friendships, boxes and snow

Thanks a lot for all your supportive and creative ideas regarding my last post. Finding new friends is really hard, meeting new people is pretty easy and most people are talkative, but to find the people you connect with and have a lot in common is a lot more difficult and will probably take a long time.

Last night I went for a drink after class with some people from my previous Swedish course. It was fun, we talked, shared our experiences with the Swedish culture and how we are trying to integrate. You always have a lot to talk to people which are in the same situation and are experiencing the same cultural differences. But is this enough to build a friendship? How often can we go for drinks and talk about how we found our jobs and what we did before we moved to Sweden? And do I want to hang out with foreigners or should I integrate more with Swedes? Of course it is a lot easier to find friends among foreigners as they are also looking to find friends. I met a nice Austrian girl in my second Swedish course that I took back in November, we’ve been taking the same classes since and I feel that I really connect with her. Soon we will go out with our husbands and hopefully they will also get along :)

I’ve been thinking a lot about this topic and your comments helped me a lot too. I came to realize that I don´t want to hang out with people for the sake of hanging out. I want to go out with interesting people that I and Mr. J.S. have things in common with. It will take time to find new and old good friends and that’s ok, we are in no rush :)

What else is new? Oh, our goods have been collected in Switzerland last week and will hit the road by truck tomorrow. 33 boxes will arrive here next Thursday. I can´t even remember what I packed in those 33 boxes. I know that about 9 boxes are my kitchen stuff. And about 2 boxes are photo albums and decoration material. Some are clothes, some are shoes, about 10 are Mr. J.S. computer stuff, or at least that’s how I labelled them :), but 33 boxes? That’s a lot of boxes!!! But at least then we will have ALL our stuff in one country again. I better find space for 33 boxes as we don´t have a storage room yet (we are on the waiting list for one…) Guess I will be going to IKEA again and buy an additional wardrobe. I anyhow need to buy some other stuff for the apartment. Good that my sister is coming tomorrow!

Other than that there is still a lot of snow and it looks like it is going to stay for a while. Stockholm looks like winter-wonderland, which is beautiful and romantic, especially since during the couple of hours that we have light, the sun is shining!