Home again, home again, jiggidy jig.

I have been waiting for a conclusive moment to put the bookend upon my journey. I think that it has come with transcripts, midterms, and the fresh suburban air of Doylestown. Even while giving a presentation to prospective study abroad students I felt like I was still processing the experience and knew that what light I could shed for them would barely give them any insight into what lies ahead. The experience is unique for each individual. I have kept in touch with two dear friends from the trip and love that we can share that time together as well as our new lives. As with entering Madrid, I am not suffering from any sort of culture shock on my return. I think that cultures are interesting but life itself is what causes the shock for me. I am faced with new ideas to ponder, new arguments to pursue, and new conflicts to confront regardless of my present culture. Perhaps it is just the unending process of growing up, but I have been realizing that life is hard. Saying it is hard makes the assumption I thought it would be easy which I indeed subconsciously constructed and now must reconstruct. This trip helped me along on that process of reconstructing the thoughts and assumptions I had made. Life is begining to look more complex than I had ever imagined. I am hardly finishing a journey at all as new and unobserved experiences confront me daily. And so I press on.

day four and much to say

What a wonderful ride we've been having!
We are in our first hostel because we have been riding overnight trains. It is really grose and that is coming from two girls who can stomach a lot. They are fixing the shower now, but I took my first shower in three days in a moldy stall behind an unlocked door with a curtain hanging from two loops (one after I tried to pull it closed) and no hot water. We had a good laugh and now understood why this was the cheapest we could find. The people here are very nice, and as humanity passifies the greatest of agonies, we will be just fine.
I have not been having deep pensive moments because we are moving fast and laughing a lot. Not to mention, I am carying all of my belonging from the past 4 months on my back and behind me. It is histerical to see us trying to maneuver through some narrow bends, but there are generally elevators and storage places.
Today we arrived in Rome and saw the Vatican City along with Treve Fountain. We are going to bed early tonight so we can wake early and see the Coluseum. I am very excited, but do not know if I will sleep well tonight. Luckily, if I do not get to see everything in Rome, I tossed my coin into the fountain ensuring my return! And I do hope to return, this is a very special place, with or without showers.
I think this could be my only internet time, so this may be the last update, so sleep soundly knowing my face still smiles abroad. However, a place to lay my head in comfort without a man from border control waking my sleep at 3 am, is greatly anticipated!

In the constant twilight of Sweden.

Again change stares me in the face as the upcoming adventure of inter railing.  Early tomorrow morning we head from Eskilstuna to Stockholm and it all begins.  I am excited as well as little anxious.  Mrs. Rogers has done two month long inter rail trips and her tales sound wonderful.  It makes me excited to build my own.  There is so much to see in such a short time, yet we will pause for four days in Rome.  

Writing these entries and looking over them, none of it seems totally real.  To say I will be in Denmark tomorrow or that I have just been to the Louvre sounds obsurd, but while it happens it is believeable.  It is difficult to express such strong yet cliche phrases.  

I must prepare myself for my trip by finishing 'Angels and Demons' by Dan Brown.  Everyone has been recommending it and finally I started reading it to get ready for Rome.  It is indeed, 'a breathless, real time adventure, exciting, fast pace' read.  I have already learned more about church history and the Vatican City than I knew before and will be thrilled to relive the adventure in the city itself.  Lucky me.  So will they find the antimatter?  I will find out soon.  

Now, I bid farewell to Sweden.  Hey do (that means goodbye). 

Greetings yet again, from Sweden.  Although it is Christmas day, the Christmas festivities are through and we are snacking on left overs, playing with new toys, chewing new candy.  Terriffic. 

Presents leaked across all open carpet space and flooded the entire living room as the tree stood  looking smaller than before.  Christmas had brought expected and unexpected surprises to each one of us.  A new furry vest or a fashionable bag.  The Rogers kindly included me and bought me some Swedish trinkets, small enough to fit in my bag home.  It was beyond what I had expected, but the Christmas cheer is indeed quite contagious to whoemever sits by the tree, so the foreigner along with great grandma were included.  

Snow fell through the morning enough to blanket our surroundings.  We children ( I spent a semester convincing myself I am nearly an adult, but on Christmas I opened gits earliest and sat at the kid table) woke as the sun was rising and quietly opened stockings as the parents slept and prepared the porridge.  It was a scene Dickens would have been proud of and lavished with sentimental adjectives.  I am so glad to be here and the Rogers have included me so graciously.  

We watched the Christmas favorite 'Mamma Mia'  at night and it felt right to watch it in Sweden.  They were proud of the Abba hits and told me lots of trivia about Abba and Swedish celebrities.  I was the only one who couldn't sing along.  

It is unusual to be at a different house during Christmas, but it does not feel very strange, because nothing is normal right now.  New things are ocurring all the time and it is a great experience. 

God Jul

Merry Christmas!

The tree is lit and the family is out finishing Christmas shopping as Alex (Victoria's younger brother) has an old SNL show on in the background and I am using their internet.  It is nice and quiet.  We have decorated ginger cookies, tasted Glögg, tasted Jul Must, and are going to begin baking tomorrow.  Not to mention, we watched their family favorite "Jingle all the Way" with Arnold Schwarzenegger last night.  I can't say that I liked it (the juxtaposition of a governor and a father desperately searching for toys in a hyperbolic Christmas slapstick rather confuses my hopes in humanity), but their enthusiasm was nice.  The Rogers have certainly shown me lots of Swedish foods and activities. 

The first day here Victoria and I walked around the lake that their neighborhood is built around.  Things looked just as she had explained them and shown me pictures of in high school.  I am not sure what to compare the terrain to.  There are mostly birch trees with lots of little birds.  The sun is not out very long here, it rises around 8:30 and starts to set at 3!  It has made the days feel very short, and right now at 5 it is pitch black.  The neighborhoods are very modest, small homes that are close together and well kept.  Because it is Christmas time, the windows are lined with candleholders that look like manorahs but are typical Swedish decorations.  There is a cozy feel to the neighborhood and the town too.  Today, Victoria took me around the town.  Just about everything is within a long walk or biking distance, so we circled the town quickly.  It is hard to describe without using the adjective Scandenavian.  My hair has been growing recklessly, so I ventured to get a hair cut when Victoria had to go to work.  Almost every Swede speaks English fluently so it is not hard, just a little embarassing to break the flow of Swedish converstaion with a hesitant, 'Hello, I do not speak Swedish'.  It worked out well and now I feel a bit more presentable.  

Then, I took the bus home which was perhaps my greatest accomplishment of the day.   Something about navigating a foreign city fills me with a sense of invincibility.  There was a group of little girls in front of me, and I figured if they can do it, I certainly can.   It seems to be an expected quality to understand foreign transit, so no one is as impressed as I am.  Therefore, I am bragging to my fellow unsavy public transit riding American friends.  I hope that is not insulting.  

I am not sure what we are doing tonight, maybe another Christmas movie, but the 24th is when all of the festivities happen.  Christmas day, is a time for sleeping in and going to the movies while Christmas eve is a full day of activities.  From morning to night, they say.  We are going to have quite the feast.  

I have finished yet another book that was supposed to keep me until the end of the trip, and the English section of the book store had mostly Nora Roberts and crime thrillers, so I picked up To Kill a Mocking Bird from Victoria's shelf.  I think I'll give it a second read tonight.  Victoria and I are trying to store up on rest before we depart for a wide eyed 9 days!

my bags are packed, i´m ready to go

On some hard days on this trip all I could wish for was my own bed in an English speaking town, but now I am feeling sentimentally attached to my neighborhood here in Madrid. I have packed my bags and went to the computer lab one last time to check up on things before I head to Sweden and now I am feeling sad! I do want to leave and continue on with life, but it is hard to conclude such an experience.
So here I am ready to go, filled with these new lessons and experiences, but for some reason I feel like I need to sit and cry for a while. It is a sad sight to see my closet empty and the bright blue room just as I entered it. I have come and gone as many other students. Hopefully I will have myself together by the time I get to Sweden.
Carmen bough some Sidra for dinner tonight so we can have a toast. That should be lovely. So farewell Madrid, it has been a great time.

In two days, it will all change again.

Just as expected, the end is in sight. Even, as I was fully engaged in each moment I have still been surprised by the work of time. I have, as is my favorite hobby, been reflecting about this trip and feel like I am far different from the same girl who nervously got on her first international flight three and a half months ago. It is hard to sum up change while it is still occurring, so perhaps I will spend the rest of my life chasing after that ability. I know that my grammar and vocabulary skills have improved very little (my pre evaluation and post were only a few marks different) but that was hardly the entire purpose of the trip.

I was reminded that grammar was not the entire purpose of the trip the other day in class. My grammar professor had mentioned to us that there had been confusion with the administration and he was not going to get paid for teaching our class. Nonetheless, he stuck out the whole semester coming early in the morning three times a week to correct our ‘el’s’ and ‘la’s’. We organized to bring in gifts to show our appreciation, because our grammatically incorrect words were certainly not going to be enough- it could have even been insulting. So as we sat to take the exam, we gave him the gift basket filled with sweets from our respective countries. His face flushed and tears filled his normally sarcastic eyes and he kept saying, muchas gracias de mi corazon. He opened some of the cookies and snacks to share as we took the exam, and I think I did terribly on the test because I was so distracted and excited. But perhaps it is better to remember such a circumstance than whether Juan was expressing confusion or anger to Maria.

I still have to study tonight for one last exam. Four are finished with one more tomorrow afternoon. Never have I crammed in the fashion I did these past few days. I have received back very good grades so far, but the style of studying was out of character for me. Attention towards 16^th century Spanish literature fades quickly at the lure of almost anything else. It seems that my language skills are the least improved while I have learned so much in my other classes. An interesting circumstance- to be able to pass Spanish philosophy and art history but struggle in grammar. I know the terms for flying buttresses and stoicism but forget when to use subjunctive.

I have been exchanging numbers and addresses with my new friends and classmates as they begin to dwindle down to just a handful. Soon I will fit right back into the places that were waiting for me, but it will not be the same. That is okay, maybe even better. I look forward to a new challenge of re-assimilating. In the meantime, I have a short adventure to embark upon. I have heard that my stocking in Sweden is already hung along side the Rodgers’ normal five. Never could I have imagined the things I am doing these days and the ones to come. I am very appreciative and am doing the best of my ability to appropriately embrace it all. Though I am small, my ability to embrace is increasing along with my new and rich experiences.

Tomorrow to celebrate, my classmates and I are going to have one last “Madrid night”, rolling in around 6 or 7 as custom. I may have to get ready by going to bed early tonight, I don’t know how the madrileños manage to make that a normal schedule. Maybe I will learn the secret when I master grammar. Además, probaré.