Denmark

Last Friday morning I left for Denmark.  I had been looking forward to this trip since I booked it just after Niko came and visited me.  I got cheap tickets through norwegian airlines.  It was a nice smooth flight, and I realized it was the first time I had ever truely flown completely alone.  When I got there I met up with Jon Groom, another exchange student from minnesota who lives close by here in sweden (I think I have talked about him before).  We met up with Niko shortly after in Copenhagen along with two other exchange students who live in the area down there.  We walked around the city and niko showed us his school which is located directly downtown right on the main street.  That night we met up with nikos parents at a famous place in copenhagen called Tivoli.  It's an old and very nice amusement park with a couple rides.  We walked around there and had dinner, then went back to their home town of Køge which is just a 40 minute train ride away.  Saturday we walked around Køge and got lunch their.  After that we went to a castle that is near by and went past the ocean.  That night niko had a birthday party for his 18th birthday which was quite fun.  Just a small get together with some of his classmates.  Sunday was a down day where we spent at home skyping a lot of people from back in minnesota and things like that.  Monday niko had school so he woke up early and jon and I woke up later and left for town to get home.  I got back that evening.  It was a great trip!  So good to see Niko again and really fun to see where he actually comes from after hearing about it over a year ago!  I'm really hoping to get back there again.

The latest from sverige

I just realized I haven't writen in quite a while.  It doesn't seem like it's been a month but it nearly has.  Time here is starting to fly by, as I sit here at write this, it is exactly four months to the day that I arrived in Sweden.  This is something that is hard to imagine and I'm realizing what other exchange students mean when they say how fast it seems the year goes.  After talking with many Australians this weekend who have only six weeks left, I am really not looking forward to sharing that feeling in what will probably be here before I know it.

Anyways, news here: two weekends ago was a huge snowboard and ski competition called Stadium Winter Jam.  It was an awesome event.  I got a press pass to take pictures in designated ares and managed to get some pretty decent shots.  If you have not looked at my flickr in a while, the best ones are on there, here is a link: http://www.flickr.com/photos/kynite/

Because of my press pass, I was also able to go back to the inside of the stadium where the riders had all their stuff.  A friend of mine who is a big skiing fan was able to talk to one of the best freestyle skiers in the world for a while, something he will never forget I'm sure.  I also got to talk to an italian rider that was there for the comp.  It was a long day and a really fun one.

This last weekend Rotary held an event here in Stockholm.  It was just a one and a half day thing, but it was a great excuse to get 60 rotary students together for some good old fashion bonding.  Saturday everyone met at the train station at 10.  We all got on a bus and took a short walk around the old part of Stockholm.  We then took a tour of the nobel museum which is right in the middle of the old town.  We ate a quick lunch there, then got back onto the bus and went to a church choral concert at a very old church just outside Stockholm.  Then back into Stockholm for a christmas dinner and a play performed in swedish after that.  It was an extremely full day and we didn't get to our hotel until about 10.  Now when I say hotel I use that lightly because we did not stay in an ordinary hotel.  It was actually an old PanAm 747 converted into a hotel a few years ago.  It is really wild, they tore out everything from the inside and made rooms and bathrooms and the likes inside the plane.  There were also two lobby areas where we could relax, talk, and eat food.  Being that we were 60 rotary students inside a plane for the night, it goes without saying that we didn't get much sleep.  I think I went to bed at 5:30?

We had to be on the bus at 9:45 the next morning so that was fun.  That morning we went to a place in Stockholm called skansen which is a zoo that has typical swedish animals such as moose, wolves, owls, and the likes.  There was a christmas festival there where one could buy typical swedish christmas food and gifts.  We got lunch there and then headed back to the train station to see everyone off.  It was a great weekend mostly because of the people we were all able to meet.  I met a ton of australian "oldies" who have been here 10 months already.  They told us all about things like the Euro tour and trip to Åre and other things they have done in sweden.  They got me really excited for the trips, especially the Euro tour, but I know they are changing it this year so we'll see what happens with that.  I'm also looking forward to meeting the "newbies" when they get here.  The oldies only have about 6 weeks left and the newbies come a couple weeks after they leave.  It's hard to believe I will be an oldie already, but I'm looking forward to filling the role.

This next week I am going to Copenhagen to visit my Danish brother Niko!  I'm looking forward to seeing him again so much!  We had a great time when he came to Stockholm and I'm thinking going to visit him in his hometown will be even better!  I'll write another blog entry sometime after I get back from his visit.

Overall, I can say I am loving life and Sweden is treating me quite well these days.

Time is now flying by

I have reached and passed the well known three month mark.  I remember thinking before I left that the first three months would be the hardest, and so far I would say I was correct.  While the first month was a lot of fun, the last two have been full of frustrating progress on the language, and not really fitting in and knowing what to do.  But I would say all of that is starting to change.  I switched into a better swedish class at school, one where I get one on one time with a really great teacher who has been extremely helpful and nice while teaching me.  This has helped me to step over a sort of plateau I was at with my language.  I feel again that it is moving along pretty well now.  I'm understanding more and more, to the point where if I listen hard enough, I can usually understand whats going on in a conversation, as long as it's not about neuroscience or something.  I'm also starting to speak more, especially at home.  My host brother has actually been great at getting me to speak swedish with him.  I'm really hoping that by Christmas I will be speaking almost only swedish at home, but we'll see.  I've also been making a lot more friends who are actually swedish.  My exchange student friends are getting quite annoyed that I'm not hanging out with them, but that's okay in my mind since I'm with swedes.  Actually, one of my friends is originally from Los Angeles but he moved here about 5 or 6 years ago, so speaks fluent swedish.

For my three month anniversary of sorts, I made fajitas for my host family.  they turned out really well and tasted like the real thing from home.  my family also really enjoys it when I cook for them so I thought it was a good way of saying thanks for the first three months of my year with them.

Another thing that has been great here is the upcoming snowboarding season.  I had my first opportunity to ride about a week and a half ago now at a ski/snowboarding competition in Uppsala.  It was a ton of fun and I almost didn't compete but couldn't stand watching others ride so I did.  It ended up being a good choice because I wound up the only snowboarder in the finals, and had a chance to win a trip to Austria, but fell on both of my last runs...  Bummer.  Two days later I found a board in Stockholm cheap and bought it.  I've now gotten to use it twice, both times again in Uppsala at a HUGE outdoor ice rink where they have big piles of snow which riders have turned into a preseason rail setup.  I took video from my last trip and will put it up as soon as I can find some software to edit it with.  Unfortunately I still have about a month until the real slopes open up.  Luckily I have found a couple buddies that are big time riders like myself that I should be taking many trips with to go boarding.  So this season is shaping up to be another good one!

In other news, school is about the same old same old, I don't do much other than listen and play cards, but I still don't mind going much.  We just finished fall break which was a great week off.  Went to a halloween party, and that was about it.  The break was uneventful for the most part but that was just fine in my book.  It is also getting quite dark here, the sun now goes down around 4:00 maybe?  and I'm not sure when it gets up, but the sunsets are amazing.

The next couple weekends will be fairly busy actually which is nice.  This weekend there is a ski/snowboard gear convention in Stockholm, and next weekend is a huge ski/snowboard event called stadium winter jam, where they set up a huge jump in a stadium that pro riders compete on.  there is also some rails that anyone can ride.  afterwards there is a photography convention as well.  The weekend after that is a Rotary weekend in Stockholm in which I have heard about 65 exchange students will be in town for tradition advent/Christmas traditions, so that will be fun.  Then the first weekend in December I am visiting my good ol Danish brother Niko in Copenhagen!  It's his birthday so I am helping him celebrate and plus I get to see Copenhagen which I am really excited for!  So I have a busy next couple of weeks, which will be a lot of fun.

Hoppas allt är bra i USA!

When is winter?

My three month mark is fast approaching which is hard to believe.  I now truly understand why we had the orientation sessions we did because I have experienced the exchange roller coaster almost exactly as they said.  My language improvement seems to be platouing and making friends with swedes isn't a walk in the park when you can't understand everything they are saying.  I am also plain missing the simple things from back home.  But despite all of this I am still so thankful and happy to be here.  I still have tons of fun on the weekends and school isn't so bad when you don't have to do homework.

This last week was very hard though.  I received the news just last Thursday morning that my grandfather had passed away.  It was not a surprise, I knew leaving that there was a possibility that it could happen, but the news was still extremely hard to deal with when I was already feeling homesick.  Luckily I have a wonderful host family who was very kind to me and helped me through it.  I was also lucky enough to have already been looking forward to a visit from my brother from Denmark Niko!

Niko flew into Arlanda at about 8 Friday evening and we went straight down to Stockholm for the night.  We met up with Jon Groom and walked around town for the night trying to find something to do, but to no success so we just went back to Jon's to sleep.  The next day we went back into the city and met a huge group of exchange students mostly from other programs.  We walked around the city and talked about exchange and such.  That evening Niko and my family and I went to dinner at some friends house.  Sunday, Niko and I went back into Stockholm again, because there isn't much to do in my small town, and met a few exchange students and went to a restaurant.  I know I know, I hang out with exchange students too much, but it's a crutch that is too easy to lean on, and plus not many of my Swedish friends go to Stockholm much.  On Monday I showed Niko downtown Sigtuna and one of the old churches, then we had lunch at a restaurant there and drove him to the airport.  It was a nice weekend, and was great to see a familiar face again.

A couple days before Niko arrived I had received a great care package from my parents.  It had all my winter gear in it.  Everything I need to snowboard minus the board was there, plus some food, candy, and a snowboarding movie.  I made tacos last night for my family from the taco seasoning I got and it was the first time I got to taste real actually good tacos since I have been here, something I have been craving.

With all of my snowboarding things arriving, plus seeing that places in Colorado have already opened, along with preseason things in MN starting, I am dying for the snowboarding season to start here.  There is a huge big air competition at a stadium in Stockholm in November that I might be able to ride some rails at, but other than that I have to wait until mid December for places to open, which seems really late to me.  I have also been scheming about many trips around Sweden with others, all of which I hope can actually happen.  Needless to say, I am excited for winter here in Sweden, but for the next two months I will just have to continue to watch snowboarding videos...

More happenings in Sverige

School is now well under way and I have started to get into a rhythm from week to week here.  School during the week, and Stockholm on the weekends.  During the week I go to school, sometimes very short days, sometimes very long like I said in my last post, and when I get home I usually watch Family guy or 2 1/2 men on one of the four channels my family has with my host brother.  Swedes love family guy and 2 1/2 men, the latter of which I had never watched until I came here, but I now find it quite entertaining.  Reading the subtitles of these shows while listening to the english has proven to be very helpful for learning swedish as well.  I've also been on my computer quite a lot, mostly watching snowboarding videos as the winter now approaches.  On mondays I have also been playing whats called innebandy here in sweden.  It's basically like indoor floor hockey thats played with these short sticks and wiffle balls.  I play with mostly older men whom are about 40 or so, but it's been a lot of fun because they are quite casual about it.  On the weekends, I have been going to stockholm.  I have become pretty good friends with some other american exchange students that live down there, as well as some australians.  It's not hard to find something to do in stockholm, even if we don't plan on anything we always end up finding something.  For example, yesterday I went down for a Veronica Maggio concert.  She is one of the most famous swedish musicians right now, and quite good if you ask me!  Her concert was packed and a ton of fun.

Sweden is starting to get very dark and cold.  When I arrived, I remember being outside at 10 with a tshirt and having fika after dinner with the sun just hiding behind the trees.  Now even on sunny days I have been wearing sweatshirts to school and the sun is down by 8 or so.  This however makes me very excited because it means winter is coming!  I am incredibly excited for winter this year.  My host family and I will be going to northern sweden for a ski trip they make every year.  There is also a trip up to Åre, swedens biggest and best super resort, with rotary that I am planning on, as well as a trip with my school to a closer resort.  I'm also hoping to take a bus at least a couple times to a place called Kungsberget which is about two hours away but it looks really fun, they have a fantastic park.  There is at least a few others I have met in my town that are ski or snowboard enthusiasts so I'm thinking I will have pretty good opportunities to get out.

Thats all for now, hope everything is well back home!

School and a little more awesomeness

I'm trying to remember where I left off last time, but I know I said I would talk about school.  I have now been to two weeks of school but it still seems like we have just begun.  The first week was pretty much a joke.  We spent pretty much a whole day organizing a game called brännball which is a simplified swedish version of baseball.  We then took the next day to play it and be outside not doing much.  This last week has been a little more typical though.  Here are some of the main differences between swedish school and high school.  The biggest is that we have a different schedule each day, and start and end at different times every day.  For example, on monday I start at 8:15 and don't end until 5:00 (which I think I will change though) but I have a two and a half hour break in there.  Then on Tuesday I don't start until 12:40, pretty nice.  There are also no bells, the teachers decide when class ends, and it usually doesnt stay the same each day (so far).  The gaps in between classes are typically quite long as well, not uncommon to have an hour between classes.  I am also with the same general students for every class.  This is good and bad as I get to know them quite well, but loose the opportunity to easily meet more kids.  Also, lunch has so far been quite good, and you don't pay for it, and its free to take as much as you want.  There are also typically several choices which is nice.  As for the students, they typically seem to be pretty engaged when class has started, but if not much is happening then most will just start chatting amongst themselves.  We have also all recieved computers from the school, so I now have a nice swedish keyboard which I can easily type the å, ä, ö letters we don't have.  So school has been pretty good so far, my classmates are really friendly and have taken me in pretty well.  I met them in stockholm last week to play pool at a really cool place downtown.  Then we went to a foodcourt in the city and had a "cheap" meal which cost 100 SEK (about $16, cheap for that city).

That has been another nice thing about school starting, my SL card.  The SL network is the transportation system in the stockholm area, and since I live more than 6 km away from school, my school gave me a bus pass, which my host family very generously upgraded to work at night and on weekends, so I am free to go to stockholm as much as I please.  That has been fantastic, and I have already made good use of it.

That is just part of the awesomeness, I also went to the stockholm archipelago last weekend.  I went with two another exchanges student and one of their families.  We took a two hour fairy ride out to an island called ingmasö I believe.  They have a small house there, which we had to ride on a four wheeler to get to since there are no cars on the island. It was a very relaxing weekend, and quite beautiful.  See my pictures on flickr for proof.

Another fun thing I got to do just yesterday was wakeboarding at a cable park.  For those of you who don't know exactly what it is, it's a series of cables that are strung fairly high above the water in a loop and have these ropes attached to them and you hold on to these as you would a rope from a boat and it takes you around to the various water features they have set up.  This is probably a subpar description so see my pictures instead.  Jon Groom (who lives here in Täby very close to me, and also comes from minnesota) and I went with Jon's host parents.  Quite a fun day!

Thats it for now!  but keep checking out my flickr, I update that much more than I do this blog.  I'll also try to start doing more captions on there so you know what you are looking at.

The honeymoon stage

I have just returned from our "language camp" that I attended near Göteborg.  I say that in parenthesis because I did not learn a bit of Swedish that I didn't already know.  They started at the bare basics such as "my name is..." etc.  As it turns out though, almost everyone there didn't speak a bit of Swedish before the camp, and a lot still couldn't really say anything by the end.  Even with this being true, the camp was a blast.  51 exchange students, 26 from the US alone, and many from Canada and France and a few from Japan, Brasil and Taiwan made it a very good time.  I did manage to learn that certain Canadians and French people are actually really awesome.  I became pretty good friends with a few of them.
At camp, we had a long talk about culture shock from a Swede who lived in Japan for some years.  He took us through the stages of our exchange year, and the first for most is this "honeymoon" stage as he called it.  It pretty much described exactly how I'm feeling right now,  I have so far thoroughly enjoyed almost everyone I have met, love the town I am living in, and just having a general amazing time.  I found this especially true when I went into Stockholm for the day yesterday to meet exchange friends I met at camp, and ended up also meeting a few oldies as they are called (because they have been here for half a year) from Australia and Brazil.  All of us walked around Stockholm all day and got food, had fika, watched some live music, and just talked and soaked up being an exchange student.  I realized how lucky I was to be in the place I was and can't explain how awesome that is to feel.  If only this stage in exchange could last forever...
Tomorrow marks what will be an extreme change in my year.  School.  So far while I have been here, I have been doing things with my host family, mostly my brother Tobias and his friends, who have all been awesome to me and incredibly welcoming.  Now I will go to school off on my own and be thrown in with more people I have never met before, but I am very excited actually.  There are many upsides to this, I will finally get to meet some Swedes that are my age, and hopefully develop some friendships on my own, and I will also now get some regularity in my life, which I suppose can be a good thing once in a while.  I will write again about school once I have a week or two under my belt.
There is so much I could write about, but I'm going to leave at this for now.  I'll also try to do another upload to flickr but I have yet to upload pictures from my recent activities.  That will come soon though I think.  Also, I have a feeling a few people are getting annoyed with me ignoring them on facebook and I promise once that month is up I will get back to you all.  Talk to you all soon!

Swimming, biking, fika, and more swimming

Well, I have survived the first five days of living in Sweden.  I arrived at Arlanda (the Stockholm airport that is actually 30 minutes outside of Stockholm but only about 15 minutes from my house here) with Jon, Kristi, and Marisa just after 7 in the morning.  My host mother and brother were there to pick me up.  I struggled to stay awake the first day as I only slept for about an hour on the plane.  Fortunately they had plenty of things for me to do that day, I unpacked, went swimming in lake Mälaren, and walked around Sigtuna.  
These other days have been equally busy, I have done many things and had to force myself tonight to write something down before everything mixed together in my head.  The second day here, my host mother Pernilla, brother Tobias, and sister Jessika went to Stockholm and went to a photography gallery, it was very interesting, and had a great location right along the waterway of Stockholm.  We then got a bite to eat and then walked through the touristy old town where a couple big churches are, as well as Swedish Parliament, and some other famous and beautiful buildings.  That night we had a family over that is good friends of my host family.  They have a son my age and a daughter a little younger and they couldn't be nicer people.  we had a very Swedish dinner that night of grilled salmon and potatoes and a delicious yogurt sauce to go with it.
So far in Sweden, I have swam A LOT, and we bike everywhere.  We'll bike downtown Sigtuna and jump into lake Mälaren and then walk downtown and then bike home or something like that.  It's so relaxing and nice, I've thouroughly been enjoying it.  There is also this thing called fika here that is a very Swedish thing to do.  It's basically a time where you sit and drink coffee with people and eat small cookies or bread or some sort of treats and then socialize.  My host father Tomas' parents came over for fika the other day which was quite nice.
I also went blueberry picking with Tomas, Tobias, and Jessika.  We drove just a couple minutes into the forest and picked with these hand-held blueberry pickers for an hour or so and got almost 8 liters. We then made blueberry jam with Pernilla and a delicious blueberry pie.
So far my favorite thing I have done is going to a small island on lake Mälaren to eat and hang out.  We went with the same family that we had dinner with a couple nights before.  They have a great boat that we took out wakeboarding and then we sat on this small island and grilled chicken and ate pasta salad, and also ate two small perch that was caught.  We stayed there until the sun went down and then boated back to Sigtuna, it was incredibly relaxing.
 I have so far been absolutely loving Sweden.  Check out my pictures for  more examples why.  Thats it for now!  http://www.flickr.com/photos/kynite/sets/72157627213886351/

T Minus One Month

It's still June, and when summer is supposed to be ramping up, all I can think about is leaving for Sweden.  Today marks my one month day until my departure, and I am so excited, yet along with this is a fair amount of nervousness.  I have yet to start packing, but soon I will need to figure out how to fit a years worth of clothes, gifts, a computer and camera, and whatever else I need throughout the year, into one 50 pound suitcase and my carry on, that will be fun.  It looks like my snowboard won't be coming with me after all; we'll see how well I survive without it.  Maybe I will pick up Nordic skiing instead while I'm over there.

The mainstreet in downtown Sigtuna

Now for a little about what I have to look forward to.  I will be living in a small town of about seven or eight thousand 45 minutes north of Stockholm called Sigtuna.  It is right on the third largest lake in Sweden called lake Mälaren.  I will be living with only one family throughout the year, the Brännlunds.  I will have a little sister Malin (11) and a younger brother Tobias (15) and a sister about my age, Jessika who will be leaving shortly after I arrive for Rotary somewhere on the East coast.  I have also emailed both my host parents, Tomas and Pernilla, about my stay with them.  Through these emails I have become extremely excited about my year with them, they all seem like such nice people and I am more than looking forward to meeting them.

Lake Mälaren

Church ruins in Sigtuna

I will be going to Arlanda Gymnasiet which is in a nearby town about ten minutes away, actually right next to the largest airport in Sweden, Arlanda.  This is where all four of us outbounds are flying in to, and my house in Sigtuna is about 15 minutes from it.

Thats it for now!  I probably won't update this again until just after I have arrived in Sweden, but I will be trying to stay off of facebook, skype, and most of the internet for the first month, except for contact with Swedes who I meet there, so be forewarned if I don't respond to you!