Five month stretch...

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Back in Sweden and I was starting to wonder what possessed me in agreeing to stay until the end of March... I’d just had a great 3 weeks in Canada (bar the broken toe) and another one in London (bar the second broken toe) catching up with friends and family and generally appreciating just how easy it is to function in a country where you understand everything that goes on! It’s not that I sit here and constantly think about how difficult it is, but being out of Sweden made me realise that it’s really tiring not understanding 80%!o(MISSING)f what happens around you and why. Over the last 6 months or so it has got better as I’ve picked up more vocabulary, but being back in England was such a relief!

It also didn’t help my mood when the November rain and grey showed no real sign of letting up, and days got progressively shorter and shorter. I don’t deal well with the winter anyway (unless I have snow and a mountain), but now I started to see why people warned me about the Swedish winters in particular! To cap it all, things at work seemed to have taken 2 steps back in my absence so I had to deal with all of that too, including my contractor finance manager announcing she was pregnant which meant I had to find yet another replacement 😞

November wasn’t all bad though - there were some highlights! I managed to meet up with Bezza for an evening beer as he happened to be over for a quick business trip. Em and Suze came over to visit for the weekend which was fantastic. Em took her latest possible opportunity to travel before she needed the permission of the entire medical community to get on a plane! We spent the weekend aimlessly wandering around, seeing the city, making fun of the changing of the guard and taking plenty of opportunities to stop off for meal and snack breaks 😊 Bizarrely, we were wandering through Kungstradgården at one point, only to find Susan Sarandon arriving by limo to introduce an open air screening of The Rocky Horror Picture Show on a screen of ice! Not something you see every day 😊

Plus I found a great new flat to live in - this one’s at Mariatorget and comes complete with a Damien Hirst spot painting! Hilarious. But at least Simon doesn’t have to put up with me after the end of November 😊 Thanks for the hospitality Simon!

And I guess I also came out of November with a resolution to make the best of the Swedish winter and the different experiences it offers. Roll on the first snowfall 😊

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