Finally its Fall!!

Boot season is finally upon the inhabitants of Varberg!! The leaves are changing colors and I have to start wearing gloves when I ride my bike to school.

What I have been up to this past week:

I was in Boras for rotary. All of the other exchange students were there and it was pretty much like the first week that we had for the language course. (same place same people) We had a text in swedish.. mostly over grammar, which everyone failed, except the german exchange student, she is pretty much fluent in swedish. I'm jelous!
We also worked on our presentations for the District Conference which will be not this coming weekend, but the one after. I think it will be a great performance. The americans (there are 6 of us) are doing a line dance to alan jackson's song Good Time. It will be funny to watch i'm sure.
on friday we went and played curling. i have never seen curling played before in my life, so it was quite strange to see. It was fun nonetheless. I think its kindof a dangerous sport actually, you have a slipper type thing on one foot so its easier to slide and you have to like run on the ice with your broom to go sweep. but it was a lot of fun, we were all yelling SOUPA SOUPA SOUPA.. which means sweep sweep sweep! in swedish. After curling we went to a basketball game. It was intresting to see a sport we would have in the US but in a different language. Most of it was the same tho. there was an announcer, a DJ jamming on music between plays, and they had cheerleaders, but think cheerleaders in really skimpy clothing lots of make up and doing flips in the air.. thats swedish cheerleader (at least the ones that i saw)
Once the weekend was over I went to Amanda' house (my lovely canadian friend) and her host family was getting ready for thanksgiving.. and i said isn't that in november?? Nope, i was wrong, being the American that I am thought that everyone has the same holidays as us! nope nope nope. Canada celebrates their thanksgiving in october, but its not weird for them because that is how it has always been. I guess you learn something new everyday!! :)

I went to the environmental club meeting on monday, it went ok. They are using my idea to have a recycled art contest and it will be next week i believe, so thats pretty exciting! :) we will see how it goes, more updates on that later.

On monday we had an "equal day" and we spent most of the morning talking about the different ethnicities and how there is a lot of harassment and discrimination that goes on between people in school and outside of school. So we watched a video about it too, the video was funny, in a good way. It had things and words in the movie that would never be spoken of in my school back home. so that was different for me. But i think there is a lot of discrimination between the albanians and swedes. I'm not going into depth on that subject, because i'm not compeletly sure about it.

This week I will be ordering my graduation hat. Here it is a reallyyy big deal. I don't really understand why but these hats cost maybe over a hundred dollars, but i plan on just getting a standard one which is around 50 or 60 usd. Still, its quite expensive for just a hat that you will wear one time. I think it has more to do with the memories that the hat will signify.The hats look like sailor hats and are white and navy. Students can pretty much put as much wording and pictures and whatever else they want on the hats, it just costs extra!

Yesterday i went with my history class down to the fortress. We are studying about archives and how to find sources without the internet. It was all in swedish so i didnt get much from the presentation but we went and looked at some of the archives and one that we found turned out that the guy used to be my teacher's (Beo) neighbor! it was really weird, but its a small town so i suppose it is to be expected.

and last night I had my next host sister Hanna S. over and we made enchaladas and salad again. With the vanilj heartar (spelling?) they are vanilla hearts and delicious, they are my favorite pastry so far! so we made dinner and had a really cozy time. :)

I found out that next thursday will be the try outs for the musical Hair. I don't think i will try out. Because it sounds like you have to be really really good and I'm just ok not really good. But who knows i may change my mind.

for those of you wondering about eva and her horse situation, she did find one, the horse is about 10 hours away in northern sweden. she is a beautiful quarter paint mare. brown and white! she just needs to pass the vet check then she will be on her way here! eva is very very excited :)

tomorrow night i leave for stockholm with my host family. i can't wait! everyone tells me how lovely stockholm is and now im finally able to go see it! we are taking the plane so it wont be too long of a flight, i think just an hour. we will be visiting the city hall (where the nobel peace prize is presented) and the famous castle, maybe a couple museums, shopping of course, and im not sure what else yet. i will be back on sunday so more blogging when i get back!!!

hope all is well back home! i encourage you to send e mails, even if i dont reply right away i will eventually!!