Week 1 In Sweden

DISCLAIMER: I will be writing every week about my experience in Sweden on this blog for the time being so please feel free to subscribe to read my story and quite possibly poems and short stories written by my sister Hannah.

DAY 1: August 14th 2017

We met Kajsa at the San Jose airport at 12. We stopped for In-n-out burgers for our last lunch in America. The morning of, I gathered all of my luggage, packed last minute items and headed for the door. There was a knot in my stomach the entire time we were driving and even more so when we got to the airport. Kajsa and I shared our combined feelings of excitement and anxiety. We discussed YouTubers, movies, and all the drama of our friend groups from the past year at North Park. When we boarded my nerves had ceased and I was ready to be in the air and over international waters (which was a first for me). The plane ride was long but we were well treated. The dinner was served early but it surprised us with how good it was. We could not say the same about the breakfast however. We touched down in Frankfort Germany and quickly found our gate to finally get us to our destination in Stockholm Sweden. When we arrived, I was exhausted. I didn’t sleep on the plane because I just couldn’t situate myself to find a good position to sleep. So, when we landed I had received a total of 30 minutes of sleep for the past 24 hours. My friend Emilia, that I had met the previous year at North Park, picked both of us up from the airport. Me and Kajsa both fell asleep on the car drive to our separate host families. We dropped her off and me and my host family drove to their house. The feeling of being in a different country dawned on me as we passed street signs that were different, advertisements that were in a different language, and different laws of the road. We got to the house and had dinner. We ate meat, vegetables of corn, cucumber, and tomatoes, cheese and potatoes. The drink that we were drinking was a juice of some kind that you add water to to create the whole drink. There were different flavors such as orange and mango. While this was different to the more standard drinks that we have in the States, I found it quite good. The silence at the dinner table irritated me. Why were they not speaking to me? Or to each other? I racked my sleepless mind for conversation topics that only lasted for a short while. At my home in California silence is something not so easily found, so having the dinner table quiet was strange to me. After dinner me and Emilia (my friend that I had met on my floor and in one of my classes last year at North Park) decided to go for a walk. We walked to get a pass for the train so we could travel in the coming days and decided to keep walking around when we reached our destination. We walked to Emilias old school and to a big Cemetery which was beyond beautiful. One thing that I instantly loved about Sweden was how beautiful and clean it was. While we walked it was refreshing to be back with a friend from my past year at North Park. When we got back to Emilia’s house I fell asleep at around 8pm (20 for European time). It took very little for me to fall asleep in the bed that Emilia had made for me in her room.