Fall is here

Fall has definitely arrived: the air is decidedly cooler, brittle leaves line the streets, some kids have started wearing their Michelin Man snowsuits to school ... and every woman from Malmö to Jokkmokk now seems to be wearing a uniform consisting of black, knee-high boots over skinny jeans and a sweater in some shade of grey. I don't think Ava is QUITE getting the concept of skipping through the autumn leaves. She has been doing a sort of kung-fu maneuver every time she encounters a pile (see above), much to Julian's delight.

We are ridiculously content at the moment. Really, I hope this blog isn't becoming a boring string of Isn't-Sweden-Great entries. I hate those! I mean who wants to read about how terrific someplace else is all the time? Please know we haven't forgotten the joys of California (weekends in Sonoma and Calistoga with friends, having a coffee with Mom [for less than $10], and getting a bagel in Noe Valley on Sunday morning to name just a few). Sweden just happens to be a great place for families with young kids. It's not the most exciting or visually dramatic place on earth (shocker!), but it's very comfortable with great work/life balance, and that's perfect for us right now. If we didn't have kids I'd probably be bored out of my noggin! I think another reason we are so content is because our time here in finite. We know we have about two years to enjoy the differences of life over here before we go back to our "real" life.

I'm off to Lund tomorrow night to do my first work assignment with Lorensbergs, and I've booked a two-day training (a presentation skills workshop) for November. As my friend Merel said last night over a tasty glass of Australian pinot (because I was just NOT going to pay $16 for a glass of merlot from Lodi), "Well, that is definitely part time!"

When you miss La Corneta a lot

It doesn't take much to be a Californian. You have to live in the state, love the Pacific, think people smoking next to you is tantamount to manslaughter, and you have to really love Mexican food. Well I really, really love Mexican food and I miss the Mexican place near our house called La Corneta a lot. In particular I miss the super salmon tostada and the super shrimp burrito with black beans. Yum. I have been missing Mexican food so much that I decided to finally try the Jonberg taco stand (catchy, right?) on the Avenue. A woman from Queens told me she goes there and hasn't died, so I figured it was worth a shot.

I ordered the chicken fajita wrap and you can see the result above. It tasted OK, except there were no beans, cheese or sour cream and it was wrapped more like an overstuffed crepe than a burrito. Note the little plastic fork, which sort of defeats the purpose of the burrito concept. Sigh. Happily, the tortilla was pretty good and the peppers were nice. Overall: C+.

Saluhallen

There's a great food hall downtown called Saluhallen and it's much more fun to shop there than in the Willy's or Coop around the corner. It has tons of stalls selling fresh veg, meat, bread, nuts, cheese, tea, etc. I went down to find some Fontina cheese and plums today for a dinner party thing we're having tomorrow. Here's some pix from the outing:

Swedish for Immigrants

Last month I started my first Svenska för Invandrare (SFI) course. This is the free Swedish class that's offered to all immigrants to Sweden. For some strange reason I was placed in level D, which supposes, I assume, that I know enough Swedish to pass levels A-C. Since I can't say anything except "Hi, can I please have a cappuccino and a cinnamon roll," I wonder what exactly was going on in levels A-C, but oh well, it's actually going fine.

Thanks to German, I can understand quite a bit of written Swedish. Someone told me that Swedish and German share 70% of their words. Well, I'm not going to count, but it does seem to help, except I get confused with the spelling. Here are a couple examples:

förbund (S), Verbund (G), alliance (E)
ansikte (S), Ansicht (G), face (E)
handflata (S), Handfläche (G), palm (E)
regeringen (S), Regierung (G), government (E)

Anyway, I won't bore you with any more, but you get my point(s): the German vocab helps a lot and Swedish is going to screw up my German spelling big time.

Now let me say that if I pass the level D test the end of October I will be living proof that SFI doesn't work, because although I can read a decent amount, I cannot actually SPEAK Swedish, and shouldn't communicating with others be a primary goal of the course? I know you'll be waiting with baited breath for my results. Patience, my friends.

I'll have to get a couple of pictures of my fellow students because we're a motley crew of people from all over the globe (lots of people from Iraq, Iran, Syria, and other countries the U.S. has bombed/invaded/embargoed etc. - makes for nice between-lessons chit-chat). It's pretty good seeing us all sitting there practicing prounouncing vowels. Eeeeee. Oooooo. Uuuuu. Ääääääää. Ååååååå. Yyyyyyy.

Work!

So I'm thrilled to report that I have my first work gig set up with a consulting company called Lorensbergs the end of September. The gig is co-facilitating a 2-day Cultural Communications training class in Lund (about 3 hours south of here) with one of their senior consultants. Lorensbergs is a facilitation, training and organization development (OD) firm, and I really liked the founder as well as their approach toward OD when we met last month. They seem to really like me too (aw shucks!) and the slightly different spin on things I bring with my graphic facilitation background. Anyway, it's all a little too good to be true, so I'm crossing my fingers that all will work out in Lund and lead to more work.

Puddles

Day 1: Julian in heaven at Näckrosdammen Park around the corner from our house. Note lack of proper Swedish rainplay attire. Bad Mommy.


Day 2: Properly outfitted like a good Swedish kiddie. Good Mommy.

Expat technology

In terms of technology, expat living has changed a heck of a lot since I was last living in Europe (London) in 1998. I barely used e-mail, and when I did I had to go to an Internet cafe with a bunch of sweaty Australian backpackers. I had a pager because I couldn't qualify for a cell phone (the shame!), so I used public phones and calling cards to call my parents. And that's about the extent of the technology I used to communicate with friends and family back home. No wait, I wrote some postcards, too.

Al Gore's Internet has changed everything. Having Internet abroad means e-mail, of course, but now it also means Skyping with webcams, blogging, Internet radio, social networking sites like Facebook, other online communities like Mums in Sweden (just to take a random example) and other weird things like Twitter, which I'm just not willing to figure out (I like you but I really do not want to know what you're doing every 5 seconds, alright!). All of these together can sometimes make you forget that you're living 6,000 miles away. As I write this I'm wondering if this is a good thing or not. Let me rephrase and say that all this technology means you never feel lonely. Better.

This morning, for example, I woke up, read some posts from the Glen Park Parents list (a Yahoo Group for parents in our old neighborhood -- it's really time for me to unsubscribe), and turned on my wireless Internet radio just in time to hear the SF traffic report followed by the California Report. Granted, the streaming audio is from 10pm CA time when I'm listening at 7am in Sweden, but hey. I love my radio. Here's a picture:


Isn't she pretty?. Thanks to James and Julia in Belgium for the idea because this thing is awesome. It gets something like 12,000 channels and you can listen to streaming audio or archived programs 24/7. Mostly we listen to KQED but sometimes I let Adrian listen to British Radio 4 because he bought the radio for me after all.

And by the way, I did qualify for a cute Nokia cell phone this time around, but only through Adrian (thanks Honey). Now I'm a texting fanatic. Also, I still like postcards, except sending one to the U.S. costs $2 so I don't like them quite as much as I used to.