Ok, let me tell you about a great day. I wake up at 8:20 (10 minutes before my alarm) and don’t even feel tired. I have breakfast with an awesome friend of mine, we talk about German and Bulgarian. I start walking to uni and I meet a former classmate and we walk together and talk about how nice it is that the sun’s up and there’s no ice left on the sidewalks. I have the final lecture in Cell Signalling which unltimately convinces me that this course is not as difficult that I was afraid it was going to be, and the detailed molecule names are relevant and make sense to me now. I leave early (at around 2pm) as I’ve finished the computer exercise, and I walk back home in the sun, starting a new audiobook ‘The Perks of Being a Wallflower.’ Great stuff.

So then I go back home thinking I don’t have to do anything else today, which gives me time to bake bread: a treat I have been trying to find time for since Sunday. I eat some bread with the marvellous Bulgarian tomato sauce-like thing that my grandmother has made for me and while idly scrolling at things on facebook, I realise that the only event in orientation week (this week) I actually wanted to go to, is happening in 3 hours.

So I call some people up and find someone to go with. It’s Ping Pong night at VG. At first we start with some typical orientation week crap: a quizz about Sweden and their choirs singing for us. But when the guys’ choir came up, everything changes.  These 4 or 5 people were absolutely fantastic. Their sense of humour is something I can only relate to this Swedish movie I saw recently Allt flyter (everything flows) about this group of guys who go to a pool in a Bachelor’s party dressed in girly swimsuits doing synchronised swimming, filming it, and playing it on the after-wedding party. I can totally imagine the VG choir doing that someday. So they said you should join VG and you can try out for the choir, and they’ll most probably take you ‘Yeah, we’ll take anyone…’ and that nobody has ever joined their choir without learning fluent Swedish before leaving. Which is an amazing skill to have anywhere in the world, they added.

That’s when I started thinking I might have joined the wrong nation from the start. Kalmar is very international; when I was working there usually more than half of the people couldn’t speak Swedish; besides it is ‘the alternative nation’ but in a slightly showy way. All the VG people, on the other hand, are quirky and nice, and maybe if I had spent as much time there as in Kalmar, I wouldn’t have given up on Swedish. You never know…

So afterwards there was a big ping pong game which was essentially a table tennis merry-go-round. Most of the people left then, and we stayed for a couple of ours playing. It is so refreshing, doing something just for the hell of it, not being serious and running around like a fool for a reason other than being late. It turns out they have table tennis sessions every other Wednesday, starting next Wednesday. Guess who’s going to be there :))