Life in Sweden
Subject:Life in Sweden
Date:Sun, 27 Oct 2002 20:33:38 +0100
Hello,
Before I talk a bit about our experiences here, I have a couple of updates. When we gave out our address and phone number in one of the last emails, I said that we would be moving to another apartment in the same building November 1. Well, the people in that apartment extended their stay in Sweden by a month, so we agreed to wait until December 1. So if you are planning on calling us, we'll be keeping the same phone number for another month or so.
[Address and phone number omitted here. If you need this information, please send me an email.
I'm told that it's rather expensive to call Sweden -- a bit of searching on the web turns up several calling cards that appear to have low rates -- I'm not going to link to any of them because I haven't tried them and I don't know if they are any good. If you find a good one, let me know and I'll pass it on.
If you've received email from us lately, it might have come from a number of different addresses -- it has taken awhile to get our email access back to normal, so I've just been using whatever address was handy. The best addresses to use to contact us are:
jeremy@arnoldzoo.org
sara@arnoldzoo.org
[addresses updated 2004-11-08]
It's definitely been an adjustment as we get used to living in Sweden, but we're making it. It's been a bit difficult not knowing Swedish -- nearly everybody speaks English quite well, but all of the signs and things are in Swedish, and everybody is more comfortable speaking Swedish, so unless they are speaking directly to us, it's usually in Swedish. We're picking up a few words, but not quickly enough.
The weather hasn't been too good since we got here. Well, Sara likes it, but I don't. It's been hovering in the 0-5 degrees Celsius (in the 30s Fahrenheit), and most days have been sort of rainy -- more of a drizzle I guess. We did get a dusting of snow last weekend. Apparently it's going to be mosty like this for awhile.
We have found a good church here, and we have made some new friends there. It's nice having a group of people we can talk to and ask stupid questions. We have joined one of the church's housegroups -- we would probably call it a "cell group" in the U.S. Most of the group is made up of university students (I'm actually in the middle of the age group for a change!), and they generally speak English quite well. Apparently most of the university textbooks here are in English, so they are used to it.
We haven't done any traveling yet -- we've been concentrating on just getting settled in Linköping. We're planning on a trip to Stockholm in a couple weeks, and we'll start working on some more extensive travel plans.
I've made some updates to our web page (http://arnoldzoo.org [link updated 2004-11-08]) -- check it out to find out about some of our experiences. Updates since the last email include crayfish, church, grocery shopping, and television. Still no pictures, but we have some being developed, so soon we should be able to post some pictures of our apartment and a bit of Linköping.
Well, I hope this message and our web page gives you a bit of an idea of what it is like here. If you have questions that we haven't answered, feel free to send them along...we'll try to keep up with our email.
I'm trying to add new people to this distribution list as I encounter their names and email addresses -- so this may be the first email you've gotten from us about Sweden. (It may even be the first you knew that we are in Sweden.) Our past emails are included on our web page, so check there if you want a bit more background info. If you don't want to receive these messages in the future, just let me know. If you know of somebody who isn't receiving these messages but would like to, feel free to forward this note to them, and have them contact me so I can add them to the list.
We hope everybody is doing well. We've enjoyed hearing from many of you -- it's nice to have some contact with people back home. We miss you all!
Jeremy and Sara