Wednesday, January 19th -
On Wednesday I had my first class. 8:15 in the morning. I managed to get a decent amount of sleep as well as some breakfast, but the bus was slower than I expected and I still didn't arrive before 8:15. But I certainly wasn't the last one to arrive. The lecture was decent, with a 15-minute break at 9:00. The student next to me was a PhD student, which surprised me - I'd kind of expected some master's students, as this was a D-level course, but not PhD. There are, to my knowledge, 5 levels of classes here. A,B,C,D, and E. E is entirely postgrad, masters or doctoral. D is for near the end of undergrad or for graduate students who haven't taken the course yet. At one point I saw that exchange students were advised to take A and B level classes... yeah. I'm taking whatever looks most interesting, and if it's an E level, that's fine. As it worked out, I have one B, one C, and one D level, plus beginning Swedish, which I'd guess is an A level.
After class I did my first cooking, for lunch. I could have used somewhat better diets in the previous days, so waiting until today to cook may not have been the best idea, but it also was the first time I had a good amount of open time for cooking. Not needing to sleep for 12-13 hours every night helps with that. Farfelle bolognese with mushrooms, and it turned out quite well. One mushroom became the appetizer - why more people don't eat whole raw mushrooms, I don't understand.
After an afternoon nap (seven hours of sleep seems like quite little after 12-13 hours the three previous nights), I went down to Gotlands Nation for the Crash Course on Swedes. It was an informative course, largely about what Swedes are thinking behind the scenes, from a very friendly Swedish member of Gotlands Nation. I stayed for dinner at Gotlands afterwards, which was good but being a burger wasn't that different from what I was used to - although pleasingly the Swedes include cucumbers instead of pickles with their burgers. I also wasn't as hungry as usual thanks to cooking more than I realized at lunch - I need to get to IKEA so I have my own dishes I can use to store leftovers.
With dinner concluded, I went down to the pub at Uplands Nation, where I met with a few international students I'd met before to varying degrees, as well as two Swedish girls (I believe one was the international buddy of one of the other internationals). We had a long and interesting discussion on all sorts of topics, and I learned many new things about Swedes. Firstly, this was certainly the longest, most open discussion with Swedes I'd had, unless you count the orientation events such as the one at Gotlands earlier this evening, which wasn't really a typical conversation.
I also realized afterwards that although almost all Swedes do speak English, the east with which they speak it does vary. The Swedish girls at Uplands spoke very smooth English, obviously very comfortable with the language. Some other Swedes either aren't as comfortable speaking English, or perhaps aren't as experienced or confident. It's very rare that it's actually at all difficult to understand a Swede speaking English, but there are some who are especially comfortable while speaking English. It also reminds me of what several American students have said: we don't want to be the jerks who are speaking super-quickly with the Canadians or Australians because we know we'll be understood and we're natural English speakers, when most people here aren't (and every so often we do speak too quickly). But these Swedes were comfortable enough with English that it seemed entirely natural to speak just as quickly as we would have at home.
Another interesting topic was the difference in ages of marriage. The Swedes said that they, and most other Swedes their age, planned to get married around 30 or 32, whereas in America that average is more like 25 and there are a lot of people who get married quite a bit younger than that. One of the Americans who was present does plan to get married by about age 25; the rest of us were less certain. I think most Americans would find an average marriage age of 30 to be a bit old, and the Swedes certainly found it odd that at some American colleges it's common to know multiple people who are getting married while still in college. Another interesting moment was when one of the Americans asked one of the Swedish girls if she was planning to marry the guy she was dating, as they'd been together for three and a half years, so in America that would be a logical question. But, rather than the answers you'd expect to hear in America - "yes" or "it's too soon", she answered, "no"!. I don't think she meant it as in "never", but it certainly wasn't an answer we were expecting. But she was still considerably below the average Swedish marriage age, so marriage wasn't something yet seriously being considered - perhaps not even casually being considered.
Once again it was an excellent evening - that was becoming a pattern, and a very good pattern at that. Uplands was fun, and it may end up being the Nation that I join.
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