I'm in Sweden!

28/12/2007
Originally uploaded by ★skandy-pictures★

It’s about time I update this blog. You see: the reason I wanted a blog of my own was to share with others my Scandinavian life but things never run as smooth as they are supposed to.
First of all I am Italian and before moving to Sweden I needed to complete my education at university which I did the 14th of December 2007. Now I am a mechanic engineer with a degree almost as good as a PhD, which means I can finally move to Sweden and apply for a job.
No more than a week after my graduation I took a flight to Sweden and now here I am, writing my first impressions from my laptop. Actually this is not at all my first impression on Sweden because I have been living in this country for a whole year as exchange student (Linköpings Universitetet) and also because my girlfriend is Swedish and I came visiting her plenty of times in the last 2 years.
My girlfriend, Martina, lives in Lund in Skåne, south of Sweden. The city is not very big for Italian standards (I reckon the population is below a hundred thousand) but it’s a university city (like Pisa) because here is located one of the oldest universities of the country. Swedish universities last 11 months with long holidays at Christmas and Easter, and the city population is usually a lot larger than usual (even though there are not that many residents). It also means that the population is a lot younger than the average, there are a lot more young girls around and, sadly, the city is almost empty during holidays. I’ve had a first hand insight of that during one of my visits in Lund.
Even without students the city is far from uninteresting. Malmö is 10 minutes away by train and Copenhagen just 50 minutes more. In Copenhagen there is also a well connected airport (Kastrup) with flights to Malpensa and Ciampino, and in March Sterling.dk is going to open a new route from Florence to Malmö’s airport which I trust will come really real handy for my trips home.
But where and what is home? Some time ago I read that home is the place where they’ll always accept you, whatever the circumstances. I find this a rather poetic explanation of what home is.
I cannot honestly say I feel at home in Sweden right now. I’m living at my girlfriends in a tiny 60 meters square apartment, just one bathroom and no broadband connection, but I’m going to change it real soon.
As a start I bought a broadband connection which is due to work by the 10th of January, so it won’t be long before I’m back online; secondly I can use my fantastic Nokia N95 8GB as a modem with a flat connection which gives me about 50MB/day (it’s enough to download mail and call home with Fring, but that’s pretty much it); last but not least it seems like all the families in Sweden own a router and there are places in Lund where I can find 10 broadcasting wifi signals, some of them open. This is fantastic news for a ninja possessor, and I intend to take good advantage of it! My broadband connection is also going to become a FON spot.
Even without internet, a loss that hurts something fierce, I still have a life here with some friends I made during my previous visits
I’ve been in Sweden since the 21st of December and naturally I’ve spent Christmas with my girlfriend’s parents which live 300km north from here in another county named Småland. Christmas there was fantastic. I believe I’ve never eaten that much meat in my life and all the rest tasted so good that I have difficulties recalling. The only sad thing was that Sweden is affected by the same environment issues, just as much as the rest of the World. It’s nearly January and there isn’t any snow!!! The weather channel says that snow will come real soon and I really hope it will because we have had a foul weather for the last 2 weeks: the last time I saw the sun was in Italy!!!
When I signed up for this life I knew what I was doing, so this doesn’t come as a big surprise, but still I’m starting to feel a little disappointed because no sun and snow is ok, but no sun and cloudy without even rain ain’t that good! Let’s hope the weather will change soon.
I’m going to go into details of what I’ve had for Christmas with my next post because at the moment I cannot upload pictures.
Now I gotta go shopping.
See ya!