well, i've passed the three month mark. my swedish is coming along well, even if i still have so many words to learn and some fairly serious grammatical issues here and there. it's better if i don't think about it and i just listen and talk. it's almost like math in some ways, how if i try really hard, it just gets frustrating. so i have to just ( Read more... )

my best american friend in sweden just came and spent four days living at my house. her name is catherine and she is a wonderful, wonderful person--one of my best exchange friends; one of my very best friends. to give a little background, we have a lot in common. we enjoy exploring, drinking o'boy (chocolate milk), and behaving like tourists with ( Read more... )

swedish tv is weird. lots of enthusiastic game shows. not much göteborgska. sometimes i catch bits of finnish TV shows. they generally involve people standing outside in blustery climates with a lot of trees in the backgrounds ( Read more... )

some differences between the USA and sweden ( Read more... )

it's only saturday but it feels like my weekend is over. exchange students have been in and out of my house and all around and it's been lots and lots of exhausting fun.

( bilder )

today was such a swedish day. i went to church with my host family for a barndop, baptism. my first time at a church service, my first time at a baptism. everyone i talked to seemed surprised that i was such a pagan, but then again, in sweden, the church is tax-supported and just about everyone belongs to it. of course almost everyone is baptized. ( Read more... )

göteborg doesn't have skyscrapers; i think that's why it feels so strange to me ( Read more... )

i love sweden because of how small and determined the highways are. i love that they and the train tracks are almost always lined with trees; i love that liseberg doesn't have fake birds in fake trees. i love seeing at least 8 kids i know in göteborg; that's a big city. 18,000 personer at liseberg last night, wow! because sweden loves håkan ( Read more... )

bicycling all over the place for an hour to find the sea that's only fifteen minutes away ( Read more... )

things are mediocre but better. i'm getting closer to befriending my classmates. i did a presentation on california in english the other day and handed out surf stickers. i noticed that one boy stuck his in his locker, so they probably don't hate me. i think they find me amusing, if nothing else. random foreign kid in their klass who doesn't really ( Read more... )