Last weekend, I went with my host family to visit Sara's father in Värmland, a rural part of Sweden in the west, fairly close to Norway. We stayed in the guest house that Sara's father built himself, and the whole weekend was extremely beautiful weather. It was the first real feeling of spring (which interestingly …
Last week was our first long break, which means that some core classes took their long study tour, while the rest of us had our spring break/travel week. My best friend from Haverford, Eva, is studying this semester at DIS Copenhagen with the Urban Studies core class, and it just so happened that we had …
February was super eventful and absolutely flew by, so I haven't had much time to write any new posts. I'm going to try to summarize the last few weeks is this update. The best part of this month was my girlfriend Sonia coming to visit me! She stayed with me for two weeks, and we …
This week was our first study tour with our core courses. Each class spends three days in another location in Sweden. My literature core course was in Uppsala, focusing on the theme of constructing national narratives and how that contributes to the process of othering. We had a very busy week, so I'll do my …
This Saturday was the first week of Melodifestivalen, the Swedish preliminary competition to see who will represent the country at this year's Eurovision Song Contest. It's six weeks of over-the-top music and very interesting performances, voting is open to the entire country, and it's honestly a pretty big deal here (especially in the queer community). …
DIS has a very large psychology program, with 3 different core courses in different concentrations. I decided, even as a literature student, to take one psych class to get out of my academic comfort zone. I was also interested in studying education in a Scandinavian context, so I enrolled in Psychology of Emerging Adulthood, a …
Thanks to the help of my host family and online church book records, I was able to find out quite a bit about my great-grandfather's family. It turns out that Erik in fact had 5 sisters, and they all stayed in Sweden. We were able to locate records up to 1950, as well as find …
Today my History of Sweden class had our field study to the Vasa Museum. This was one of the places in Stockholm I was most excited to visit, primarily for the history lesson but also just to see this massive ship. The Vasa ship was commissioned in the 1620s by King Gustav II Adolf (Gustavus …
First Impressions of Stockholm I've been in Stockholm for about 5 days now, and I've spent most of that time getting acquainted with the city, the people, and DIS. Obviously I've learned a lot, and I don't think I could describe everything, but I'll do my best to hit the highlights. Gamla Stan, Stockholm's Old Town Hökarängen and Tunnelbanan …
In less than 48 hours, I'll be arriving in Stockholm for my four-month-long study abroad. Despite all the time I've spent this last year planning this trip, it still hasn't quite set in, and I'm sure that it won't until I get on the plane tomorrow morning. As I finish packing, I'm reflecting on the …
Finding Home in Stockholm 