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