I've been busy, leave me alone!

Ok, yes, I know, it's been a while. A long while. Excuses: I've been studying, sleeping and pretending to have a life. You know that the sleeping part is the most true part. Anyway. What I've actually been doing these past "few" weeks is embracing my Swedishness, a lot! "Oh really?", you might be wondering (or not, I mean, I can't read your mind or anything), "How so?" Well, I'll tell ya! Starting with...the school trips!

#3 - Travelling "abroad"

So, apparently, embracing your Swedishness means you also have to embrace your Nordicness. Crazy, huh? (Not really, it's just how we do things up here) At least, if you are to become a Swedish teacher in Sweden, you have to embrace your Nordicness, or at least your Scandinavianness. (As an aside, let's once and for all clear up this whole "what's the difference between Scandinavia and the Nordic countries" thingy: Scandinavia is Sweden, Norway and Denmark, while the Nordic countries consist of Sweden, Norway, Finland (also Åland), Iceland and Denmark (with the Faroe Islands and Greenland). If interested, you can read more about it here. Got it? Ok good, moving on.)

Anyway, as I was saying, if you are to become a Swedish teacher, which I am to become, you need to study Norwegian and Danish too. It's because of this whole Scandinavian thing of being good neighbours and loving each other instead of all the hating that we normally wallow in. The basic idea behind it all is that we need to feel some sense of community up here in the cold, dark north, and to do that, we need to be able to understand each other. Fine idea, I guess, sounds good (except for the part about understanding Danish, that's fucking impossible).

So included in our Norwegian and Danish studies were two trips, one to Schæffergården north of Copenhagen, or København as the Danes say (pronounced Kööbenhaun), and one to Voksenåsen, just outside Oslo (in Norwegian it's pronounced Oschlo). I signed up for both trips, because hey, they were cheap and it's always fun to travel, even if we Swedes don't really consider Norway and Denmark "abroad" (hence, the title for this installment). Since most costs for the trips were paid by scholarships, we only had to pay 500 SEK per trip and student. That is what we like to call "najs prajs". Anyway, on with the show. (Next post will be about the trip to Denmark. Read it. Now.) (Or, previous post, whatever, this blog does not like me today.)