Wednesday, October 19, 2011

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...