orusttjejen

• We met our friend Pierre and he showed us his home (where we're also gonna live from Friday) and the city.
• Checked in at the hostel where we stay until Pierre's parents go on vacation. (The internet is not very fast; therefore no photos.)
• We had awesome food and great wine at the cute square.
• I went for a morning walk and got a little lost.
• Today we started the day by doing a oral French test to decide our level; I wasn't able to speak so much but I think I got in just the perfect group for my level!
• My group consists of three guys from Oman, one woman from USA, one girl from Ireland and one girls from Taiwan. Everyone is very nice! :-)
• During the breaks we made friends with nice people from Australia, Russia and Switzerland. Yey! :-)
• We got a lot of homework and tasks to complete at home; this doesn't seem to be a vacation - but I guess that's good! ;-)
• Tonight Pierre took us to eat crepes, so good! And when you eat crepes as a real French person you apparently drink cider from bowls (instead of glasses!) to go with it. Interesting... but very good! :-)
• Finished the evening at the language café and I spoke only French for about 2 hours, so proud! I find that I can understand quite well when people speak nice and slow now, yey! Speaking is a little harder, but still manageble.
• We met Pierres cute friend Mari, she was so nice! She had also been in Sweden to watch the Nordic Lights this year, interesting...
• I do mix a lot of Spanish in my French. My teacher even asked multiple times about me having some Spanish blood in me... Haha... Well I wish I was partly Spanish but I guess nothing other than Swede in me...

So well that was a quick recap of the first day in Tours. Now I will go to sleep so that I can manage another long and tiering day tomorrow! Speaking and listening to a language you don't really speak makes you real tired...

A photo of my school that I found online, isn't it beautiful! Trés jolie! :-)

Driving in Switzerland...

Since Switzerland is a very expensive country we decided to fill up gas in Austria before crossing the border and then not to go on the high ways but on the smaller ways, since it's apparently about 60 euro to go on the high way even once in Switzerland, crazy! But our navi found us nice roads instead and it was just much better and nicer to see the nature! Switzerland was also very beautiful, but I think that Austria still beats it! ;-)

I had always imagined Zürich to be kinda a big city with tall buildings, maybe because I'm thinking of the banks there I don't know, but anyway it was not. Zürich is a very small city with small cute houses. So nice! Unfortunately very expensive, or at least we think so, we never quite looked up the exchange rate between euro and swiss franc... :-)

With a view over Zürich!

Then the day ended in a very small town (or Austrian: "Kaff") in southern Germany. We're staying at a very nice Gasthaus called Dinklerberger Hof that I can totally recommend! The bathroom is shared but the rooms are big and nice and they serve awesome food here! I had the most amazing meat, that I unfortunately couldn't even finish because it was too much. So afterwards we had to go for a walk in the "Kaff", which was nice. It's beautiful here... And feels a bit, or a lot, like Orust. They have a lot of cows, big fields and an interesting cow smell. Just like home. ;-)

I also introduced Anna to this amazing "french teacher" Michel Thomas that I found through a friend. I've downloaded his French course and only after listening a little bit I feel like I can talk better than before. He's truly amazing and has his totally own way of teaching, comparing French to English and showing you how much you actually really know. So well if you wanna learn French Michel Thomas is your guy! ;-) Thank's YouJung for the recommendation!

Driving in Austria is beautiful! :-)

But in Innsbruck I had good Austrian food and drink, we watched "the golden roof", was amazed by the beauty. Go to Innsbruck! A really amazing city, one of the most beautiful ones I've seen I think and then most importantly we bought a new navi - that works. So we have a little friend with us in the car! :-) From Innsbruck we didn't only go on the high way but take the scenic route that took us to see amazing views!!! Austria is crazy beautiful! I think I could totally move there or something! ;-)

Me and sweet Anna in Innsbruck.

A cool thing with yesterday was that me and Anna spoke German for most of the road trip, in Innsbruck and in the evening - even discussing politics! So apparently my German is way better than I think, yey! :-) It's so cool how fast you get into it and can actually speak! Looking forward to the French course and what it can do to me! ;-)

In the evening we got to Anna's aunt's house and she was the sweetest ever. They live in a really beautiful house and she took us out for pizza in the evening, helped us with directions through Switzerland, made us breakfast and even gave us some franc for the lunch in Switzerland today. But mostly she was really nice to talk to, and we managed to talk a lot in German, really cool! Need to see my sweet "German teacher" Damla again soon so that she can see the difference! Well and I must add that Dornbirn is a great city, super pretty! Also go there! So I'd say take a vacation in Austria, totally nice! So Sofia and Björn, I guess you made the right choice! ;-)

(Sorry for the lack of photos, I took loads, but the internet in this hostel is a little slow...)

The awesome restaurant from yesterday that has a view out over the city. (Also observe the man in "leder hosen" standing in back of the photo. Anna says that it's not normal wearing them but at least he did... :-) )

My sweet sister a couple of weeks ago cheering for Sweden in the Euro Cup, I guess the picture is taken before she knew the result... ;-)

Then I have spent my whole day travelling, first by plane Gothenburg-Berlin, then a short change in Berlin to Vienna. And I just realised that one hour is maybe a little short to be sure to get your luggage so I was a little worried, but it was fine! :-) Then I took the airport bus into Vienna and met up with my darling Anna! It was so good to see her again, I've missed her... And can't imagine I now get to spend a whole month with her! Yey! :-D

Just now she's running around in her apartment packing and ironing her last things for our road trip that will start tomorrow, and since I'm already packed I just relax and enjoy being in Austria. I like this country, people are nice and the bread is great, so the weird accent can be overlooked... ;-) Tonight we're going out for dinner at some amazing place, no idea where, maybe I'll have some schnitzel...

The view from Anna's apartment, so nice, I wanna live here! :-)

Tomorrow we'll start our road trip by going through a big part of Austria to the very west of the country, I think it's called Dornbirn, where Anna has some realtives. We're gonna stay with her relatives for a night, and apparently they both live close to a lake and has a pool. Seems like a cool deal since the weather in Austria is like 30C and sunny at the moment, yey! :-)

Anna and her room mates dog that speaks Swedish yey! It understood all of Anna's remaining dog vocabulary; sitt! and ligg! ;-)

Me and my darling Anna

In Tours I'll take a French course from 9 July-24 August and I hope that I'll after that be able to speak quite some French. Because even though I've taken a short French course this spring I still feel like I can't really speak.

A photo of my school in Tours

Here comes a couple of photos of Tours that I found online, looking good I'd say! :-)

So here we go again! I'll try to blog a couple of days a week! But if I'm bad please remind me! ;-)

The beautiful view in south of Kosovo, on the way to Macedonia.

The crazy big statue of Alexander the great in central Skopje. Both a very expensive investment for a poor country and annoying to the neighbouring countries.

The beautiful lake outside Ohrid.

Me and beautiful Ella in Ohrid.

Thessaloniki!

Dinner at an Italian restaurant with Dutch Karlijn and Swedish Marika. A very nice evening, with very expensive wine. Lesson for next time; don't just order a bottle of wine, ask for the price! ;-)

Me and Norweigan Thea at our party yesterday. (And the dress is a very much needed buy in Greece... :-) )

Me, Alexander and Ella

With Armend, who works with us.

Me and my sweet flat mate!

Norweigan Kristine, with the apartment in Paris, me like! ;-)

The people hanging on the coooold balcony!

So I hope you got some insight in my life here with this! :-) Othwerwise what's on my mind at the moment is the future (as always I guess). What to study in the spring? What to do in the summer? And the fall? Sweden, Europe, US? So smart people with good advices, give me a call or write me an e-mail! That'd be appriciated! :-)

And some great news, sweet Linnéa is coming here in a couple of weeks! :-) So other people, we have a huge apartment with a guest room, come and visit! :-)

Finally I just wanna add that because of some changes with the border passings in Mitrovica this week there might be some distrurbances close to the border. Unclear if it'll be violent or not. And it might be something in the news about it. But I wanna clarify that I'm not in Mitrovica and won't be going there during this time either, so don't worry about me if that's the case...

We start the walk by walking over a little field. In the background you can see Hotel Victory that has a small Statue of Liberty (frihetsgudinna) on top.

The big road with a lot of traffic that we need to cross. And it doesn't have any crossing so you need to make people stop. It usually goes ok though, but a little scary.

The we continue here...

Going through a tunnel which is building the first escalator (rulltrappa) of Pristina (maybe of Kosovo?)

This is the street of our Embassy, 100 meters before or something. In the end of the street is a lot of cafes and restaurants.

Here is the Swedish Embassy (and the Finnish one)! :-)

On Thursday this week me and Ella had also arranged a get-together for trainees in Pristina on the terrace of the Embassy and it was very successful! :-) Around 20 trainees turned up and we walked around talking to all of them and making new friends and getting new ideas of what to do here! After the get-together we went on with eight people to have dinner in a cool Mexican restaurant!

On Friday night we met up with some people and started off with a small art exhibition that was hard to find the way to. Directions here are generally hard because there are (almost) no street signs and the streets have changed names from normer Serbian names to now Albanian names, so it's all confused. So location here is all about naming places. Like that if we say that we live in the Arab apartments every taxi driver knows where it is but noone would know the street. After the art exhibition we decided to take some drinks at the Cuban, which has great mojitos! :-) There we also met some of the other trainees (Pristina is starting to feel like a small city where you can bump into people). We met up with another Swedish girl and her friends in a square with a lot of people on the street and ended the night with some clubbing!

Some cool girls I now know here at the Cuban! From the left Thea from Norway, Blerina from Finland, Karlijn from Holland, Venny from Finland and Ella!

Last night we went out as well. Starting off with dinner together with the two Norweigan girls, and then we were joined by an Argentinan, Italian and a girl from Czech Republic. I love being in an international atmosphere again! :-) Then we went to an Irish Pub and I had the Kosovan beer Peja. The night ended at the club Maroon which had good music, was crowded, fun and extremely smokey.

My opinion on the night life in Pristina so far is that it's way better than in most cities of this size (200 000 inhabitants). But the downside is the smoke. People are smoking everywhere and all the time. The reason I went home yesterday was that my eyes and throat were hurting from all the smoke... I've been to other countries where you can smoke inside and remember when you could in Sweden, but the way people smoke inside here is incomparable. It's just too bad. It's a lot of great places, but all the smoke takes down the spirit a little.

The entrance (hallen)

The living room, and we have TV with like 70 channels or something, and a lot of them are movie channels. Kosovo doesn't synchronise the movies either, so we can watch everything! :-)

The kitchen - and Kosovo is smart enough to understand that gas is a bad idea, so we have an electrical stove and oven! :-)

The big bathroom - then we also have a small bathroom with only a toilet and a sink.

Our guestroom - that I really hope that some of you want to come and stay in!!! It even has it's own balcony... ;-)

Our big balcony, where we spent all night yesterday talking about life... :-)

The view from the balcony this morning...

And apart from all these common areas I have my own room with a big double bed. The apartment all in all is 115m2, so it's really big. (My apartment back home is 29m2.) But still I only pay 200 euro/month for living like this! :-)

My room with my big bed from one angle...

And my room from the other angle... I've put up pictures of some of my favourite people around the mirror, but I have some more to put up. Just need to figure out where. But it makes me happy everyday to look at you! :-)

So now you know how I live... And hopefully you want to come and visit! ;-) Just fly to Pristina airport and then it's close to the city! I'm off all weekends so it should work almost any time...

Now I've arrived, and started to feel a little bit at home, in Pristina - the capital of Kosovo, where I'm gonna spend the next 4 months! So far everything has exceeded my expectations, everyone is so nice, the apartment is great and the job seems interesting! :-)

I'm gonna work as an intern in the Swedish embassy together with about 15 people, of whom about half is Swedish and the others are Kosovoalbanians. And all of them are superfriendly! :-) I'm living together with the other Swedish intern Ella in a really big, really nice and really cheap apartment (Kosovo is the place to live nice!), and I'll post pictures of that later... Here comes some pictures of the view from one of our two balconys.

This is facing the city and the big tower closeby is the "minaret" of the mosque which calls to prayer at 5am every day (more times too, but that's the annoying time).



The other direction from the balcony. The red thing in the bottom of the building is our closest foodstore.

Jag och Ella




All the crayfish in the middle of the table and mandatory hats. It's possible to have a proper Swedish crayfish party in Kosovo! :-)

Will miss this view of Birmingham...

... and I will miss this handsome guy.

But on Monday I will fly down to Kosovo to start my exciting fall as an intern in the swedish embassy there! :-) Actually working in an embassy has been a dream of mine since I were like 15 years old, and now I'll finally get to do it, which feels so good! :-)

I'm gonna live there together with the other intern Ellinor in a big apartment 15 min walk from the embassy! :-) We have one bedroom each, two bathrooms, two balconys, a guestroom, a living room and a kitchen - so awesome! So if anyone wants to visit I'd be happy to have you! :-)

I just need to show a picture of what apparently is a popular candy in the US (according to Andrew). It's kind of like the fishes you can buy as "lösgodis", but so funny that they have it as a special bag like this... :-)

And apparently swedes are popular here, especially on the airport. I almost didn't have anyone ask me where I came from here before, but when I went through security one guy told me that he really wanted to go there and another one told me that our soccer- and icehockeyteams were great and that me made great cars and airplanes! Glad that some americans get what is good! ;-)