Välkommen!

Welcome to my new blog about my travels, experiences, and life in Sweden!  I've been thinking and talking about doing this for a while, and now it's finally happening.  We'll see if this amounts to weekly posts, monthly posts, or perhaps nothing more than this post, but I think this can be a good way for me to keep in touch with my life in America while documenting my experiences abroad.  While I may have moved very far away, my friends and family in the US are important to me, and I want to keep in touch as much as possible.  This is not to say that all I have to do is send completely impersonal posts to the public internet and expect you all to treat these as personal messages - this is more a way to update you and remind you all that I'm here and interested in hearing your updates, and hopefully it'll spark more individual conversations via email, chat, phone calls, videochat, teleportation, etc.  That said, you are welcome to publicly comment on any of my blog posts or send me a personal email at hoffenson@gmail.com - whatever you prefer.

I'll start off by saying that I can't believe it's already been six months since I moved to Gothenburg.  Time is really flying by, and I wish that my progress at work and in learning Swedish were a little bit further along, but I do feel like I'm moving forward on both fronts, which is good.  I just started my third Swedish course, which is level B1 part 2.  Right now, I feel like I can understand about half of what I hear in Swedish, and maybe two-thirds of what I read, but I really don't have much practice speaking because everybody switches to English whenever we are talking (since nearly all Swedes can speak English way better than I can speak Swedish).  I'm hopeful and confident, though, that I'll be conversing fairly proficiently in another 6 months.

Just like moving to any new city, it's been a little bit tough to build a network of friends, and I think this has been exacerbated by the minor language barrier and the relatively introverted nature of the Swedish people.  I do feel like I've made some good friends through work, as well as a few through the Swedish courses and sports that I've been playing, but my social network is still much smaller than what I'm used to from my groups of friends in Georgia, Maryland, and Michigan. It probably doesn't help that I live alone, but I actually really like the independence I get from that.  Anyway, at this point I'm starting to feel pretty good about having made some good friends and finding things to do to fill up my free time, and I think that this will continue to improve over time.

My summer and early autumn were very busy times, which is part of the reason why I dropped off the email update bandwagon.  I think I should probably describe my trips in more detail in later posts, but as an overview I had 4 visitors and traveled to Budapest, Belgium, Holland, London (Olympics), Paris, Chicago, Ann Arbor, Aalborg (Denmark), Stockholm a few times, and Copenhagen a couple of times.  It's really nice how easy it is to get around Europe, and some of the flights were around US$50 round-trip!  And I know some of you are going to ask me what my favorite place was out of those trips, and I'll tell you right now to please not ask me that question.  Each of those places is very cool in it's own way, and I really hate picking favorites.

Since it's still election season, I have to mention that American politics are surprisingly well-known to a lot of Europeans, considering how little we typically know about foreign politics, and it seems like whenever I meet somebody they ask me about the election.  Almost everybody I've met over here supports Obama, and I suppose their main interests lie in foreign policy, but they are also very socially liberal over here.  The American left (liberal/democrat) is pretty far to the right (conservative side) of most European political views.  People here don't seem to understand why conservatives in the US are so against universal healthcare, which most other developed countries have.  And on the foreign policy side, they like that the democrats use diplomacy and cooperate with other nations to avoid war.  Some Americans argue that this makes us look weak, but on the other hand, it makes us look reasonable.  I know that not everybody reading this blog agrees with these views, but I think it's important to understand how outsiders view us, because it can't be a bad thing for other people to like us.  Anyway, I'll be happy when the election is over so I can read the news and learn something interesting rather than the same stuff over and over.

Okay, that's probably enough for my first post.  If you want to subscribe (i.e., get an email update every time I post something), you can do so by putting your email address in the "Follow by email" field and clicking "Submit" in the top-right corner of the page.  If you can't figure that out and want updates, just ask me and I'll send you an email every time I post!

Med vänliga hälsningar,
Steven