November Post

It is the second week of November, and I realized it is about time to blog. It is beginning to switch to winter, which is a reminder of just how quickly time is moving. There are patches of snow sprinkling the landscape and the days are becoming shorter and shorter. At 7 am it is still dark and by 4:45 when I arrive home from school, it is dark once again. The reduction in sunlight makes me feel quite tired in the evenings, but I am adjusting. The temperature has been around freezing in the mornings, and then in the afternoons about 8 degrees Celsius.

Since my last update, I had a rather busy week-long fall break, and another week of school. During höstlov, my host family and I started by baking chocolate cupcakes and then decorating them for Halloween. Halloween is not popular in Sweden, but companies have tried to bring Halloween items in stores. The weekend after, the Swedes celebrate All Saints’ Day (Alla helgons dag), where you buy candles that can burn for a weekend and people decorate family graves. I went with my host grandma, host uncle, and host mom to decorate my host grandpa and host great-grandparent’s graves.  In my opinion this tradition is much more meaningful then the hugely commercialized Halloween tradition in the States.

Naomi and I had a very busy höstlov thanks to a Rotarian named Ulla. She is the former youth exchange counselor, but still helps out. There is no way to describe her.  She is a retired business teacher at my school, who is very kind and very determined. If she tells someone something, they do it. My host parents were both working the entire time, my host dad was in Romania, and my host mom had a very busy work week.  Ulla decided to figure out an entire schedule of things to do. We went to a folk concert one evening, a Rotary luncheon, and then we visited several businesses. Ulla had done this with her students, and felt we would also benefit from this. It was interesting to learn about some of the major employers in my city, and the people who showed us around were wonderful and spoke mostly in Swedish. We visited a construction and design firm. After, we visited a woven floor manufacturer called Bolon, which is surprisingly international company with the floors used in universities, malls, stores, and offices. Armani has also contracted Bolon to supply the flooring for his storefronts. We visited the newspaper and learned a bit about the history of my city, and left with two books that the editor of the paper had helped write. My favorite place was Sandberg Tyg och Tapet. It is a fabric and wallpaper designer and producer. It is quite small but they specialized in vintage prints, and the colors and patterns were beautiful. We got to see the entire process from design to the actual printing/painting/stamping of the wallpaper.

Besides this, we had a friend from Germany over for a sleepover, and she also travelled to Göteborg with us. It took about an hour and fifteen minutes by car. We drove with our Rotary president who goes there for business several times a week, and he offered us a ride there. It was very kind of him and he even paid for our fika, even after we were adamant he not do that. This was my second time in the city. Göteborg has an interesting history. It was founded by King Gustavus Adolphus in the 1600s. It was considered the access point to Western Europe, because the southern most parts of Sweden were ruled at various times by Denmark. The city has around 500,000 people. It is a nice size because it did not seem so congested. The architecture was nice, but not overly fancy, and I felt comfortable exploring the city. We will have to go back to do more shopping and to look at the art museum. While we were in Göteborg, we looked in shops and had giant kanelbullar in The Haga. This was the traditionally working class area of the city, that has been fixed up and become a highly desirable place to live, and has a sort of Bohemian feel. We were showed around by a family that Naomi had met on her airplane to Sweden. The woman and man had been youth exchange students in the States, and now are architects living in the city, and they had a young daughter. The mom and baby walked around for several hours showing us around. I felt very grateful.

At the end of the week, I ate dinner at my teacher Sarah’s home. She is actually British, but moved to Sweden after meeting her Swedish husband. They have two girls between 7 and 12 years old. It was fun because the family speaks a mix of the two languages  and they are all fluent in both, so it is a good way to learn Swedish. The seven year-old, Antonia, has made it her goal to teach us Swedish. Sarah also happens to be a Rotarian. She meets with us each Monday after school and has become a mentor to Naomi and me, as well as provides us with some language learning resources. This weekend we are spending the night at her home.

I am very impressed with the Rotary youth exchange program in my city and district in Minnesota and the kindness of my home Rotary club, but I didn’t know what to expect when I arrived in Sweden. After these adventures the last few weeks in my city and the support I have received, as well as all the activities within my Swedish youth exchange district/region, I feel very fortunate. My Rotary counselor is my choir teacher, and Sarah acts as an additional mentor, which has been quite good. I don’t have huge difficulties, but there are times at school when it is nice to have clarification about my schedule, learn more background about the community, or receive more information about events going on. The Rotary organization has been wonderful to me.

In other news, I feel quite satisfied, but I can’t say my school experience has been great in terms of my courses. I still have more free time than I want, and my classes are not all that challenging. I have Swedish lessons but there is no real curriculum for the exchange students. After winter break, my schedule is changing, and I will make an effort to enroll in some more challenging classes. In the meantime, I am trying to provide my own structure and schedule. I am working on Swedish using my textbook and workbook I got before I came, and I have also started reading Harry Potter in Swedish. I can understand a great deal, even if I can’t understand every word. I am learning many new words, as well as seeing more examples of the sentence structure and grammar. I still need to speak more Swedish, but I still don’t feel entirely comfortable speaking when I am with more than a few people. My host mom mostly speaks Swedish now, and I am trying to resist jumping right to English when I respond. 

I mostly feel comfortable in Sweden, but I do long for familiarity at times. It is not always easy to be away from home. Yet, when I share a laugh with my host family, share a hug with a Swedish friend or exchange friend, get teased by an adorable little boy in my scouts group as he tells me to repeat the same Swedish word over and over again, enjoy time with my wonderfully kind teacher and her family, and on Wednesday, when I got a beautiful rose after my choir concert from Ulla (described above), I realize everything will be okay and that Sweden feels like a home now. Sometimes I feel don’t deserve all of this beauty and kindness.  I am lucky.

Pictures and another post will come soon.