This is the Most Poorly Written Post I’ve Ever Made

Hamish, Andrew, and Emily. I think I joined a gang. I’m not sure. I don’t know if I like it.

Andrew

We took this escalator up to a library and then when the library closed we tried to leave, but there was only this escalator and it only went up, so we had to use the handicap elevator???? I feel like this architect could have just planned it so much better

group hug! awww

Pablo and Jorge DJ-ing like bosses

yoooooo Pabloooooooo

Martin is an amazing dancer omg

Oh Narain

Aakanksha!

Martin wearing Andrew’s glasses

wow my lense is dirty

we woke up at 7 in the morning to walk Aakanksha to the bus stop

THIS IS THE BEST SCHOOL LUNCH I’VE EVER HAD!!!! ILY ST. ERIK’S GYMNASIUM! First time I’ve had curry too!

This is my ID. I’m lookin fresh to death, but my name isn’t Aaron??????? Or is there something my parents aren’t telling me?

Okay so I hung out with the losers (I say losers lovingly. That probably sounded mean if you don’t know me.) in the first picture all night and it was great and Muna from Kungsholmen came along which was super cool of her and I hope she didn’t hate us.

The next day I went to the train station to meet Andrew so that we could go to Södertälje together and he was late. Andrew, if you’re reading this, I haven’t forgiven you yet. He told me to meet him at 12:30, and he came at 1:13.

Moving on.

We walked around Södertälje a bit before meeting up with Breno and then later Narain, and then even later Hannah, Alejandra, and Jorge. We sat in this super amazing McDonalds for a long while before the DJ event started. (Jorge and Pablo take DJ-ing lessons and their club put on a charity event for kids with cancer. We all signed up to work it, but in the end only the 18-year-olds were allowed to work. Martin gave me his Crew shirt though, so it was all good on my end.) We got there and Pablo did some mixing and then we all stood around and talked/danced*.

That night we went home around midnight and because it was a sleepover we talked until 3. I then layed in the bed Hannah generously offered me (btw, if you’re reading this Hannah, you need to stop being so nice because it makes my stomach hurt and I feel awful taking things from you.) staring at the wall wondering how sleep happens. A little after four I think I fell asleep. The alarm went off at seven and that was the start of the day. Who needs eight hours of sleep? Certainly not me!**

We walked Aakanksha to the bus station and then went home. Narain called and he and Pablo met us outside the house, where from we walked to ICA to get some doughnuts for Hannah. Pablo is really generous and bought everyone doughnuts*** and wow, what a cutie. He stuffed a chocolate bar in my pocket and I ended up really needing it when I got to the train station to go back home because I hadn’t eaten anything all day. ily Pablo!! ❤

Idk what else to say? I hung out with Narain and Hannah all day because Pablo had to go to his host mom’s birthday. I love Hannah and Narain so much and it’s not like I can tell you our conversations? I seem to run into this problem a lot. We just sat around and made bad jokes for a few hours . <I hope that works for you.

Then I headed home. The bus and train ride home seemed to last years and I really appreciated riding to Södertälje with Andrew and being able to take the bus to Trossa to Hannah’s house with everyone because company makes the time go by so much faster and easier.

FIRST DAY OF SCHOOL!

I got up at seven (ughhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh seven) to go to school and I had a really hard time finding my first class. My room was A4107F, but the doors went G, D, C. No F. So I went to the room where F should have been (it didn’t have any number on it) and I asked the teacher and she was like “Go away, I need to start my lesson. I don’t know who you are, I can’t help you.” in Swedish and I was like “UM?!” and I’m desperately trying to explain my situation in bad Swedish and this other teacher guy comes up and he’s like “Who are you?” and he’s speaking English now, so I was able to explain myself completely and he still wanted to kick me out until I showed him my schedule. I think they made a few phone calls wherein Jonas explained who I was. It was all very stressful.

The kids in my class are super cool and super nice and I’ll take pictures of the school and classrooms soon.

In all, it was the best day of school ever and I can’t wait to go back.

*When I refer to all of us dancing, I’m excluding myself. Social situations with that kind of pressure give me a lot of anxiety and I know I may seem like a super cool person on the outside, but I’m almost always uncomfortable with everything and it takes a lot of effort for me to even talk to people I’m unsure around, much less dance in a dimly lit room with them. If I ever dance around you it’ll be impromptu and probably after several nights without sleep when I’ve lost all sense of boundary.

**That’s a lie. Today think I fell asleep in every single class. My eyes kept closing and when I tried to keep them open they were so heavy it hurt. I want to go to bed right now, but I need to make this post before I forget everything! 😦 I’ll do the ESA thing when I get home from school, Dad. I’m dying right now.

***I told him “NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO” because I can’t let people be nice to me and also three hours of sleep makes you want to lay down and die, not eat doughnuts.

In which I get progressively more lost

?

it’s a watertower?

oh, is it really that easy? Just hang a left?

That dark place on the hill that I went to used to be a fort or something? In 1654 I think it said. Now it’s a cafe and there’s the remains of a cannon road on the other side of it. I accidentally deleted the video clip of me explaining all of that.

Ollie, I found it!

http://onputlocker.me/enders-game-2013/ < HOORAY!

Also, I got lost trying to find the ice skating hall and it was really pathetic and scary. I walked around for about an hour before I finally got there, and by then I was really frustrated and a lil tired so I only skated for about an hour 😦

I think it’s really unrealistic in books when the main character gets a massive amount of information once (instructions, directions, prophecies, etc) and then they can remember everything. Especially since they’re usually told these things when they’re stressed out or caught off guard or when they don’t really understand why they’re getting this information or how important it is. When I ask “How do I get there?” and someone says “Straight on and then a right” I still get lost. I need Dora the Explorer to be reminding me ever three minutes where I’m going or else it’s not going to turn out.

One Week Later

Dear Lord am I bad at this.

Okay, so on Monday? Monday. Let’s say it was Monday. I left at noon to catch an SJ train to Hannah’s house. The ride was an hour or so long, and then I got off at Nykoping or however it’s spelled. I had to find the bus station from there. After a few attempts at asking for directions (which is really difficult when people use words you aren’t expecting. Mostly I just followed where they pointed.) I walked a kilometer to where I was supposed to be. LUCKILY I had 40 minutes to do it, which I clearly needed. UNLUCKILY it was raining the whole time. It has been raining ever since.

So, I got to Hannah’s house and she’s going this little dog named Willy, and he’s super cute and he total fulfilled my dog petting needs. We decided to go out that night, and when I say night, I mean afternoon except for it gets dark at 4pm, so I mean night. She took me to an old burned down castle and then we went to a coffee house so that we could dry off, as water was literally pooling on my shoulders.

I feel like I’m using a lot of comas, but I can’t help myself.

Anyway, we went back home and then we watched A Haunting in Connecticut and Insidious before going to bed.

TUESDAY:

We went back into the town (the bus ride is like 25 minutes, but there’s nothing to do where she lives as far as I’m aware) and we met up with some Australian girls. We ate at Mekka, which is this Exchange Student Mecca, and then we walked around for a while looking for a Halloween costume for Hannah. We stumbled into a few stores that we shouldn’t have, and if you want to hear about it ask me on Skype or in school, because it’s too inappropriate to post here.

yes, hello Future Kate. I’m sorry I didn’t write down this particular adventure. I’m sure you haven’t entirely forgotten the details though. Best Wishes, Past Kate. 

That night I got Hannah hooked on American Horror Story, and now her life is all downhill from this point.

Wednesday:

We went to the castle again so that I could take pictures and then we went to the highest point in Nykoping and sat up there for an hour or so before going into a cafe and waiting for my bus to come. It was a very sad a tiring day. Hannah is lovely and her parents are lovely and her dog is lovely and I wanted to stay for another week because it was all so quaint. Like Fond du Lac on steroids.

The way home was tricky tricky tricky. I had like 3 buses and a train to locate, which really shouldn’t be so difficult, but I’m paranoid. I thought that I had missed my stop a million times, and it got dark so fast that I couldn’t be sure where we were.

THURSDAY:

I went to Farida’s house and had a Swedish dag with her, Jenny, and Josephine. I think I can steal some of the photos from facebook, but they haven’t been posted yet. We shall wait with baited breath.

We went to a pizza place (see photos) and then we watched a movie called Ego and then we played a board game about Africa and diamonds and I think our English teacher would love it. ALSO we (actually it was more Farida and Josephine, I just watched) made choklad bullar (chocolate balls) and they were out of this world, I love chocolate so much. My skin should be way worse than it is.

Friday:

I felt really ill. probably because I’ve been eating so poorly of late. Blame the chocolate and greasy pizza. I stayed in bed all day and slept. Then I woke up and we had fish sticks and I went back to bed because I was dying. I couldn’t really sleep because I’d already slept 18 hours so I watched Man Of Steel and I highly recommend it. I should update that list of mine.

This is me being excited about trains

My train!!

basically I’m going to hogwarts

You’ve got some dirt on your nose. Did you know?

ALL ABOARD

This reminded me of Alaska Young

Me being scared that I’m on the wrong bus

Inside a church

theres so much gold

ring a ling

a wonderfully gloomy day

these clouds are so dramatic

Hannaahhahahaha

dramatic

such drama

high school musical?

Farida with a calzone that size of a puppy

how

how am I supposed to eat this?

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!

Poetry

I’m not one of those girls who has a poetry journal full of “deep” thoughts and bad similes. My first class today was music though, and our project is to write a song. The group nominated me to be the lyricist because since I’m the singer it’s going to have to be in English. I wrote a bad poem (see the bottom of this post) and they all think it’s really great because I don’t think they understand it fully. They’re all really good at guitar and piano and they came up with music on the spot, so I’m the weak one in the group. Hooray! They all seem really cool and nice though, so maybe we’ll all become friends and they’ll forgive me for sucking so much.

In my SFF class Davide (the Italian boy) and I are the oldest. There are five fourteen year old boys in this class and omg I forgot how immature fourteen year olds are, boys in particular. They were disruptive all class long and it was super annoying, but Davide and I shared many meaningful annoyed looks at each other because I couldn’t understand his accent and he couldn’t understand my English. So maybe once we learn Swedish we can get past our language barrier and be friends.

My religion teacher was no where to be found (Cecil Baldwin teaches that class too) and I think he maybe went home because his daughter was sick or something, because I remember him saying something to me about just getting back from maternity leave. That’s right. Maternity leave. Because Sweden is amazing and equality reigns. This is a feminist paradise.

I got on the train and went into the city because I needed another pair of jeans and some sweaters and I got some (it was so hard to spend money, you don’t understand. I don’t like shopping that much, and I HATE spending money, but it was important and now I won’t be freezing all winter long.

After I was done shopping, I went in search of the library my school buds took me to earlier, and I was walking for almost three hours because, even though I had a map, I was lost. The map only named major roads, and I couldn’t find any. I asked for directions a few times, but every time I asked, they would point me in the opposite direction the last person pointed me in. Eventually I got there and my legs were having little muscle spasms and wow. It was all uphill and I was carrying a lot and don’t judge me.

Anyway, I picked up a million books about religion so that I can write this thesis-like thing that they want from us for Humanistics. It’s a huge paper that has to have a least ten sources and you have to explain why the sources are legit and then you have to write a companion piece demonstrating what you learned. I think I’ll write a short fiction story. In English, just to stick to them for making me work so hard.

Sorry about the lack of pictures. My camera is dead and I only have one adapter, so I have to decide what is priority in the charging queue, and the camera is dead last.

Here’s the terrible poem I have to sing in front of my class. It had to be about a key, and we couldn’t decide what the key was to, so we made it a key to a heart, house, and lock. Hooray for indecision!

We met on a Saturday night

The bus was running late, the rain was a fright

I thought you were cute so I opened my umbrella

I thought we could share, you seemed an alright fella

How could I have known how wrong I was

How could you mislead me so

Why would you go and break my heart

Say you love me,  then let me go

And I’ve been told a hundred times

That it’s not you, it’s me.

I don’t know why I thought you were different

Why I gave you my key

I let you into my house

I let you into my heart

We were always supposed to be together

I don’t know how to live now that we’re apart

We declared our love at Westbridge

Our lock still hangs for all to see

I wish I could tear it off

But you threw away our key

Though years are passed

And other lovers have come

I can’t make myself forget you

You’re still the song I hum

And I’ve been told a hundred times

That it’s not you, it’s me.

I don’t know why I thought you were different

Why I gave you my key

I let you into my house

I let you into my heart

We were always supposed to be together

I don’t know how to live now that we’re apart

Now that we’re apart

Playing Hooky

I didn’t have school again today. Thank goodness it’s Labour Day, or else I might have felt bad about it. All three of the teachers that teach the first 3 hours of my school day were missing, so I left at eleven to go to Gamla Stan so that I could go to *My First Rotary Meeting*. I thought that I was going to get lost when I was going to or when I got there, but no. I’m pretty good at reading maps, so I found the meeting place right away and I had an hour before I had to be there. So I wandered around and it was pretty boring and uneventful.

I’m such a good blogger. Anyway.

Went to the meeting, it was nice. Everyone shook my hand and they all held on for far too long while the continued to talk to me. Business as usual. I think the most awkward thing was that I didn’t know what to say to this people except for “nice to meet you!!!1! 🙂 Thanks for having me!! :D” and so there were many awkward pauses and such. Then we had lunch (mine was a salad that was mostly cheese and halves of tomatoes. ?) and I noticed that a lot of the rotary members were female and also not elderly which was strange and refreshing.

The meeting was pretty interesting from what I could understand. The presenter was from Ghana and she was talking about a program funded by Swedish tax dollars that helps lower income countries set up research teams so that they can help themselves with SCIENCE. Hooray for science!

Then I got on the train to go back to school only I didn’t go back to school because I got lost. I got off one stop early because I thought that I could find the way back to school from that stop and I felt like walking some and the train was stuffy but uuUUUGHHHHH. I stumbled into the big city, eyes bleary, disoriented as a newly born calf. I walked around trying to follow signs, and it started pouring out (I had my umbrella, but my jeans still got soaked) and I must have walked for about an hour before I finally found a green line subway station and went home because by that time school was over.

I feel like I should have been more scared than I was? I mean, I was sooo lost and none of the maps I found were comprehensive, but I was more concerned about the rain than the fact that I was walking up and down streets that all looked exactly the same and could only find subway stations that had the wrong color line. idk, man.

So that’s why I didn’t have any school today. I think I’ll get a map of Stockholm tomorrow morning so that I never get lost in the rain again.