the end of scantrip the second

 i regret to inform you that as i sit writing this to you, i am no longer in the great land of scandinavia. however, since i am instead in Neuchâtel, Switzerland, the regret is somewhat softened. but first things first!

so last week was quite sad, seeing the guys at the salvation army for the last time but at least i got to see everyone that i wanted to since most of them knew it was my last week so made more of an effort to be there at the tutoring/homework hours. thursday was my last day there, and then thurs night was the night of our housewarming.

then on the sunday i had planned with katie to go to norway and i'm really glad she was able to come at that point. i wasn't getting that excited until we were crossing the bridge to norway, and then our bus had to go through like a customs thing where you basically drive into this warehouse, and a cute dog comes up and sniffs the whole bus.

and then we were in OSLO,norway!i have to say, i'm really quite fond of oslo and am a little concerned that i might actually find it more beautiful than stockholm.

this is the opera house which is a genius building. you see the sloping roofs? you can walk all the way up them, to the top. its like one of those optical illusion things

 these are our belgian hostel mates jerôme & françois, who we met on the night we got there, and then they showed us around oslo a bit on the second day. the aussies made pasta, the belgians made pancakes

 so one of the 'must-see' spots in oslo is this somewhat strange naked statue park. 

 like what am i meant to make of that?

 on the second day, the belgians went back to belgiumania and left us to fend for ourselves and we had in mind to go to holmen kollen which is a fun word to say but also the name of the ski jump place that norway rebuilt for last years winter olympics or something. we got there but because it was so foggy, there wasnt much point going to the top to see the non-view. a bit of a shame but what can you do.

 and then that evening back at the hostel we met some new friends and went out to a bar and had yummy but expensive cider. we had marie from germany, gosha (?spelling?) from poland and claudia from switzerland

got back to JÖNKÖPING, sweden on late wednesday night and i spend thurs morning finishing up packing and my lovely housemates made me lunch, so from the back left its joy, and wei mei (both from taiwan), and then katie and lisa (germany)

then i left for ARLANDA cos i'd booked to stay near the airport for my flight out in the morning and the cheapest option was a cool hostel that has been made out of an used-to-be plane!

and then the next morning i got on a real, functioning plane but i'll have to update you on that another day

its a whole new (housewarming/farewell party) world

housemate lisa a.k.a. alice in wonderland

really cool guys from the salvation army coming as themselves or aladdin 2011 (reza's joke not mine! i'm not racist at all!)

captain jack sparrow, will turner and aladdin no.3

joy, another one of my housemates and david both as the incredibles!

tinkerbell and pocahontas, who MADE HER OWN DRESS FIY

everyone put in a stack of effort and dressed up tremendously! memorable night

Go jump in a lake

what i've been up to since the last time we blogged:

- visited colourfully wooden Habo church

- went to Jönköping kultur day in which there were more people on the bus back home than there was out in the festival the whole day. woo hoo Jönköping the party town

- swam in a lake. sun was out and it was beautiful but the water was still freezing since it is autumn in sweden after all. discovered serenity.

- went to a farmers market, which again by Jönköping standards means 3 stalls with a couple of apples and a handful of eggs for sale. no i exaggerate, there were 7 stalls

- discovered free movies on youtube

- made pizza without yeast..

..but it was actually really yum

- played risk with katie, her grandma and fam!

- finished my TEFL course

- found an app that teaches you how to speak chiu chow language (chinese dialect that my dad and his fam speak)! intend to learn some handy phrases such as "please pass the soy sauce" and "next year i'll have another baby so you can shout me dinner"

- started teaching my flatmates swedish in the evening

- having a really good time at the salvation army. its been great cos i've been there a bit longer now so have gotten to know some of the guys there better so have some regular ones who i tutor and work with. they're all really good guys and actually appreciate someone to practice english with so thats been really encouraging. definitely a lot of fun.

i've got about one more month in sweden, which feels about right. still haven't really missed home at all, especially not with the shoddy weather i hear you guys've been having but i hope you all are well and drop me a line!

really nice restaurant right next to the water in goteborg with the lovely anna-lena!

Settling down in Jönköping

re-reading my last post i realised it sounded a bit of a downer though i guess it was at the time. however now i bear good news as things have definitely looked up and i think the day after i was confirmed with the Salvation Army (so not the Red Cross, someone was mistaken). the salvos have housing here in their building which they set up for refugee youth that have left without their parents, and at the moment most of the guys are from afghanistan. so they kinda learn to take care of themselves in these dorms and then eventually move out to live on their own (still supported/funded by the government/salvos), while at the same time, going to school and trying to learn swedish and get an education. there's people available to help them with homework, and i am one of them but so far they dont seem so interested in schoolwork (big surprise) so i've just been getting to know them. at the moment i'm there 3 days a week but i've told them i'm happy to do more if they want, so i might help out at the secondhand store or with the soup kitchen or something.

the first day i was there though, i realised how much my swedish sucks. i have an ok time understanding people though i have to concentrate really hard but i'm very rusty at formulating sentences out of my befuddled brain. but in any case i'm very happy to be able to practice and any practice is good practice.

fun fact, last weekend i went with katie to visit her grandma in goteborg which is sweden's second biggest city after stockholm. i went op-shopping a bit, got a cute vest (ash, you'll approve), and then went to anna-lena's for dinner and she is lovely and has a beautiful apartment. ohhhh and me & katie got to watch tv for the first time since being in sweden. side fun fact, in sweden u have to pay this tax to have a tv, so we dont have one since we dont want to pay.

anyhow, the next morning while sitting at breakfast, we saw on the news that the night before there'd been an evacuation in the art centre several buildings down from us cos they'd had a bomb threat or something but they didnt end up finding anything. always something happening in good old scandinavia!

oh and we had taekwondo the other day cos one of the guys here is some hardcore korean master and i remembered all the reasons why i have done no sport since high school PE.

haha and then yesterday my flatmates and i were making lunch for the OM board and one of the girls here is german so 1/2 of us were making spatzle (which is basically german spaghetti/noodle) and the other 1/2 were in charge of the apple cake. with some communication errors, we ended up with a cake that was basically, if you can imagine a lake which has frozen on the top but where the water underneath is still fluid, and if you imagine taking the lake in both hands and slightly tilting it either side and then you would have our cake, where the top undulated as the liquidy apple inside sloshed around. yum.

Note: correction from last blog, its 'festing' and not 'festering', which is good cos on the one hand, 'festing' sounds less gross and on the other hand 'fest' means party in swedish, so you can imagine some sort of insectal-social gathering instead of the violation that it is

Forests of Doom

it seems that i will be staying here in Råslätt. unfortunately the other options have not really worked out which has been a bit sad but theres not much we can do about that. coming from a family with the motto of having plans within a plan, i will stay here until at least the end of september and then i will reevaluate whether i want to continue staying here and if not, then i'll just go travelling. there may be a language cafe thing here that i could help out with with the Red Cross apparently and perhaps teach english there which would be great, so we'll just have to see.

and i guess i've just been trying to figure out how my relationship with God works. its been kinda different being here, so many of the people here know why they're here and what they're doing and obviously thats a good thing for them but i dont think that's everyone's experience. like for example, some people think that there's a reason for every single thing that happens so me being shut down by three separate organisations/churches, there must be some sort of God's will behind it all but honestly i dont believe that. crap stuff just happen sometimes. things dont go as planned. plans fail. so all i know is that God's happy enough for me to be here in Sweden/Europe but as for the rest of the details, its a bit of trial and error. i dont really know how you guys feel about that and maybe when i'm older and wiser i'll feel differently, but for now, this is where i stand.

ok, so touchyfeely stuff aside, i'm actually very cautious of what i write on this silly blog cos naturally you want to write almost like a journal type of thing but then you have to take into account everyone who may be reading. for example if this had been a real diary, i would have substituted 'crap stuff' for a different word.

so the last week or so i've been trying to finish my online TEFL course. i started it in oz but never really had time to do it, and now i have 1 mth before it expires so i'm being very disciplined now.

the day before we were invited over to someone's house for dinner, which was lovely, really good tunisian/algerian/swedish food as made by an american lady who's married to a swede who has worked in tunisia/algeria.

before we went to dinner we had a great excursion out to the nearby woods, and sweden is well-known for its natural beauty and so we went mushroom-ahunting as jean explained to us which were edible and which were deadly. its the end of summer but we also managed to find some blueberries and lingonberries so snacked along the way.

last night, we had time to cook the mushrooms and later on that night katie was feeling really dizzy, like couldnt walk straight dizzy and asked us this morning if we'd had the same effect and we deduced that she had been the only one who'd eaten a special type of mushroom. then since she was sharing ailments i thought i would show her this little spot on my leg cos there'd been something in my skin the other day and i didnt know what it was and then she was like i think it might have been a tic (festering in swedish. they really tell it like it is dont they, that sounds a lot more severe than what it is i hope) and then i realised i actually had another one and so i had the fun game of putting it out of my leg preferably without leaving any part of its nasty body behind. and note for mum yes i will keep an eye on it, the people here have rang the clinic up for advice and said it should be ok so i'll keep you all posted if i begin to see any changes eg i begin to mutate into a half insect woman.

sweden 2, australian girls 0

Swedish Lifts are Dangerous!

And on the sixth day, God created the vlog

for those of you who wanted me to vlog, this is the closest its going to get!

video made by joy from om sverige

Back at the Office

let me catch you nice folk up on whats been happening.

so Malmöfestivalen finished on the friday night and we returned to the office/base in Jönköping on saturday for debriefing. the last 2 days we've had off and everyones been catching up with family/friends and sleep.

throughout the week in Malmö, our team has had many good conversations with people from all different walks of life and i've actually been surprised at how many swedes, immigrant and domestic, who are interested in talking about God and Jesus, who are seeking answers. We've had some people come to faith over the week, as well as people signing up for alpha courses (discussion groups available worldwide where you can ask any & every theological question) and have even had some people healed.

one man had been to the doctors to get his vision treated after damaging his eyes from welding and it had been a success but he felt massive pain behind his eyes. Some of the guys met him and prayed for him and at first asked him to rate his pain from 1 to 10, with 10 being the most severe and they prayed for him until the level dropped from an 8 to a 1.

not that i've had masses of interesting stories but i'll just name two for me. there was Adriana the brazilian girl who came up to me and took a book and started telling me how she was christian but her boyfriend arvid wasn't but how he would pray with her and study the bible with her and she obviously wanted so much for him to believe. i honestly believe that God had meant for me to meet her since i could legitimately relate to what she was going through and so i prayed with her. charmain you will be proud to know that i was speaking in swedish the whole time!

then on the last night there was a swedish lady taking around her friend's mum who was spanish and we had a fun-filled, broken-trilingual conversation in which i got a bit muddled and threw some french in for kicks.

so the dealio for the next 2 weeks is that i'll be here in Råslätt, Jönköping and just helping with the orientation they're having here for the new permanent people joining OM, so it'll probably be bit of a slower week. after that, my fate is still yet to be decided, there are at current 3 possiblities:

1) stay here and help out with the stuff they have goin on here which includes a hangout they have for youth who dont go to school or work

2) go back to Malmö and work with the church there and probably the street church stuff as well. i quite liked the church we stayed in, and i know they had a spanish group and a iranian group so it could be pretty cool there

3) there's a sister organisation who work with visits to prisons and working in the schools as well i think

probably keen on either 2 or 3 but i guess we'll wait and see

so i am having a good time, definitely enjoy being in sweden and meeting all types of people but i think this trip has probably shown me more clear that its not necessarily what i want to be doing full-time. the soul search continues...

Oh I'll just go to Copenhagen for the day...

not quite legoland but the legostore on strøget - amazing works of legolicious art

me & katie b trying out some typical dansk pølse hotdog, actually really nice
me & my new elk friend

Street Churching the Festival

hanging out with moomins (not mormons, moomins are much cuter)
staking out our turf, handing out prayerbooks

this is our team from all over the world including Taiwan, Sweden, Germany, USA, Aussie (of course!), Sth Africa and Indonesia

Selling Matches at Malmöfestivalen

I have finally found both the time and the internet access to write to you guys! Sorry for the long wait.

So recapping from my last post, after spending one night at the hostel, i got up the next day to take a train to Jönköping. Now at first i had thought to myself that i should make sure i had plenty of time to get to the station, but i ended up having a bit of a chat with someone at breakfast and thought i had seen the station not far from the hostel the night before so left a little later.

I got to the station & soon found out that this was not the right place. I needed to be at Stockholmcentralen but this was only one of its exits & could not lead to the platforms. So then the semi-stress began as i had 10min till the train (which btw i had already booked & paid for, a little different from taking Metro) and there was a very groundhog’s day moment where i came up from the escalator of said exit, crossed the road to try another exit as marked by the Tunnelbana sign only to somehow find that i was somehow in exactly the same exit as i was before.

In the end, I hauled my luggage to the real station with a few minutes to spare but as i got to the platform and the fastidious Swedish train was about to leave, i was told by the conductor (who was nothing like Santa Claus traindriver & his Friendly Conductor Sidekick from last trip) that it was not going to Jönköping. The train left and i was thoroughly confused and went to Information and had to book the next train. The lady at the desk was also unsure as to why he had said that, but i guess that’s what you should expect from a train company called Veolia whose business in Australia is to pick up rubbish bins.

In the end i got to Jönköping and got picked up and met up with all the others that were on the OM team. OM is a christian organisation whose claim to fame is having big ships that go around the world with a huge bookstore on board. So for the next few days in Råslätt (which i’ve been told is like the ghetto of Jönköping) we had training/orientation. Theres actually 3 other ozzies on board, from all different states, NSW, QLD, TAS so thats been really nice.

So last Wednesday we left for Malmö. Malmö is the 3^rd largest city in Sweden & it has some pretty awesome parks. We’re staying at Immanuel Church while we’re here, and our days look like:

9am – breaky

11am – prayer then lunch

2pm – out in the festival

5.30pm – back home for dinner

8pm – out in the festival till 11pm

Malmöfestivalen is kinda like the culture days we have in the city/southbank, where there’s stalls of food and other stuff all on the 2 sides of the street, buskers and there’s also a stage further down with concerts and basically we’re helping out with Street Church which is organised by churches in Malmö who go out fortnightly to the streets and chat to anyone who come up to them and wants to talk about God, Life and everything in between.

The first day and a half i was like what the heck am i doing here. I felt like i had now become the people that i usually avoid on the streets, with our wagon of prayerbooks and the first night was cold and rained a bit and i very much identified with the Little Match Girl, though it was more handing out than selling and the match was physically a bible verse or prayerbook and metaphorically just a bit of God.

But i have to say that somehow i’ve become more comfortable with it. Sure, i’m never goin to be that eccentric “Repent or Die” guy at a city centre near you, but like one of the guys have said on the team, we’re just kinda there to be God’s presence and if ppl want to come take a book or talk, that’s awesome. And you get to meet some really fascinating people with fascinating ideas, like the guy who asked what if God is a magical duck. One guy took a book and started telling one of the girls on my team that he was interested in religion, and that he had this plan of being king and creating a new world and something like he didn’t really believe in relationships but he wanted to have stacks of kids who had to obey him and if they didn’t then they would become his slaves or something, i’m not sure. He was so adamant about it that i wasn’t sure if he was wacky or not but he actually said something that really stuck with me. Like most ppl, he said that all that was important was what happens in this life and to make the most of it and on anything after death he said ‘If there is something more, Give it to me, but i don’t want to pay for it’ and i think that might reflect the opinions of many. Thoughts?

i've taken someone's comment that there shall be more pictures this time! Not sure if u can see this properly but this is near my grandparents' place, apparently we have a fellow clan member who sells luggage. ok the quality of the pictures will improve from here on

Return of the Mack

i am finally here in stockholm! i've just spent the last 3 days in hong kong getting materialistically ready for this trip and quite a number of you will be ecstatic that i have finally stepped into this century and bought.... not an iPhone but an android nontheless! sony ericsson xperia mini, and no i didnt get it cos its swedish but because i was convinced by the salesguy that this was the fastest, fittest, best-looking (not so much the last part, actually i dont really like the look of it, it looks like a normal ericsson chopped in half) and that it could save google maps without me necessarily being online. since i just got it last night and then hopped onto a plane this morning, dad had apparently downloaded whats app on it (which is actually the only reason why i wanted a smart phone) but i have yet to work it out. one step at a time people.

hong kong was good as always but humid and often discouraging as i realise time and time again that my granddad has no idea who i am. day one, i rocked up at the family apartment and he's like who are you. fair enough his memory is a little average these days and hey i'm not around that much. second day i bumped into him downstairs as he was about to go on his morning round with his helper and she said hi to me and asked him whether he knew who i was and he answered in the negative. third day my aunties came over to have dinner with us and he questioned one of them on my identity, the tone in his voice implying that, 1) he did not expect that they would know, and 2) that he sure as hell didnt. on the positive side, he is a very generous man for letting a complete stranger sleep and eat in his house.

right now i'm at a hostel in stockholm, close to falling asleep because the start of this day began some eon ago since you guys are already enjoying all the excitement of Sunday the 14th while i'm still dragging my feet in boring Saturday, but i thought i'd better start somewhere with this blog. highlight of the day: within 2 minutes of walking in the city, looking for dinner (which btw was Max, (oh no not you max, dont worry), but as Scantrippers the First would remember is basically Sweden's version of maccas), a lady asked me for directions on where to take the number 1 bus! never mind that i had no idea and gave her no help, but she asked me! cos she THOUGHT i knew stuff! seriously i'm totally fitting in right away.

ps. dont let the fact that the date written at the top of this post being completely inaccurate tarnish the credibility established above that 1) i am technologically capable enough to have an android 2) i know stuff.