my last Friday in Stockholm, and what am I doing?

I thought I lost this post, but blogger is smarter than i am and autosaves everything that i do. So here is what I was thinking about last Friday.



I really can't believe this is the last day! Tomorrow morning around noon I will leave for Hamburg, where I will meet up with Erik and then together we are going to spend Christmas in Denmark with Ditte and Lars and the whole family I suppose.

Tonight I think I will be having my last earthenware glass of mjöd with Alexandra (from Belgium) and Linnea (from Sweden!) and then sledding with my housemates on garbage sacks down the avenues of Gamla Stan (yippie!)

OH, I learned a new word yesterday, no WEDnesday. It was one of Siri's favorite words: upplopp. It means "riot"

Today around noon I saw a jul konsert I think it was called at Norra Real, the school that Linnea goes to. It was like an end of the year talent show/concert for the last day of school before break. There was a group of dancers who did a routine to Michael Jackson songs, and then maybe 30 kids got up and sang something about giving your heart away for Christmas only to have it broken the next day... and then came the 3 or 4 teenage girls who thought they were hot shit singing Christmas classics with as sexy of an inflection as they could muster (some were pretty good, the sexy version of White Christmas kind of threw me off though). BUT THE BEST was the very last guy who was just a guy who could play the bagpipes and then stomped/marched around the stage playing the bagpipes for like 10 minutes, ending with a bagpipe rendition of the Swedish national anthem. Oh, and they also distributed the prize for the winner of the gingerbread house competition. Fun!

Its really pretty here now with snow everywhere. Last night at the apartment we had a "pyssel kväll" which actually just means "crafts evening" but its something people do around Christmas time - you drink glögg and then take oranges and make patterns by sticking cloves in them so that you can tie a ribbon around them and hang them in your window to smell good. We ate goat cheese on pepperkakor, and I made spinach artichoke dip and we also had some wine so it was pretty successful.

Its three o'clock now and I'm watching the sunlight disappear behind the building next door. I still have a lot to do this afternoon - pack and weight my bags, mail the stuff that doesn't fit within the weight limit, oi, I don't know what else. It doesn't feel very dramatic because I'm not REALLY leaving, I'm just going to Denmark, but at the same time I won't be living in Stockholm any more and that is actually a big change. I can always visit, but this is the end of a four month long romance with the city and now I have to say adieu and I don't really know how to feel.