragging me out of the situation and the man took away the bracelet and the medallion quickly. We were apparently running late to something and I’m actually really grateful for her dragging me out now. Honestly, now afterwards it felt weird, Buddhist’s shouldn’t beg for money right? Let me just say that all Buddhists aren’t like this, I’ve met a bunch and what I know they don’t go around forcing bracelets on to people. I still have a lot of anxiety about this situation today.

Over to happy stuff!! Our troop that went to Korea had a thing with plushies. We had a mascot named Göran. He is a tiger who where crocheted in the first meeting my troop ever had. He went with us on the whole journey since that point. Göran even had his own blog post on our troops instagram “retorikerna_wsj23”. It’s in Swedish but you can always use google translate.

We had an avocado that we treated like a shrine on the plane home.

And we can’t forget Jalmar and Helmer. Two sharks who seems identical but their not. One shark has it’s plastic fibers a bit burnt from unlisted reasons and the other just don’t. The also became two iconic mascots.

It was a one of a kind trip and if you have any questions you’re more than welcome to ask questions or just comment.