Swedish Lax

When I heard there was a lacrosse team practicing in the northern part of Stockholm I had to go check it out.  I had done some research on the team I was going to play with and on multiple webistes it said that the team was the second best in all of Sweden so I was a bit nervous going into practice.  I forgot that lacrosse is not a big sport in Sweden at all and there were only a total of 4 "teams" in Sweden. 

 

Ya, so thats me right in the middle! There were a total of 8 players at practice and 3 had never played before.  The field was not really even a real field.  It was the size of those small fields that small children play soccer on and there were no field lines.  I was the youngest there the other girls/women were in their mid twenties or older. 

It was very nice to go out and exercise and get to know some more people even if it wasn't the hardest lacrosse practice I have been to.  There was one girl from Great Britian who is a professional lacrosse coach and another girl from Germany who played lacrosse in college and run this team.  They were really fun to practice with! 

Overall it was a really fun experience and nice to get my stick back in my hands, but I'm not sure if it is worth an hour drive each direction every week when I could just find a place to play wall ball.

Stockholm!

My host mom and I took a trip to the beautiful capitol of Sweden, Stockholm!  It was only a 45 minute drive from Uppsala and was so worth it!  We first went in the tallest building in Stockholm,

Kaknästornet to see everything there is to see.  From the top you can see 60km in every direction. 

After that we went into town to tour the Swedish royal palace.  While there we were able to overlook a triathlon occurring along the streets with contestants from all around the world (even the US! Yay!). 

 Marie and I meandered through Old Stockholm and ate lunch at a restaurant in a building built in the 16th century.  Stockholm is very clean compared to Seattle.  There is no trash on the side walks or streets and no graffiti or poster advertisements.  The buildings seem to be in better shape than those in downtown Seattle even though they are older.  The streets are busy with people and cars, but it doesn't seem as chaotic as Seattle, I'm not sure why.  Stockholm is so big that we only saw a fraction of it.  But that just means I get to go there again!!

 

 

 

Rotten fish? Sure why not!

I can now officially say that I have eaten rotten fish.  Well not exactly rotten, but fermented fish.  Apparently it is a tradition in Sweden to eat Surströmming or fermented herring.  The tradition of eating herring started by Swedish sailors who did not have enough salt to preserve the fish so it began to rot.  The sailors didn't have any other food and decided to eat the rotten fish.  Thus every year people throw parties just to eat this delicacy.  As you can imagine fish left in cans to rot/ferment over time smells horrific.  In fact it smells so bad that we had to shut all the windows and doors, open the can across the street, and eat it on the porch!  Surströmming is usually eaten on a piece of tortilla/cracker thing with butter, sour cream, potatoes, onions, tomatoes, chives and whatever else you want to put on it to mask the taste of the fish while taking shots.  (Don't worry mom, I did not partake in the shot drinking)  But I thought the smell was worse than the taste; not that I loved the taste, but I did not hate it.  Along with the shots comes old Swedish songs/chants.  I was able to get a few recorded but the quality is not that great.

 

 

This last one is a Lapish folk song (the native Lapland people).

Lundellska Skolan

I always forget how exciting the first day of school is.  Now try to imagine how exciting your first day of school would be if you were in a foreign country, and knew no one and knew maybe 5 sentences.  It might sound terrifying to you but yesterday was amazing!  School started at 8:30 and I rode my bike there.  I found Sierra (the other exchange student) and a counselor/head/important person that I needed to turn in papers to and he introduced me to Olaf and Eric who went on their own exchanges to the US and UK last year and could speak English well enough to help me understand what was going on.
Our first class was history I think.  I made the "grand entrance" that every new student makes into a class full of people who already know each other and was introduced (along with Sierra, Olaf and Eric) to the class.  I think the class had about 25 people but I am not exactly sure.  There were two male teachers who were teaching the class; one of them I found out after is actually my math teacher.  They talked about some dates in the future that I think are the days we get textbooks and stuff and then dismissed us...An hour before the class really was supposed to end!  So Olaf, Sierra, Eric and I walked around the school meeting all of Olaf and Eric's friends.  I probably shook hands and heard names of 100 students and I only remember about 5. Oh well, they will come slowly.
Then Helen, Tilda, Maya, Caroline and some more of their friends who I have no idea what their names are took us up to biology class.  I understood some of what they were talking about in this class; they talked about abiotic and biotic factors and example of both and the environments they live in.  Then the class took a vote as to how we wanted to be graded.  The options were something along the lines of: regular tests, take home tests, papers/essays, and discussions.  I think I chose regular tests, but I am not exactly sure if the mumble jumble of what apparently is Swedish that came from my mouth reflected that option.  We talked about what we would be studying during the year which I understood to be a lot about water and then later in the year genetics.
And last class we went to was a gym class.  The gym is a whole separate building that Sarah and Eric took me to about a quarter of mile down hill from the main building.  We walked past the locker rooms and into what one might call a ballet room (small with mirrors on two of the sides and windows on the other two).  The teacher talked a bit about how we are supposed to rank our effort on a scale everyday based how tired we feel (or something like that).  Then we were given the option to go canoeing, go for a walk, play basketball, or play volleyball.  I chose to play volleyball with the majority of the class.  After that we walked to the cafeteria, which is like 10 minute walk and ate lunch.  The lunches are free, there are no options to choose from, but the food is better quality than MIHS food.
You also might be surprised to hear that I have the exact same people in my class for every subject.  You stay with the same group of people for every class except for your two elective classes.  Also the schedule is really different than an American high school's schedule.  We have a different agenda everyday and they even vary from week to week.  So yesterday I only had three of my 8 classes and I got out at 12:30.  Some days I will only have two classes the entire day, and other days I will have 5 classes and stay at the school until 4:30 (see the picture of my next weeks schedule and try to guess what the classes are).  The school has three stories and three wings.  There are three different "specialties" or programs you can go into: Social Sciences, Natural Sciences, and Nursing I think.  Each program has a different hall and the floors are split by subject.
Today I had 3...well only 2 classes: math and a biology lab.  I was supposed to have a social studies before math but the teacher did not show up.  Apparently substitute teachers is a foreign concept to schools in Sweden and if a teacher is sick or out of town you just don't have that class.  So I just didn't have social studies today.  Math was nice because we just took a teat and I could understand all of it.  Even the story problems I could figure out by finding the word percent for percent of just finding two numbers and guessing what they wanted haha.  The biology lab is taught by the same teacher as the other biology class I had yesterday.  It was essentially a free period to do bookwork and answer questions so I pulled out my handy dandy Swedish-English dictionary and translated the questions into English.  The teacher was pretty proud :)  Also today we got our laptops.  Every student receives a laptop and a locker to keep it in.  And I noticed today that there are no digital clocks in the entire schools.  They are all the circular ones. 

First day of school!

Front entrance to Lundellska

Svenska Fotball

Tonight I got to attend my first football (American soccer) practice.  It is a local team that plays on a very nice grass field that is about a 20 minute walk from my house.  The girls were very nice and all introduced themselves to me.  None of them really held a conversation in English with me, but that is to be expected.  They were all very surprised when I was able to introduce myself and told where I am from in Swedish.
The soccer drills were similar to those that might be done by an American team.  The two coaches were very vocal and yelling more than half of the time.  I couldn't tell if it was good yelling or angry/mad yelling.  Occasionally I would hear "lasptlahenadlkasetoihgANNAalsdtoeladsgncl" and have no idea what they meant or what I was supposed to do.  Haha oh well, they didn't look too mad. 
I think the best part of the experience was that I could, by the end, partially tell what the coaches were saying because I knew the game and I knew the basic skills so I could kind of understand the directions he was giving us.  It was a great boost of confidence!  Tomorrow is the first day of school and I better go get a good night's rest.

Sunnersta Uppsala life

The past few days I have been meeting good friends of my host family and settling in to everyday life in Sunnersta. Two families that are good friends of Anna's (my host sister) came over the other night to give her a farewell party (she leaves for Taiwan on Thursday). There was so much food! I have found that almost always swedes go back for seconds so I have learned not to fill my plate the first time round.  Also swedes drink coffee, tea, or sparkling water. That's it. I have tea for breakfast, water for lunch and tea or coffee for dinner and a coffee or water for fika somewhere in the day.

 I learned to play a swedish backyard game called kubb (pictures below). The goal of the game is to knock down the other teams towers and then the king who stands in the middle.  But you must knock the king over by throwing backwards between your legs.  It's a little bit more complicated than that but hard to explain.

In Uppsala people either ride their bikes to town or take the bus and then walk around.  So today I managed to ride my bike from our house to the center of Uppsala (6km round trip) alone without getting lost! Sweden is very flat and there were only gradual inclines so it wasn't too hard.  But since it is very flat and not much around there is a lot of wind to deal with.

I also stopped by the school that I will be attending starting Thursday and tried to make sense of the schedule. I still am not quiet sure how it works so I will tell you after my first day of school.

I have noticed that there are a lot of people who smoke here. It comes as a shock when I see a guy, who I think is younger than me, casually smoking while walking down the street.  People don't really look different from Americans. The blonde hair blue eyes stereotype is not actually as common as people think it is.

 My host father and a family friend 

Neighbor and I playing Kubb

Neighbors playing Kubb with us

The "king" is the one on the right of this last picture

 

Language boot camp and fika!

I just returned from a trip to a small, quaint cabin getaway with about 13 other exchange students trying to learn Swedish.  There were two girls from India, one girl from Japan, another girl from South Korea.  A guy from Canada and then 7 girls and two boys from the USA.  Ya I know talk about major girl power and a domination of USA students.  In a way it was kind of disappointing to see so many USA students because I wanted to learn about other countries and their cultures, but the Americans are all very nice.  At the little cabin thingy thing we took lessons in Swedish with two teachers.  Our day would look like this:
                                  8am: breakfast
                                  9: class
                                  10:30: fika time
                                  10:50: class
                                  1pm: lunch and fika
                                  2:45: fika time
                                  3: class
                                  4:30: more fika!
                                  4:45: back to class
                                  6: dinner and...guess what? FIKA!
                                  7: movie
                                   Free time
So now you might be wondering what fika time or fika is.  Well it is essentially the action of getting coffee or tea (usually coffee) and a pastry or something sweet with someone or a group of people.  It is a time to socialize for Swedes during the middle of busy days at work.  I get the sense that fika's do not always happen this often but I understand that it must be hard to get teenagers to pay attention all day in a class during the summer.  Fika for teenagers  (I think) usually happens 2-3 times a week and for adults maybe 5 time a week.  With all this fika you can imagine that I will most likely be a coffee drinker when I return to the USA.  Also I do not know if it is true, but Swedes seem to say that their coffee is much stronger than any United States coffee and I will be disappointed when I go home. 
The learning the language and culture part of the trip was very interesting and helpful.  I can now hold a miniature discussion with someone, tell time, name objects in the kitchen and all throughout the house and ask some simple questions to others.  We watched some Swedish films that were also very helpful!
Here are some pictures or the scenery and area that we stayed in along with most of the exchange students one picture and a land snail that we see EVERYWHERE. Oh and of course a picture of only a third of the candy that all the host mothers sent with us.  Yes every mother had the same thought and hence there was sooooo much candy we left 4 bags full of candy and 3 huge chocolate bars at the camp place.
Oh and Toby: There are only three Starbucks in all of Sweden.  One is in the Stockholm airport, one is about 45minutes away and I am not sure where the third one is.

My New Home

Finally! After 11 hours of plane rides I have arrived in Uppsala and am settled in with my first host family.  My 9 hour flight to Amsterdam went smoothly.  I sat next to a guy from Croatia (I think?) who, when he was 16 came on an exchange to Missouri!  It was fun to talk to him and learn about his experiences.  The second flight I rode with three other exchange students from the US coming to Sweden but don't really remember it...I slept through the entire thing :)
I was greeted by a huge sign saying Welcome Annalise in Swedish along with a Swedish teddy bear, flowers, HUGE bar of chocolate, and a traditional Swedish horse souvenir.  My host parents and Anna (my host sister) were there along with my host aunt and two host cousins (age 15 and 11? and I forgot the names already) Who I discovered are my host family for the last part of the year!  We went to eat lunch in the "center" of Uppsala where my host brother (Johan) met up with us.  After, we walked around town which is absolutely adorable.  It is a university town and there are more bikes than cars and half the streets are closed off to cars completely. 
My host family knows English pretty well and have been guiding me around.  But they said today was my only free day that they would talk English to me and tomorrow was begins boot camp :)

 on left: town and church in background
on right: river flowing through town

 Left: church (same one as first pic)
Above: heading into town

 Top: arboretum
Middle: view of town from pink castle
Bottom: PINK CASTLE!!!