Football love pangs?

Many of you will be shocked to hear this, but I think I miss football. Although the sun is still shining and you could still potentially run around in tank tops and shorts in the Midwest at the moment, that is not the case here. The rain stopped, so it has gotten much nicer, but the weather we're experiencing here in early September is comparable to Thanksgiving weather in the Midwest. Yesterday eight of us ate brunch together, and hours later decided to step outside and enjoy the chill/sun combo. We were throwing around a frisbee, wearing sweaters and scarves and watching our breath circle around our heads, and I just had this shockingly strong pang of desire to be throwing around a football at a tailgait! Who would have thought? It was a blissfully bittersweet feeling: Here I was, in the middle of the woods, playing frisbee with people from four different countries, in the cutest little town in northern Sweden, only a mile from a huge lake and a few more from breathtaking mountains, couldn't possibly be asking for more, and yet what I really wanted for a split second was to be in more familiar conditions. Isn't it funny how your mind works like that? I have half a mind to buy the next pigskin I see, because as you can assume they're sort of hard to come by out here! :) 

That was probably the strongest sense of homesickness I've felt yet. All the other awkward moments and uncomfortable situations have been the result of getting settled into a new place, and maybe sprinkled here and there with pricks of needing the familiar. So it's all very healthy and normal, I'd say.

So I spoke Spanish yesterday! It was awesome to feel and least somewhat competent in a foreign language, considering that I'm not catching on to Swedish nearly as quick as I had hoped.  (The class starts tomorrow though, so maybe it will be a different story in a few days.) I desperately wanted to know if this buried treasure of a flea market I had stumbled upon was going to be open again during the week sometime, but every person I stopped to ask if they spoke english replied with, "Nay." Finally I heard two people speaking Spanish to each other, so I approached them and managed to get my questions answered. In a fragmented, choppy conversation we learned a little about each other, and I discovered that even after a year of living in Sweden, they had not yet picked up on the language either. This confirmed my thoughts about the languages I've been exposed to: If you learn Spanish first, languages like French and Italian will come easier for you. If you learn German first, Dutch and Swedish will come easier. When it comes to foreign languages, I'm in the Spanish school of thought, so it may take a little more time to try to break that mindset to learn Swedish. That being said, if I listen to Swedish for long enough, I can hear how similar some of the words actually are to English! Reading it is another story, but to hear someone say, "Tack su meekhyet" (phonetically written), it's not that difficult to understand that they mean, "Thank you so much." So I'm pretty confident there will be a positive outcome to my studies :)

Alright this is getting pretty long so I'm going to wrap it up here in a second. I just want to share about the types of cultures represented in this program real quick. I mentioned before that people from four different countries were playing frisbee together yesterday. Two americans, a canadian, four germans, and a dutch girl all ate brunch together before that. I had wine and cheese with two French students last night. I figured out my way to town with an Iranian boy at the beginning of the week, and had a discussion about real estate in the States with a boy from Hungary. Needless to say, I am entirely submerged in a pool of varying cultures. There are some students who have asked me and the other primarily english-speaking students to correct them when their english is incorrect (in fact a few of them actually came here to improve their english!), and there are others who, I would contend, have better english than I do! Basically the learning never stops. :)

Miss you all! Write me! :)

kt