This post will be in Dutch, look at the bottom for an English translation of the introduction. Swedes can read parts of the Dutch text also. Gisteren is het Nederlandse woordenboek binnengekomen, voor Zweden wel te verstaan; Nederländska fickordbok. Zodat Frida de Nederlandse grammatica achterin in het Zweeds kan leren, wel zo makkelijk. En achterin [...]

Continue reading about Dat wordt nog wat..

Last week I went to sit in Hubert’s chair (Hubert is the president of the international comity) and he told me about a project portraying the international students here around Mälardalens högskola. The idea is to show the Swedes around here who these students are. Swedes (sorry for the generalization again) are rather reserved and [...]

Continue reading about International Presence Exhibition.. preparations

I don’t think the snow has ever been absent since I’ve been here. For the last almost two months there was always some snow. It snowed like twice a week and the temperature stayed low. So there is snow everywhere. On days that it actually snows the snowplows can be seen in front of my [...]

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This is great, I’m finally getting in some new friendships. This is what I’ve been missing the past weeks. I do have a group from all the exchange students here, but that remains a group with very mixed interests. So it is hard to really connect to others there. And then there is a group [...]

Continue reading about Friend management

Today I had a lecture again where we discussed about stereotypes. Tulips, cheese and drugs-friendly Dutch; family loyal, siesta enjoying and hard-working Mexicans; always on time, environmentally aware and reserved Swedes; and many more. What I particularly liked was that it came clear that stereotypes are not always negative, in fact stereotypes are mostly positive [...]

Continue reading about Communication crisis

At the end of today we got a lecture about the Swedes and the Swedish culture. This was after two introduction days and our own adventures in the cities Eskilstuna and Västerås of the last days. The lecturer was Jonas Stier, also my teacher for the first course starting tomorrow morning. He’s a great guy, [...]

Continue reading about The Swedes and Swedish culture