40 days struggle of being an expat

I started to feel better and figured out how to have a life here in Sweden. It might sound funny to you because I have been to 27 countries and lived in Holland for 14 months. However, living abroad without being part of AIESEC is much harder. There have been quite a few things I am struggling with:

My own social network:
Seeing so many trainee network in different countries, living in Rotterdam as foreigner last year, one thing most of the expatriates are challenged by is to form a social network with the locals. For me it is even more challenging when I spend most of my time with Aron, when Swedish are not particularly open and friendly to foreigners (oops!), when cold and grey winter is getting on everybody’s nerve.

Just like what Devrim pointed out, spoiled by AIESEC, the snobbish me only wanted to make friends with inspiring and interesting people. It turned out that I was the one separating myself to the rest. After an extremely eventful weekend with the trainees here, I found myself having great fun socializing with people with less judgments and more openness.

Since my goal is to make more friends with Swedish people, the next round of challenges will be: join our department fika (a conversation over a tea/coffee between friends) and talk to those 20 years older than me; find out more parties without @ers or trainees but Swedish young people who I don’t know. For me personally, these things are much harder to do than how they sound. Non AIESEC networks are usually not as open and friendly. And Swedish are not the warmest people in the world, at least not superficially. I would like to increase more insight to locals and observe how I truly live in this environment.

Activities attended so far:
- A Mozart concert in the church at Gamla Stan (Old Town) - to complete the oldness, everyone else is twice my age! Both Aron and me fell asleep - too relaxing!
- The History Museum - enjoyed those ‘learning circle’ style exhibitions by picking out the favorite and most disliked pictures and talk about the reasons which is very personal connection to love, power, hope and fear inside us.
- The National Museum of Fine Arts - enjoyed the modern Scandinavian design and the great company of Linn!
- Christmas Choir in a university at Flemingsberg - full of joy and festival atmosphere!
- Jazz club Stampen at Gamla Stan again - everyone else is twice my age again! Where are the young people in this country?
- Cultural dinner organized by the LC - first time meeting all the trainees in town and luckily everybody liked the stirfried noodles
- Hosted a Christmas party in my apartment - first time had great fun with the trainees and had good conversations
- Visited Skansen (a huge outdoor museum demonstrating Swedish life and culture) - the Christmas market there was very big. Will go again with Aron for some lectures on Swedish culture.
- Shared my @XP at LC’s induction seminar - woke up my sweet AIESEC memories. Once again I felt that this organization is incredible!

A lot more to experience: having a Swedish Christmas, moving to Maria Johansson’s apartment (living with a Swedish, yah!), watching the musical ‘singing in the rain’ in Swedish, traveling to Egypt after IPM. Stay tuned, my friend!