A Californian living in Sweden

Tag: Malibu

Back to School

First day of Swedish class

Monday was back to school day for me, the first back to school day in as long as I can remember. I got up early, made coffee, grabbed a half-filled notebook that I last used for an online screenwriting course, grabbed my bike and rode through the crisp fall morning to class. It felt amazing. I hardly noticed that it was about 32 degrees Fahrenheit.

The class, a four-week intensive Swedish course taught daily for three hours, was everything I had hoped for; and I came home the first day with pages of notes and the first real bit of faith that I might actually learn Swedish.

The class and the instructor came highly recommend to me by two different people, a Ukrainian and a Brazilian, that I met at Hillsong, an international English speaking church in Malmö. I decided I needed something to get me going again in my language learning, so I enrolled.

The class is intense. The teacher speaks mostly in Swedish. She says something, writes it on the white board, waits eagerly through the blank stares, gives us a few clues and then sometimes just says it in English. Sometimes she doesn’t have to translate at all, and that makes the class both challenging and interesting.

 

After living in Sweden for several months and grasping bits and pieces of the language, I’m discovering that the class is filling in the missing pieces, the little bits of information that I needed to bring it all together.

For one thing, I have found that written and spoken Swedish can seem almost unrelated as the Swedish speaker often excludes parts of written words and seems to blur others together in phrases that sound like one sing-song muddle. When I have pointed this out to Swedish speakers they often say, “Oh, but Danish is much worse.” (There should be a Swedish word for Danish blame shifting.)

My first attempt to learn Swedish began in Malibu when I bought Rosetta Stone for Swedish and sat in the kitchen with my open laptop. At that time moving to Sweden still felt like a hypothetical possibility and I needed something to motivate me to begin the work of preparing for the move.

Rosetta Stone was a great start and I learned my first bits of vocabulary, pojken (the boy), flickan (the girl), but Rosetta Stone is built on inductive reasoning, educated guessing, and the program only took me so far. I was totally confused by the grammar until July when I met a German hiker on our trek in Abisko, in the far north of Sweden, in the arctic circle. In a rustic hikers’ cabin with no electricity or running water, over a candlelight dinner of freeze-dried stew, she mentioned that German and Swedish are very similar and that learning Swedish had not been too difficult for her. The biggest difference was that the articles were at the end of the nouns instead of the beginning, for instance “katt” and “katten” in Swedish versus “die Katz” in German. When she said that it was like a light went on. I had been struggling for weeks and had no idea why the nouns changed without warning, and I suddenly understood. I wanted to immediately trek back to civilization, boot up my computer and get back into Rosetta Stone.

I also used Duolingo, which is a fun free app that I have on my phone. But just like Rosetta Stone, it is not enough. Sometimes you just need a human instructor who can said, “yes, that is right,” or “not exactly,” or even give physical tips like how to hold your mouth when you say the vowel sounds or the very odd sound that is the word for “seven.” It is written “sju,” and sounds a bit like a lazy, “ch” and “who?”  I am sure that I don’t have it right yet. It is a good thing that I have three and a half more weeks.

Kip is having a work-from-home week, much to the delight of katten. Kip sent me this while I was at class today. Our Swedish cat says, “Det är mycket bra.” It is very good.

 

 

 

 

A Little Bit of California for Breakfast

IMG_9730When we arrived in Malmö in June, I felt like I had survived a decluttering marathon. We had lived in our Malibu house for six years. Our kids had literally grown up there, as evidenced by the pencil scratched benchmarks on the kitchen doorway and the two closets full of toys in my son’s bedroom. Sorting through our accumulation of life was not easy.

We had amassed six years of stuff, the usual clothes and books, tools and toys, furniture. But there was also a pile of stuff the kids had also grown out of — books and toys, stuffed animals that used to be friends, games we never got around to playing. I knew it would be silly to ship most of it to Sweden, and just as silly to let it sit in storage. But it was not easy to let it go. I felt like I was letting go of my kids’ childhood, which, to be honest, I needed to do. Healthy mothers nurture and equip and release their young adults to their full potential without making them feel guilty for growing up. I know this. I want that for myself and my teenagers.

So in the weeks leading up to our move I gave my friends most of the books, games, dishes and random things that I thought they might want. We sold other things on Craigslist, but on the day before we left California there was still a car load full of donations to go to the thrift store.

The whole process was emotional and exhausting, and in the end, rushed. So much so that I had several moments during the three-month interim period between our moving-out day and our moving-in day that I could not remember if a particular item was in the anticipated shipment or if we had given it away.

Even so we ended up bringing things we did not need, and we gave away a few that we had to repurchase in Sweden. Already I have looked around for at least one book that I wish I had kept.  But really, most of our material possessions needed to go. It is good to move on when you move on.

We accidentally packed rocks.

But even so, there are a few items, really just a few, that I have been very happy to have with us in our new apartment life in Malmö. The Vitamix is near the top of that list.

IMG_9731We had to get a huge transformer to make sure we did not burn out the Vitamix engine on the 230 volts piping through our electric outlets here, and after blowing a few power fuses, we have worked out a system to make it run in our Swedish kitchen. It works pretty well.

This morning I got up, despite the persistent October grey, and went for a run. When I came home I made an awesome blueberry, banana, almond smoothie. It was perfect, the true breakfast of champions, not unlike so many Malibu post-run breakfast smoothies. And as I ran the Vitamix I thought about how this transcontinental move is all about that process– simplifying, moving out into the unknown and living this next part of life well. But in the end a familiar purple smoothie just makes it all sweeter and a little easier to swallow.

 

 

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