Tuesday, September 29, 2015

On Culture Shock

”You don’t slice your own cheese in America, do you?”
“Not really, it comes pre-sliced but sometimes you can buy a block but it’s not common”
“Ahh, very different cultures then”

I write this post as an American, on a computer manufactured somewhere in Asia, living in Sweden, drinking Italian coffee out of a mug from Norway. There’s no question that we live in a globalized society, so culture shock shouldn’t be as prevalent as it was previously. But it is, it exists and pretending that it doesn’t is being plain ignorant.

It’s more than a different language or pre-sliced vs. block cheese (block cheese is 1000x better), it’s something larger than those, the shock is based on a difference in way of life that creates culture shock. I didn’t know how much culture shock would affect me coming into Sweden but looking back over the past month and half, I can acknowledge that it has. Similarly, I know that I’ll experience reverse culture shock when I come back to the US in three months. 

In the past three years, I’ve lived in four different states, two continents, and four time zones. I’ve spent my fair share of time driving and in planes to get to my next destination and after everything I’ve experienced, you’d think I would be prepared for culture shock. But I wasn’t.

Everyone always asks me what the US “is like”. And I never know how to respond. What do they want to hear? What do I need to explain? Why is everyone asking about guns, Donald Trump, and prom? Why do I feel like I’m constantly getting judged for being American? 

Yes, I’m from the land of democracy, a weird election system, gun control or lack thereof, and millions of cars. But there’s nothing wrong with that. I don’t run around waving an American flag, carrying a rifle, and singing the national anthem or America the Beautiful but it doesn’t mean that I’m not an American. I skipped prom twice, disagree with pretty much everything that Donald Trump says, can’t sit through a baseball game, hate fried chicken, and advocate for stronger gun control. The American stereotype doesn’t perfectly fit me or anyone. It’s the individualism that creates its own stereotype.


Far from that, it’s everyone’s individualism that creates culture shock. You’d expect the norms of one country to be similar but in reality the norms are different. Maybe globalization has changed the Swedish stereotype. But a lot of people are still tall with blonde hair and blue eyes. Whether you move across the country or across the world, there’s nothing that you can do to prevent culture shock. It will happen and it’s part of the process of moving. The only thing you can do is to accept who you are and where you come from and put the best version of yourself forward.


Wednesday, September 23, 2015

No(r)way!

I’ve been staring at my screen trying to think of how I should begin this post. I started yesterday, wrote a couple paragraphs and then deleted them, and then started over a couple times. Eventually, I gave up, watched “Friends” and went to bed. Nothing seemed to capture, portray, or live up to the exact emotions I felt and it was incredibly frustrating.

At this point, pretty much everyone I know knows that I spent my weekend in Norway. I can sum up my time there in eight words: “it was awesome, I want to go back.” In essence, Norway is amazing. The friends I went with and I spent the weekend in Bergen which is a city built into mountains and on a fjord. All of the buildings are either old or built to look old so everywhere you look there’s a mixture of modern culture with old world architecture and it’s beautiful and thought provoking.


Jumping for joy because nature is awesome
On Saturday we decided to hike Trolltunga. For those of you who don’t know Trolltunga is a rock that sticks out above a fjord near Odda, about three hours outside Bergen, and it’s an 11km hike to get there. I am by no means a professional hiker. I hike parts of the Appalachian Trail every once in a while and enjoy hiking in Colorado when I get the chance but this was the biggest challenge I’ve ever taken on and I was so excited.

It sucked. The hike was super hard but after the first two kilometers it became much easier. Once the stone stairs were finished, I was able to set my sights directly on reaching Trolltunga, something I’d only dreamed about doing. It’s pretty cool to actually achieve something you only dream about because once you’re there it seems surreal but then you pinch yourself, take some pictures, and then realize that it’s reality.

Wondering across the Norwegian mountainside was an adventure. Rocks were everywhere and made up the majority of the landscape, something that I’m not used to coming from the east coast. I did slip a couple of times as my boots, backpack, and pants could show but that was just part of the adventure of it all. Sometimes the slip would hurt or jolt me but it made it more fun. 

We made it to Trolltunga about four and a half hours later and it was worth all of the slips, the aching legs and feet, and the sweat covering my face. Yes I’ve seen pictures of it, but once you see something in real life, it changes your view completely. Honestly, the entire rock and hike is surreal. I’m no geologist but rocks shouldn’t really stick out that far without falling but it does and it has for thousands of years which is pretty cool.

The top of the mountain was freezing and I sang “Let It Go” in my head for an hour and a half while we waited to take pictures. In the midst of the rain, mist, and snow, I couldn’t help but be amazed at everything that had happened in the past few hours. I’d flown to Norway, slept for a couple hours, and hiked longer than I’d slept. If you’d told me three months ago that I’d spent a weekend in Norway hiking Trolltunga I’d laugh and say “that’s nice, but it won’t happen.” BUT IT DID. Bucket list item checked off

We made it back down the mountain with a few more slips and a lot more mud but it didn’t matter since we’d made it. The hike down was much easier than the hike up and even though my toes and knees were in pain for the middle kilometers, we didn’t stop until the bottom. I took a minute to fill my water with some fresh aqua but that was it. After the hike, it took us 45 minutes to wash off ourselves and our boots and then another three and a half hours (we got soooo lost) to get back to Bergen. But we watched the sun set on the day over the fjords and getting lost, the mud on my pants, and the sweat in my hair was worth it. Norway is beautiful, 10/10 would recommend.


Thankfully, Sunday was spent wandering around Bergen and not hiking a lot since we were all somewhat sore. We tried fresh whale from a vendor in the fish market, got Starbucks (!!!) and ate lunch at a traditional Norwegian restaurant. It was the best weekend I’d had in a long time. Norway is so cool and getting to see two different aspects was really interesting. Now, I’m just counting down the days until I can go back.

Once I can actually write with some more caffeine and when my thoughts are more aligned I'll actually write more in depth about my experience hiking Trolltunga and in Norway. Trust me, this won't be the last of Norway.

Tuesday, September 15, 2015

Why I'm Glad I'm Not Skating

It’s been a really long time since I’ve skated. Over a month. And the days keep passing by since I last laced up my favorite shoes. Yes it is sad and yes I do miss it but at the same time I don’t.

I long for the days when I could spend two plus hours on the ice with the wind in my face or hearing the ripping sound of my edges on the freshly cut surface. The rink is home and always will be. But at the same time I’m glad that I’m taking so much time off and am thankful for what I can do as a result. There comes a time when you spend so much time doing something that it becomes who you are, and not in a good way. It’s all you think about and the thought of failure becomes second nature so you don’t know who you are if you "fail". The subsequent fear of failure and the unknown that follows overtakes the excitement of the little successes that always happen and what seemed like fun and enjoyable in the beginning is no longer that. Pretty much, you get burnt out.

The problem with me experiencing burn out is that I wouldn't acknowledge it. Somewhere deep down I was aware of the existence but I would go back to the failure thing. "Burning out is failure so I'm not burning out because I'm not a failure. I still like skating, I go to practice every morning, I'm fine." The thing is is that thinking that isn't right. I couldn't see that my negative thoughts were eating me up inside, that I was twisting how I felt to how I wanted to feel, and that I wasn't living the way I should be.

There was a time last school year where I would skate for two hours in the morning, go to class, and then go to the gym for two more hours of off-ice training that consisted of a mixture of HIIT, dance classes, stretching, stairs, and traditional lifting and cardio. So what’s the problem then? It’s a simple question with a more complex answer. I was spending so much time thinking about how I put in all this physical effort so there was no way I could possibly fail when in actuality, I could. The physicality was there no question but I was lacking any mental training. My brain wasn’t trained to deal with what I saw as a failure and others saw as success, it wasn't trained to prepare me for competition or anything other than running stairs or doing countless burpees. I didn't train to compete, I competed to train. For me, anything other than reaching the goals I set was failure. In other words, my life was gilded.

You would look at me and think I was completely fine. Hell, looking back over the past year, I thought I was fine and I was happier than I had been in a really long time. And on the outside, I was. I wasn’t getting bullied by others and I had friends that I loved. But bullying is more than words or actions by others, it has a deep, internal, emotional aspect. And I was twisting everything that I thought and others said to eat me up on the inside while remaining my outward appearance of being a happy, bubbly person. The pressure to keep up this act of being fake happy and annoyingly fit and obsessive ate me up until last week when I just broke over Facebook messenger and Skype with a friend who will remain nameless (but thank you!). 

He gave me probably the best and worst advice I’ve ever received: “You are not a skater. You are a person who happens to skate. You are more than that though, you’re a sports fan, an analyst, a business geek, a coffee lover, someone who can talk for hours about something you're passionate about...” Honestly, it hurt but got me thinking, “Skating doesn’t define me and here I am thinking that it’s all I have. Maybe there’s more to me than ‘that skater girl.’” And there is.

Before this realization, I would never do some of the things that I’m planning to do or have already done. I’m hiking Trolltunga in less than a week. That’s 13 miles (20 km) of slippery rock, pulling yourself up over ledges, and who knows what else. In other words, it’s an injury and/ or sore muscles just waiting to happen. But I don’t care. In fact, I’m more excited about this one hike than I was about competing in my first Nationals. The fact that I’m willing to risk what could happen in order to fulfill something that I’ve wanted to do, so that I can experience something that’s once in a lifetime, means more than skating in 4 Nationals and not placing ever could. 

So maybe I’m not what you would call a “skater.” Maybe I’m less, maybe I’m more but it depends on your point of view. I’m the girl who will wear leggings as pants, drink more coffee than advised, walk instead of drive, do too much HIIT, spend a week eating pasta in Italy, and wear flannel until I die. There’s no problem with that. It takes more than one thing to define someone and I'm not the exception to the rule.

Skating has made me who I am today. Without it, I'd be another person completely, I would have gone to university somewhere completely different, I wouldn't have the same friends, the same competitive nature, the same outlook on life. But there comes a time when I have to decide what is best for my mental wellness and maybe that's taking time off to decompress and deciding to exploit who I am and my characteristics without skating. 

Yes, I miss skating every day and will until I can lace up my worn down boots and feel the cold air hit my face. But at the same time, I’m thankful for the experiences I have while I’m not “that skater girl.” I’ll take the opportunities skating gives me in the future and will forever be thankful for all that it’s given me thus far, but until that comes, I’m going to continue defining myself in ways that don’t involve copious amounts of makeup and lycra.


Photocreds to Mary Lunsford, love ya chica
PSA: If anyone ever feels something akin to how I felt...here's Queen B with some inspiring words and a really interesting article I found. Sometimes it's hard to take other people's advice but this is really good shit. My "junk food" wasn't TMZ or anything but it was self-depreciation and the article's full of some good advice for any situation.

Sunday, September 13, 2015

The One Where I Move a Couch

“Do you like helping people? Do you like free things? Do you like exercise?”

I like all three of those things so when I got that text from a friend of mine, I was instantly intrigued. It ended up that she needed help moving a couch (read: extremely heavy loveseat) that she found for free. So I agreed and we moved the couch. The end.


A very realistic portrayal of the endeavor
Haha just kidding. That loveseat was actually really heavy and not the easiest thing to move. There were times when I thought back to the episode of “Friends” where Ross orders a new couch and has to move it in himself (PIVOT!). The only difference being that Ross was just dumb and ordered a couch that he couldn't actually move and we were able to move ours. But I will give Ross something: it's really difficult to move a couch and pivoting it does actually help. It was a struggle to pick it up in the beginning and we had to move it across town back to her apartment. 

It worked out, the couch is in her apartment. We moved it with a lot of breaks, four girls, and lots of “almost there”s. My forearms and triceps are still unnecessarily sore but it was fun. I wouldn’t do it again but ask me in a few weeks with the promise of coffee and food and I might do it.

We were quite a sight walking down Tunavagen past ICA and past a school. The kids at the school waved and laughed at the sight up four slight and surprisingly strong 20 year old girls carrying this huge-ass couch past their playground. People at ICA just kind of stared as we struggled with the last hundred meters, sweat accumulated, and we were struggling to keep it up. It was nice though, because when we took a break, there was somewhere really comfortable to sit and that was the highlight of the day. 

I really don’t think that moving a couch without a car or a strong person to help was ever on my bucket list but looking back it was quite the experience. For example, I now know that I can carry a couple hundred pound loveseat with the help of three other people, life lessons. 

So when you ask me what I did when I studied abroad my answer can now be “I went to a music festival, drank coffee, and moved a couch”

At the beginning...

Hey boyz, we're all single

Sunday, September 6, 2015

Lektion?

The way classes work in Lund is complicated to say the least. Students take four classes per semester but only a couple at a time. Classes run for anywhere between a couple of weeks to the entire semester and don’t end until after New Year’s. So even though I’m enrolled to take four classes, I’m only in two right now, which means that I have six hours of class per week and way too much free time...

Even though I seem to have free time on paper, I’ve found easy ways to fill it up. My homework for Swedish takes much longer than any other language that I’ve taken and my desire to learn the language pushes me to really try on the work and go an extra couple steps. A good portion of my spare time is filled by my love of coffee and trying new cafes. I can easily spend a couple of hours drinking a cup, talking to friends, doing work, writing, or just watching people pass by. While Lund is homogenous at it’s core, the university gives it a little bit more spice with students from all over Sweden and the world.

After three weeks, I don’t find myself lost quite as often although I did find myself really confused on my run last week and much to my dismay had to use Google Maps to get myself back home. And that was the last time it’s been open, Hooray!

While the classes are not serious, it’s so nice to be taking something that doesn’t have anything to deal with finance, accounting, or business in general. Don’t get me wrong, I love what I study and really enjoyed the experience I got over the summer, but there’s still times when I want to get out and take interesting classes that aren’t all about numbers or making a profit. I’m a closet history nerd so being able to take a course in Scandinavian history is a dream come true. 

Everyone sees abroad as a break from legit class and school and so far, I definitely see that and understand what they are talking about. You learn a lot but it’s not all, or primarily, in the classroom. 

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

Over the past few weeks, I’ve gotten three questions over and over again from friends and family.
  1. How’s your Swedish?
  2. Do you have a Swedish boyfriend yet?
  3. What’s your favorite part of being there?
And here are the answers so everyone can stop asking the same things and come up with something new.
1. My Swedish accent is atrocious and my vocabulary is getting there. Sometimes I sound like I'm trying to speak Italian but with Swedish words. I can get around and understand basic things but otherwise I’m limited to:
  • Kaffe med mjölk
  • Tack!
  • Hej (or two: hej, hej!)
  • En stor falafel med hummus, tack!
  • Fika?
  • Ursäkta! 
2. HAHAHHAA no. Sorry mom, no tall blonde to bring home yet. However, I’m not too worried since I’m here for another three and a half months so I’ve got some time. If anyone has tips on how to get a Swede, I’m more than open to suggestions

3. The people! They’re all really nice. Even though most of them are super quiet, they’re all welcoming, espeicially when I tell them I don’t speak Swedish. I could go on and on about the culture and people but I’ll save that for later.

Vi ses,

Em

Officially a superhero but it's no big deal

Thank you Sweden for giving a name to my coffee addiciton