Helgen

This weekend I was at a birthday party for my friend Peter in a place called Byärsjölagård that I defy you to pronounce on the first try. What I've noticed about birthdays parties, or at least 18th birthday parties is that they celebrate them later after the actual date and make a rather big deal about it. They also do them in pairs from different classes, presumably to double the guest list and split the costs. I had a pretty good time there.

The day after I went to Simrishamn with my host family for a more formal party with some of their friends. It was very fancy, we had several courses, from soup with champagne and cream in it to Italian meat roll type things and then on to dessert which was kind of like custard with sweet almonds. Very good.

Today was a pretty normal day, Swedish For Immigrants then to Språkvärlden where I studied some Russian. My German friend Philipp got his Finnish book in the mail the other day so I helped him study with that as well. Philipps goal is to learn all the Scandinavian languages with the singular exception of Danish on the grounds that it sounds like someone trying to speak Swedish while choking on a hot potato. That includes Faroese and Icelandic, which are together only spoken by about 500,000 peopler. However, it's low number of native speakers is almost certainly made up for by or perhaps adds to the inherent coolness of both languages.

Dugir tú føroyskt? Eg veit það ekki!

(Do you speak Faroese? I don't know!)

Also in Icelandic, they don't take in any loanwords. They kind of just make it up from older words from their own language. For example is "talavölva" which means "computer" can literally be translated to "number seeress".

Familjen Barlöv

Yesterday I moved in with my new host family, the Barlövs. There's Anette my hostmom and Kjell (pronounced "Shell"). She's a gynecologist and he's a retired gynecologist. Anette works at a clinic in Ystad and Trelleborg. My new room is quite impressive. There's the room itself of course and then there's the the adjoining study and mini-kitchen. And bathroom.

Svarte is a small town about about 5 kilometers and 5 minutes from Ystad by either train or bus. I have a great view of the sea from my bedroom window which is nice. I'll be staying here for a couple of weeks, until they go on vacation to New York. Then I'll move back in the Grahns for the remainder of the year.

6 of 12

The first thing I would like to address is the ungodly amount of snow that we're getting down here. If you want to go outside you can't walk, you can only hope to wade.

The next thing is that I have been here for a little more than a half a year. I remember landing being a disoriented in the airport, waiting as continental drift slowly overtook baggage claim, seeing the "Welcome Phil" sign being waved over the crowd at Arrivals. Over the past six months I've experienced a lot from Tivoli Amusement Park in Copenhagen to Skansen Zoo in Stockholm to Sweden's southernmost city, Ystad. I've still got about six more months before they can deport me and there is still so much to do and see.

Over the year Rotary arranges a lot of trips around the country (and sometimes out of it) for us to go on. There was a trip to the Rönne river where we canoed for two days, we visited the National Museum (National Muséet) and of course there was the language class where we all met for the first time. I'm looking forward to our Kiruna trip sometime next month and then there's our big end of the year Eurotrip.

It's about this time of year that the new exchange students from countries like South Africa, southern Brazil and Australia in the Southern Hemisphere come to replace those who have already been here for the year. We now have five more exchange students in our district. Three girls from Australia, one from the US and a guy from Argentina. I'm looking forward to meeting them.

January 14 - Present

Our computer broke. I turned 17. I started to study German. There was a snowstorm yesterday and we had to stay at home. Other than that the only thing less impressive than the past few weeks is my ability to write about it.

Forgive me.

School Starts Again

School started on monday two days ago. This semester I have a few new classes like Naturkunskap, Information och Layout and Filosofi. Tuesday I didn't have to come to school because all of my classes were inställd, canceled. Except for Engelska, but I don't have to take that class. I'm going to fotboll tonight, first time this year. I might go to a friends before and play videogames for a while.

I'm looking forward to my birthday on the 20th.

Christmas Holidays

God Jul och Gott Nytt År!

I had a nice quiet Christmas this year. We had about 7 types of sill to choose from, which is raw herring. We sat and watched the Polar Express while we waited for Lena to come home from work at around eight. It was Rolf, Lena, Annette (Rolf and Lena's daughter) and me. We opened presents one by one starting with the youngest to the oldest and then back down again and so on. I got lots of chocolate, a national team shirt, a CD of Swedish music, a book about Sweden and "And Another Thing", which is a great book. I also got a one month trial for the gym that Annette works for, so I've been twice by now and I've really liked it so far.

The next day everyone came over again including Emmie who is Annettes four year old daughter. We had a great lunch of Christmas leftovers and then played games for most of the day. I went and saw Sherlock Holmes at the theater with a friend a couple days ago. It was a really good.

I have another week of so until school starts so I'll probably just hang around watching Scrubs and reading. Maybe go to the gym every other day.

Last Day

Last day of school until the 11th of January. We had a short little concert by the music program followed by some awards, then we went back to our classrooms and had a fika. A fika is any kind of meal besides breakfast, lunch or dinner. It usually involves coffee and biscuits. In this case we had julmust and desserts.

Avatar tonight, 7:30, Cinema 3.