I apologize for my serious lack of posts. I will do better. Any who...
Hey all!
I have now been in Västerås for almost two months (Holy Cow!!) and I am settling in! Västerås is situated on a harbor of Malaren Lake and about an hour west of Stockholm. I can easily take a bus or a train to Stockholm, which I have done a few times to get to and from the airport and to visit the city. There are about 100,000 people that live in Vasteras and 14,000 students at Malardalen University, where I am attending! I have met so many people from all over the world through my program. I have learned about more countries that I hardly knew anything about like Latvia, Lithuania, Serbia, Switzerland and Poland just to name a few!
This past weekend I had the wonderful opportunity to go to Stockholm to visit my friend from SLU, Gunnar, who was traveling north to visit some old friends. We had awesome weather (really any weather that isn't rainy in Stockholm in February is awesome, but this was really quite spectacular. I'm talking blue skies) and amazing company. We made dinner for his host sister, her boyfriend and their friend and talked and laughed for the full length of the meal. It was one of the best days I've had on this trip thus far.
Now I am back in Västerås and getting ready to go back to Stockholm tomorrow to see another one of my friends from home, Sarah! Sarah and Gunnar are both studying in Copenhagen, so it is fun to compare the two Scandinavian countries and our two experiences. I went to Copenhagen earlier in February to visit them and I LOVED it. It is such a beautiful city and I highly recommend traveling there if you are even only slightly considering it. There is so much to do and see, and we did a lot of it in four days (yes, my feet were sore). It was a great trip.
After this weekend, I'm planning on going to Umeå, which is in northern Sweden, to visit one of my old high school friends Louise! She studied abroad in high school and we were on the Speech and Debate team together. I just didn't there was any way that I could come all the way to Sweden and not see her :) There are some other trips in the works after that to go to Finland and Estonia, but I will attempt to keep the general populous updated (thanks for reading this, mom).
Some fun things that I've discovered about Sweden:
FIKA (pronounced fee-kah)- This is the greatest tradition of all. Swedes believe strongly in taking plenty of breaks, and eating good food in that time span (enter Keckeley). Traditionally coffee and a cinnamon bun are the treats of choice, but there are so many to choose from! There are these pastries that are balls of baked chocolate covered in sugar, called Chocolate Balls, imagine that. Also, the cakes! äppelkaka (apple cake), kladkaka (chocolate cake), and daim (toffee and whipped cream cake) are all cakes that taste incredible and are not what their names might suggest them to be (thank you Adam).
Apple is äpple and orange is apelsin, which was confusing for a while.
My personal favorite- I went to a traditional Swedish meal the other week where we prepared and later ate pea soup (it was amazing, I'm a convert), beet pie, and kladkaka. The school chaplains were hosting the dinner in a church and while we were sitting there someone walked in late and asked if there was room for a couple more. One of the female chaplains smiled and said (quite loudly) "Well sure! If there's room in the heart there's room for the ass!" And promptly smacked hers. It gave me quite the giggle. I later learned that this is a very popular idiom and said often, in which I will be partaking.
Oh well, I hope this sort of catches you all (mom) up on my life across the pond!
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