On an island! (using the internets!)
Dec. 31st, 2006 01:24 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rhyllWell, I'm on an island somewhere in the Stockholm (?) archipelago now. It's raining, and cold, and I've just lost at Alfapet (the Swedish version of Scrabble), but I'm relatively happy with the situation.
In part it's because things here are very new for me. The landscape, for a start - pine (?) trees, forests, quaint little red houses, boats... it's all very surreal, like I've fallen into an old-fashioned storybook. There's frost on the ground that crunches under my boots, and if we go anywhere after around 4pm we have to take torches, because it's pitch dark. For added excitement we carry all the water for the house in buckets - I'm not entirely sure how that's meant to work in the context of the sauna that's currently heating up. People keep making jokes (I think) about moving between the sauna and standing out in the rain. I'm sticking with my usual policy - I'm willing to give it a go as long as I see someone else do it (and survive) first.
As well as all of the "ohmygodI'minEurope" stuff, I've also enjoyed a lot of the discussions here. Last night I stayed up late drinking whisky and beer and talking about science, belief, social engineering, and other stuff that tends to tickle my intellectual taste buds. And tonight a couple more people arrived to stay in the weird collection of houses around the place, one of whom is leaving a job with ericson to look for environmentalist work, and another who's just had a book published.
My favourite snippets of yesterday were finding out that children here have "coffee parties" instead of tea parties, and meeting someone who told me that nose-picking was a family tradition.
I still miss you kids back in Perth (and elsewhere!) and think of you often. Many waves and so on!
In part it's because things here are very new for me. The landscape, for a start - pine (?) trees, forests, quaint little red houses, boats... it's all very surreal, like I've fallen into an old-fashioned storybook. There's frost on the ground that crunches under my boots, and if we go anywhere after around 4pm we have to take torches, because it's pitch dark. For added excitement we carry all the water for the house in buckets - I'm not entirely sure how that's meant to work in the context of the sauna that's currently heating up. People keep making jokes (I think) about moving between the sauna and standing out in the rain. I'm sticking with my usual policy - I'm willing to give it a go as long as I see someone else do it (and survive) first.
As well as all of the "ohmygodI'minEurope" stuff, I've also enjoyed a lot of the discussions here. Last night I stayed up late drinking whisky and beer and talking about science, belief, social engineering, and other stuff that tends to tickle my intellectual taste buds. And tonight a couple more people arrived to stay in the weird collection of houses around the place, one of whom is leaving a job with ericson to look for environmentalist work, and another who's just had a book published.
My favourite snippets of yesterday were finding out that children here have "coffee parties" instead of tea parties, and meeting someone who told me that nose-picking was a family tradition.
I still miss you kids back in Perth (and elsewhere!) and think of you often. Many waves and so on!