AT LAST

Indeed

We made a gingerbread house!!!!!

I saved his little hate in case I should find a little cat to wear the little hat

I through with apologizing. I  know I’m late, forgiving me is up to you now, I don’t feel like begging.

Where to start??? Um. Where did I leave off last? Guys, I don’t even read this blog. What are you doing with your lives?

I guess I’ll start with updates:

I know nothing. I am Jon Snow. I’ll start off with what I do know then (which isn’t much)

1. I’m for sure not moving to Nykoping
2. I’m for sure not going to Turkey
3. I may be changing schools
4. I may be changing families
5. I may be going to London
6. I may be dying of cold
7. I may be dying of heat in a parallel universe????

I think I might be going through menopause? Because half the time I’m so cold I could chop my hands off and not notice, and the other half the time I’m so hot that I’d like to bash my head against the wall until everything stops. I think that’s what menopause feels like, right? No one ever taught us about menopause because we live in a patriarchal society and therefore menopause is not of import. jk jk (maybe.)

Quick Side-Thought:

Sometimes I’m just staring off listlessly and I think the weirdest things? Today I was riding home and I remember Aaron Baldauf’s hair. Wow I miss that hair. I mean, Aaron’s alright, but his hair. Wowee. That was some really great hair. Monuments should to be built for that hair. I pray he should never bald. God bless.

BACK ON TOPIC!

I saw a super cool Lucia Thing. My younger host sister, Saga, swims and so we went to see her do her singing thing? I don’t know what I was expecting. I guess I thought that they would all stand around the pool and sing or something, but they JUMPED IN THE POOL WITH THEIR CANDLES AND MY MIND WAS BLOWN! Then there were these really attractive guys on the diving board holding torches, and I felt like I was in an episode of FREE! because they were wearing the same suits and everything. At the end they jumped into the water and my life was made. God Santa Lucia, everyone!! Jajaja

tha pool

Sagaaaaa

Here’s a really long video of the thing:

I saw Astrid’s ballroom dancing recital and while it was really cool to see them all dance (and the little kids were super cute and reminded me of my days in ballet) I felt SOOOO bad for her because her dance partner quit on her and she had to pretend he was there. She totally made up for a lack of partner, but it couldn’t have been easy to practice like that. In fact, there was only one girl with a partner, and 2 without besides Astrid. Boys. Ugh.

I also saw a theatre thing that Astrid’s school at been working on a few weeks ago (sorry for not mentioning it!) and I could understand a lot of it because *acting* and I was, once again, thoroughly impressed.

 Astrid is the one dressed as a man in the middle. I thought it was funny that every scene that required a man, the man was played by a girl, and then one of the only scenes that was gender neutral, the only two boys were cast together in.

It snowed here! I rejoiced by running outside and catching a few on my tongue. People be like “yo, haven’t you seen snow before?” and I be like “Självklart, mah home dog. I live in da nort. Snow da best doe, ja feel?” Now the snow is gone though, and I am very sad. Please accept this video as proof of the snow:

This is my school just as I was getting out. Hello, Moon.

Here are the results of today’s little trip:

stadshus

Oliver said that I could go up in the tower, but sadly I could not. The man at the gift shop told me that it’s only open in the summer, so I guess we can go up there later.

pretty pritty

Riddarholmenskyrkan. I was going to read you the history of it, but there were people around, so that’d be embarrassing.

It’s a door, if you weren’t aware. I know it’s awfully ornate for an entryway, but so it is.

Parliament House

StorKyrkan

Here’s a video of the changing of the guards:

Here are some unconnected thoughts:

We’re going to the highest point in Stockholm for New Year’s Eve so that we can see all of the fireworks. It’s going to be great! I’m making cookies and I think we’ll hang out for a few hours before it. Yay! I really love all of the exchange kids. A few of these people are so tragically amazing, I just, I just. Ugh. I’m so mad that we’re never going to see each other when this is all over. I hope that college lives up to all of my expectations and I can be surrounded by people like these again. It’s so dumb of me to be sad about it at this point in the exchange because 1) there’s so much time left! 2) I knew this was going to happen. I should be more prepared for this. I’m too emotional. Get over yourself, Kate!

One last thing: I’ve been pronouncing plebeian wrong my entire life as well. It’s pleBEian not PLEbeian. Emphasis, man. Gets me everytime.

Nicholas Charles Horning, You Had Better Skype Me

Last night I went to the Imagine Dragons concert and AHHHHHHHHHHH OMG it was so amazing! I’ve never been to a concert before, so this completely blew my mind.

They had two opening acts: Moth and Flame & Dan Croll

I thought M&F was good, but then Dan Croll happened and they were even better and then Imagine Dragons came on and I wanted to die because they were amAZIIING!!! We were the second or third row from the front, so we saw everything (except for Hannah who is 5’1” and could only see people’s backs. Poor Hannah 😦 ) The whole thing was super intense and I could feel the bass in the bones of the people around me.

Since the refrigerator here is broken, the milk keeps freezing. I quickly discovered that there was yogurt in the door, and it’s been there the whole time, but I’ve never looked at it close enough to notice it. I’m afraid my host family is going to be very upset with me pretty quickly here because I LOVE YOGURT. I love it so much, I think about it all the time. Risifrutti doesn’t matter  when there’s a liter of yogurt and granola at your disposal. Sometimes I’m laying in bed trying to fall asleep and I think about how excited I am to eat yogurt for breakfast the next morning. It’s getting pretty pathetic, you guys.

Today we had hole time for humanistics. Only it wasn’t for an hour like it usually is, it was for three because Humanistics lasts forever. Afterwards we had E-Block until 5:10. Some woman was going to come in and talk about her book about Pompeii, and I really didn’t want to go for several reasons.

1) I didn’t go to Rome with the class, so the book doesn’t really matter to me. I mean, it might have, but

2) I didn’t read the book. So,

3) I wouldn’t be able to ask any questions about it. And

4) If I were to ask questions, they would have to be in Swedish. My Swedish isn’t advanced enough to ask questions about Pompeii and books. Besides that, my heart beats really fast and I sweat for like ten minutes after I answer a simple question in class. I don’t think I could handle the level of participation this sort of thing requires.

5) omg, 5:10? You’re kidding me. That’s less than an hour ago that I would have gotten out of school. Ughhhhhhhh

So, to conclude this thrilling story I went home half way through hole time because after talking to some of my classmates they said it wouldn’t be a big deal if I did.

Tomorrow I don’t have school, so I guess I’ll return my severely overdue library books (Sorry mom. You were right. I can’t handle the responsibility of library books.) and do some NaNoWriMo stuff. I’ll have some stuff for you Ollie!

Titling these is super hard, you have no idea

Philosophy = I don’t know what happened, but I saw Cecil Baldwin’s full arm tattoo and was super disappointed. Jonatan said it might me a Satanic worshiper thing though, so I guess I can always pretend it’s something scary and cool. I don’t know, it was like a pitchfork in a circle?

Svenska 3= We read poetry about death and then I translated one of the poems and had to write a super detailed and disgusted essay on something that happens in my daily life. Mine was a really surreal piece about waiting for the train in the rain. I didn’t read it aloud because I was embarrassed by how freaky it was.

Lunch = penne noodles and hamburger?

Natural Science = nap time because I couldn’t remember my password for the school computers

Music Class = I still suck at music, but Rickard was just as hopeless, so I don’t feel too terrible. They wanted me to stay after school and teach him how to harmonize though and I had a thing, so I recorded me singing the song with the piano so that he can figure it out on his own this weekend. I really hope he pushes the due date up to next thursday. We are soooo not ready.

Break = I went home and had a meltdown because the internet wasn’t working and I couldn’t figure out where to go to meet my rotary contact and I ended up getting there a half hour late and ughhhh.

Dorren = That’s with a swedish ‘O’, to be clear. I hung out with a girl named Hanna (Hannah?) and a guy named Oscar (Oskar?), and Hanna and I watched Oscar edit photos for an hour, and we talked and ate sandwiches and drank tea and it was a grand time. Then Christal picked me up and we went for vegetarian food and IT WAS THE BEST, OMG! I’m so tired of meat, this was a blessing! Then I forgot my phone charger so I went back and hung out with Hanna  and Oscar some more and then we all went to the train station and here I am. What a day. I want to go back to Dorren because those kids were really cool and I like them a lot and they listen to good music and the photo editing was really interesting and yay!

Engelska och MUSIC TRYOUTS

Sorry I’m so late posting! I’ve been really tired every time I had time to write. On Friday I only had English class. It started at 9:50 and ended at 10:50 or so and I was almost late to class because the train was late. Debbie was actually late, so I didn’t feel too bad about sitting in my seat 2 seconds before the teacher closed the door. I was going to sit next to Nick Baker (real name: Jonathan) but he only had one seat next to him and I thought maybe he was saving it for someone, so instead I sat by myself and it was awkward and THEN he turned and started talking to me and no one ended up sitting next to him and omg I should have just sat there instead of being nice to his imaginary friend. Debbie came in late and sat next to me though, so I didn’t look like a total freak.

The English teacher’s name is Thomas. With and H. Which is weird because no one has and H in the middle of their name here. He told us it was a problem for him. He didn’t know I was an exchange student at first and when he couldn’t think of a word (tailor, draught, etc) I gave it to him and he was really impressed. Then he gave us these worksheets, and it was stupid because we had to match the English word to its Swedish meaning and obviously I can’t do that even though I’m fluent in English. So Debbie and I worked on it together, which was against the rules, but no one cared. I told her the English definition of the word and she told me which of the Swedish words that sounded like. I think I was helping her cheat as much as she was helping me to, but when the teacher came over, she said she was helping ME and the teacher was all “Why?? You’ve just got to read the text, it’s not that hard!” and I was all, “I only know conversational Swedish cause I’m American.” and then he was visibly less impressed with my earlier English feats. He flipped my paper over and read the answers I gave to some questions (which were all sarcastic because he SAID we weren’t turning it in and I didn’t think anyone was going to read it.) and pressured me to write better ones and I said “ok” and he left me alone.

I walked around town until 11:45 and ate McDonalds because I’m a fatty and then I went back to the school early because I the choir room is on the 7th floor and I didn’t want to be out of breath for tryouts.

Didn’t matter that I came early because as soon as I got out there, the teacher lady came out and said she could take me a half hour early. Seriously woman. I’m going to puke.

Lucky for me she talked for a while and I got my breath back. She tested my range and said I was definitely a soprano. This surprises me because I sound like Morgan Freeman when I talk. Whatever. Then I sang The Black Swan for her and she really liked it and asked me a bunch of questions about the composer and the opera it came from and I’m SO HAPPY I was curious about all of that Thursday night because I researched all of that and I knew the answers. 10 points for the nerd.

She had me sight read this Swedish song on the sound “nu” and I didn’t do so hot because I didn’t magically gain the ability to sight read over the summer, but I wasn’t absolutely wretched, and she said “It’s always hard in the beginning, but you’ll get better.”

So I think maybe she likes me. We find out on Monday.

Details

Förlåt for the vagueness of my last post. Here’s some details my father asked me to include in case any of you are interested:

I can sleep now. The week before I came here I could only sleep 3-4 hours at a time and the night before I came I only got 3 hours of sleep. I slept for an hour on the 7 hour plane ride over to Amsterdam and was awake until 22:00. Then I slept for eight hours. At camp I slept for six hours each night before waking up at 4:00 covered in sweat and needing to take a shower. Last night I slept nine hours. It’s getting better and I don’t feel sick anymore.

Before I left I had really bad allergies and couldn’t hardly breathe when I went outside. Now I go for walks all the time because it’s not difficult for me to. There’s  no ragweed in Sweden and the house I live in doesn’t have carpet, so the pet dander doesn’t get stuck in it. I feel great!

To my surprise, the seat I  got on the plane ride to Amsterdam was in the front row so I could put my legs out in front of me. A Dutch couple was sitting next to me and they gave me their dinner rolls for some reason and I didn’t understand what they were asking me when they were trying to give them to me so I said, “what?” and they put their bread on my tray. MMM. Carbs. The meals they served us were reallllly good. I want to write a nice review for the quality of that KLM plane. 10/10.

Customs was easy. Probably because it wasn’t American customs. It was basically going through security again. It took two seconds and we found our gate without a hitch. The Amsterdam airport is really nice. There’s nature everywhere and special recliners that you can sleep in. Sabrina and I went outside and sat on a deck and drank coffee while we waited for our plane to come in. I didn’t know travelling could be so comfortable!

The food here is pretty normal if you ate meat all of the time before you came over. I hadn’t eaten meat in about a year because my parents didn’t make me and because I was hardly ever home for dinner. Here, I’m really hungry by the time each meal comes around and it would be rude to not eat, so I swallow everything down with water because I wouldn’t be able to otherwise. We had thai food for some reason at camp. Even my host parents thought that was odd. The water tastes the same as it does back home and so does the milk, so it’s not that big of a deal to act the way I do.

We get up in the morning because we go to bed at 22:00. It’s about 7:00 when we get up each morning. They have work and school and soon, so will I. I don’t know anything about my school next, but we tour it tomorrow.

Some of the kids I met at camp wanted me to come to their homes here in Sweden and one of them wanted all of us to come to India and we all thought that it would be cool if we could host each other at some point. I don’t think that it was a serious though, cool as it sounds.

The cats sleep with me here the way that they did at home. There’s one in my lap right now. She’s calico and purrs the way Mr. Kitty did. You can probably hear her upstairs.

I think I broke my hair straightener. It smells like death. I plugged it in and I thought it was going to be okay because all of my other thing that I’ve plugged in worked fine, but my hair straightener filled the entire lower level with it’s stench of burning flesh. Ulf and Astrid came downstairs to talk to me and they didn’t mention the rancid smell, so I don’t know what to think about that. Do they think I smell like that naturally? I hope not.

kk, peace out.