Everything is falling into place

For the past month, we have been waiting on pins and needles to hear if Blake could stay in Sweden with me. You see, his scholarship ended as mine began, and so he had gone to the Migration Board and asked for a Visitors Permit that would allow him to legally be here until the end of October. In the mean time, we moved to Stockholm, and he began looking for a job. Well, he got a great job offer at a structural engineering firm (Tyrens), but they said he had to get a Residence Permit before he started. Ok, fine. So he called to look into that and the person he talked to bluntly said that in no possible way could he get a Residence Permit while on a Visitors Permit, and that he would have to go back to the states for 3 months and wait before he could even come back to Sweden. Great. My scholarship is only 9 months to begin with, so it would have been pointless for him to try and stay, and it would have sucked, big time if we had to be apart for another year.

So he decided to just give it a try and apply for a Residence Permit anyways, which was a hassle because first his job had to get approval to hire him. You see, with Sweden being part of the EU, his company had to prove that they weren't discriminating against any other EU citizen when they hired him. That got approved, but it took a few weeks.

Once that was approved, we took a trip down to Norrköping, which is a 2 hour train ride south of Stockholm to apply for his Residence Permit. You would think that the main Migration Board office would be in Stockholm, it being the largest city and the capital of Sweden and all, but nope, that would make too much sense. But anyways, it was good excuse to take a day off and to see a new city, since all we knew about Norrköping was that they speak with a whiny accent. He could have just mailed it in, but we felt better talking to someone in person. Nothing was approved that day, but the lady at the counter seemed positive that it would be approved and told us we would know within a week. So we just walked around Norrköping, which is a really cute city, although there isnt much to do there.

In the mean time, we basically can't plan anything in our life, including finding a new apartment (our lease ends at the end of November), planning a trip over Thanksgiving to Doha to visit Molly and Clifton, or anything because we didnt know if Blake could get back into the country if we left, and I didnt want to commit to an apartment thinking Blake was going to cover half and spend all of my stipend on rent! One good thing about Blake not working though was that it gave him time to officially finish and submit his thesis! So congrats Blake!

So we waited to hear back something from the migration board, and Blake sent an email to the lady in charge of his case. He gets an email back on Tuesday that says, "I am glad to tell you your case is ready, so please contact The Migration Board where you are living." Ummm... are they glad because it is approved, or just because they finished one of the things in their inbox and can move on with their job? We werent sure, so I gave Blake a big kiss the next day just in case he showed up at the Migration Board and they escorted him to the nearest airport to forbid him from coming back into Sweden ever again or something.

Luckily though, when he showed up they gave him a Residence Permit! Hooray! Today he is getting his personal number, and then he just has to do a few random little things like open a bank account so that he can get paid and then he can start working!!

With the good news in hand, we started looking at apartments. Our main priority was to get a 1 bedroom apartment (or as they say here, a 2a, which means that it has two rooms- a bedroom and a living room... so confusing!) close to downtown Stockholm. We knew this was going to cost quite a bit more, but after living in the suburbs for 2 months now, we decided to splurge and actually live in the city that we wanted to live in. One of my co-workers is moving back to China, but is keeping his apartment, so he offered to sublease it to me for a good deal, but it was still outside the city. So we declined, and on our first visit, we both fell in love with a place in the exact neighborhood (Södermalm) that we wanted to live in. It is in the heart of everything, and the apartment has a lot of character. Also, we can move in on Sunday. We have our current apartment until the end of November, so we can take our time moving in. We are so excited about it!

And to top things off, tonight I am going to a Okkervil River concert! Yeah, I would say things are going pretty good right now...

Things that make Courtney happy

Also, the Wearing of Dog Hair. Here are some portraits that I stole from some other blog:
One person is actually quoted as saing: "Kara was a pedigree Samoyed. She was so posh, if she could have talked she'd not have spoken to the likes of us." Hahahahaha...

Other people said that: "It is the most amazing stuff. It's like mohair but more lightweight and more soft, and the more you wash it, the more soft and fluffy it gets." Mrs Willis added: "People are surprised when they find out we're wearing dog wool clothes. Some think it's disgusting and ask how we can do it, but it seems very normal to us." Even now, Mrs Willis has enough hair left over to make a new jumper, and it has been sent to a friend in Derby to be spun.

Wanna try it yourself? You can purchase the following book at Amazon:
And last but not least, I wanted to brag and show my latest felt inspired creation:

That's what I call a great day

Last weekend the weather was beautiful (and by beautiful always just assume that I mean it was cold but at least sunny). The leaves have been changing colors and there are tons of parks around the city. So Blake and I walked around one of their biggest parks, Djurgården on Sunday. Here is some of the amazingness of Stockhom:







After our walk we went to a Chocolate Festival. Yeah, I know.. awesome. I can now say that there is such a thing as too much chocolate. There were about 100 vendors and you would just walk up to their booth and hold out your hand and they would give you chocolate. Pretty much the best thing ever.

The whole day was really fun and then to top it off, we watched American football with a group of Seahawks fans. We went to a "Boston-style" pub that we knew was showing the Dolphins game and Blake noticed a few people decked out in Seahawks gear. We started talking to them, and one of their brothers used to live in Seattle, and he converted all of his friends to Seahawks fans. How random is that?



The first game doesnt even start until 7 pm, and then we have a half hour subway ride home, so at 10:30, I was ready to go home, even though the Seahawks game was just starting. Plus I remembered that I had promised my office to bring in real American cupcakes (Thanks to Kathleen who brought me some cake mix and frosting from the States when she visited), and I still had to make them. Well, when you are at a bar watching football, apparently "I have to go home and make cupcakes" sounds like a pretty weird excuse... they got a pretty big kick out of it. But my office loved the cupcakes at fika (coffee and cake break- also, coincidently my favorite thing about Sweden) the next day.

Not too much going on here

You may have noticed that I havent written in awhile, because, well, to be honest, there hasnt been much to write about. Things have been going great, but nothing really blog-worthy has happened.

I really like where I work, the people and the place are really nice. I am just starting to get into some projects, which is good. Before that I was just learning a computer model which gets old really fast. Here is my building on campus:



Here is the inside in the area where I work:



This is Micke who I work with who has taken Blake and I out to see the city and caught a soccer game with us:



I would show pics of our apartment, but we arent really crazy about our place, so I figure I will wait until we move in December to a place that we actually have a chance to look at before we put money down on it!

Stockholm- Let the Games Begin!

Blake and I were really excited to have our first visitors in Stockholm, even though we had no idea what we were going to do with them. We live a bit outside of the city (finding a place in Stockholm is insanely hard) and besides our visit last January, we had barely seen the city ourselves. But it was fun, and Jason and Kathleen were both ok to be ushered around the city by 2 people who clearly didn’t know where they were going.

The plan was as follows:

Saturday, September 20^th: Jason and Kathleen arrive in Stockholm and see the city

Sunday, September 21^st: Hang out in Stockholm

Monday, September 22^nd: More Stockholm, then take overnight ferry to Riga, Latvia

Tuesday, September 23^rd: Arrive in Riga, sight-see and stay the night in Riga

Wednesday, September 24^th: Fly from Riga to Munich, Germany and go to Oktoberfest

Thursday, September 25^th: Go see Neuschwanstein Castle (a couple hours from Munich) and more Oktoberfest

Friday, September 26^th: More Oktoberfest and sight-see in Munich. Then take a train in the evening from Munich to Frankfurt (because we couldn’t find a hotel in Munich for the weekend and because we wanted to see more of Europe)

Saturday, September 27^th: Hang out in Frankfurt

Sunday, September 28^th: Fly back to our respective homes from Frankfurt (sorry, no post)

There were a lot of pics between the 4 of us, and I tried only picking the best ones, so if you want to view the pictures, you can find them here:

Stockholm

Riga

Munich

Frankfurt

They both arrived separately on Saturday morning. Jason, who lives in Seattle, was coming from Hamburg, Germany where he had had a business meeting. He took a long ass over-night train from Hamburg to Copenhagen to Stockholm and called me at 6:30 in the morning to meet him at the subway stop. Kathleen flew in from Chicago at 7:45 and Blake was nice enough to meet her at the airport so she wouldn’t get lost getting back to our apartment.

We were all pretty tired Saturday morning, but we were excited to get going and see Stockholm. I won’t bore you with the details, but basically we just walked around Gamla Stan, saw a cool ship museum and saw what life would have been like if we were made out of wood:

We had a great time just wandering around the city, looking at all the ivory covered buildings:

(I might as well fess up now that I said ivory instead of ivy and never heard the end of it!) We were all pretty tired and knew we had a long week ahead of us, so we went home and watched Beerfest to mentally prepare for Oktoberfest.

Stockholm- Take 2!

The next day was more sightseeing around Stockholm and we went on a boat ride around the archipelago. The boat was more of a high speed raft with seats, and they give you these outfits to stay warm and dry while speeding like crazy. Here we are in our awesome get-ups:

Our guide was all about speed, which I loved. It was like being on a jet ski without getting wet! Check out how fast we were going for almost an hour:

After the boat ride, we headed off to Stadshuset (City Hall) for a little more sight seeing, and an impromptu band cover picture. Go to Blake's webpage right now to vote on what you think our band should be named. Hurry!

Deciding to embrace the whole tourist thing, we went to the Absolute IceBar that night. Blake and I had gone in January, and drinking in ice is so awesome that we didn’t want to keep that to ourselves.

Kathleen really picked up on the Stockholm sense of style as you can clearly see here:

Note: When going to a bar made of ice, I suggest (and I am sure Kathleen does too now) to wear more than flats and a skirt. Although our resourceful friend found that the sock she normally uses as a camera case doubles as a sock! Genius!

We then explored a little more of the Stockholm night life on a Sunday night. We even convinced a bar to put on a real American football game! Oh boy! (No, really, it was awesome, Blake and I are going through some serious football withdrawals.) The most exciting part of the night was when Kathleen and I found out the best apart about girls shoes:

Stockholm- End Scene

We had to catch a boat by 4:30 on Monday, so we just wandered around Stockholm, enjoying its beauty on a sunny day. While looking for a scarf for Kathleen's brother (scarves are the thing to have to support your favorite football team) we went into some weird little store and found these awesome, cheese-a-rific American flag wrist-bands. We had already bought Nike headbands to wear for our team costume, but since Jason is the only one who looks good in a sweatband, these turned out to be the best purchases of the trip. No sneak previews though... you have to wait until Munich to see their awesomeness.

Cruisin' Together (like that Huey Lewis song from Duets)

We had no idea what to expect from the ferry/cruise from Stockholm to Riga, so Kathleen and Jason were the perfect guinea pigs to try it out (insert evil laugh here). Turns out it is a fairly large cruise, nice in a way that I imagine Atlantic City to be nice. We had a nice little cabin for the 4 of us, a restaurant, entertainment, dancing and most importantly- a duty-free shop. They say do not open stuff on the ship, but there are no regulations, um, at all, so everyone does and it turns into a crazy party boat. Some people had a little too much fun:



There was some pretty funny entertainment (actually it wasn’t terrible compared to our last real cruise), but we made our own entertainment on the dance floor:



We never knew Kathleen was so good at the Pop and Lock!!! (Note: Not sure that is the actual name if the dance move, if you happen to know the real name, let me know, it has been driving me crazy!)


My favorite part was winning a bunch of money at the slot machines without having any clue what I was doing. But then I lost it with Blake’s help just as fast as I won it, so oh well. All in all, the cruise was a success- but the ridiculous of it all can not be summed up in this blog succinctly enough, so you will just have to make me take you on one when you visit. :)

Riga- We would never be the same again

The boat arrived in Riga at 11 am the next morning and so we had all day to do whatever there is to do in Riga, which is more than we thought. On the cruise we talked with a couple Latvian dudes who were on their annual trip to Stockholm. We asked them what they did in Stockholm and their answer was “eat McDonalds.” Which is weird, because there are many, many, many McDonalds easily found in Riga. We should know, we ate at one.

(hey, we were hungry and weren’t ready to face the language barrier quite yet!... Don’t look at me like that! Do you speak Latvian? Yeah, I didn’t think so!!!) The city is really cute though, there are tons of parks, cute old buildings, cute old buildings being torn down:

We mainly just wandered around the city, checking out churches and points of interest. Kathleen was looking through a paper that was for English speakers and found an announcement for a free ticket to a semi-final match between Riga and Skonto (another Riga based team). We decided, hey, why not? It’s free. So we wandered over to the stadium through some sort of sketchy areas of town, thinking the roar of the stadium would make it obvious to find. Well, 40 people do not make a roar. Yep, semi-final match between a cross town rival, and nada. So we walk up, I show some enormous bouncer a newspaper clipping and he says, “we don’t take this.” Before I can object, a more reasonable looking (and by that, I mean normal human size) interrupts and says that they do indeed take these. Well I keep walking, forgetting that I had everyone else’s coupons, and not thinking that they needed them since the stadium was only about 2% full, and I hear Blake, Kathleen, and Jason all yelling at me. Apparently the huge bouncer was not about to let them in without a coupon. Blake tried to alleviate the situation by joking with the bouncer, “I think there is plenty of room in here.” Yeah, bad idea Blake. I thought Blake was going to die. We are pretty sure the huge bouncer had a thing against Gingers (aka- Red heads, aka- Blake). After many a Ginger-head jokes, and one of Jason’s random tangents about how he likes to eat shredded ginger (the food, not, ewww), we came up with the best name ever for the over-sized bounder.... “The Ginger Shredder.” So we find seats (there were plenty!), already 30 minutes into the game with Skonto up 2-0. We were afraid we missed out on all the action, but Skonto, my most favoritist team ever kept on being awesome and finished 5-0. Skonto!!! (Clap, clap, clap) Skonto!!!

After the game we grabbed a beer at a bar that was completely decked out in frogs. No, really, all frogs. How weird is that? From the urban legends you hear about Eastern Europe, I suppose it could have been worse! (I luckily have never seen the movie Hostel that my parents mistakenly watched once.)

Oktoberfest… here we come!

The next day we caught a plane and after much delay (well, it was fun delay, but lets be honest, Stockholm and Riga were just a delay for the destination of destinations) we arrived in Munich! And now, without any further ado, I would like to introduce to you, Team Chokengruppen! (Don’t even bother asking about the name, all I can say is that the best things in life are free…):

We found our hostel and didn’t waste any time getting to the beer tents. We arrived around 4:30 or so and it was already packed. We went a few beer tents and we were starting to get frustrated because we could not find a place to sit. Finally, at Hafbrauhaus, we found a table with 4 older guys representing the British Isles. There were 2 Welshmen, 1 Scottish guy, and a British dude. They were all hilarious. Slightly perverted, but funny. Lucky for me, it was made clear from the beginning that Blake and I are an item, so Kathleen got most of the crap from the guys. Bossman (that’s what we called him) was all about Kathleen:

The whole thing is just crazy. The tents are jam-packed full of drunk people, who prost (cheers) and sing and stand on tables.

Blake and I tried the traditional Schweinhaxen, which is, as the old British dude yelled out across our table, “Pork Knuckle!!!!” It tasted sooo good!

I was wearing my Swedish soccer jersey, and every time I went anywhere, people would scream and point at me, Sweden!!! I ended up chatting with a few of them in Swedish, which was pretty cool. It was hard to explain to everyone that I am American, but I live in Sweden, and that I am not Swedish at all, but in fact mostly Irish, German, and Lithuanian. It blew their minds! Most of the night we all just talked to random people that were in proximity to us or that stopped and talked to us because of the wristbands, or a t-shirt, or whatever. Jason became good buds with a cute German couple that are “seriously” going to come visit him. Here are a few pics and videos that hopefully capture this atmosphere better than I ever will:

Everyone loved our American wrist bands, which again, we bought in Stockholm. I think my favorite pic of the night is Blake having a moment with one of the neo-nazi Germans who kept telling him to be proud of his heritage:

After about 5 hours, some of us (you know who you are...) had had enough, and because we didn’t want to pass out around some scary Germans, we decided to call it a night.

The Neuschwanstein Castle Disaster

Since we are civilized people and because we appreciate our livers and all that they do for us, we decided to do some sight-seeing and see more than the inside of the beer tents on Thursday. Blake had gone to the Neuschwanstein Castle last year, and I saw pictures and really really wanted to go this year. He had gone with a tour group last year, but thought it might be more expensive and that it would be easy enough to go on our own. We got a somewhat late start, but hopped on a train before noon. We are on the train for about an hour, and we get to some random stop and almost everyone gets off, but Blake said that last year he didn’t switch trains, so we stayed put. Over an hour later, we get to the last stop on the train and find out that we should have switched trains an hour ago when everyone else did. Opps. So we had to get back on another train, explain why we didn’t have tickets for that train, and take it back to the stop we missed an hour or so back, and wait for another train to take us to the castle, which then was another hour on a train. We finally got there a little after 4 pm, it was rainy and foggy, we were pretty tired from being on a train all day, but at least we were able to book a tour for the castle before it closed. So we walked up a pretty big hill, but it felt good after sitting on the train all day. The castle itself is pretty amazing. It was built by a crazy King, it was never officially finished, it was used as a model for the Disney World Castle, and it is set in a beautiful setting surrounded by mountains. Here is our group after the long journey:

The best part was that on the way down we stopped and got some Glühwein (hot spiced wine).

We had checked the time that the last train was leaving from Füssen (the closest small town to the castle) and we were very close to missing it, which would have meant staying the night in Füssen with none of our stuff. We then had to take that an hour back to where we transferred to get to the train that took us back to Munich. Because we were rushing around missing trains and running to other trains all day, we hadn’t eaten all day and it was already 8 (except for Jason trying a hot dog from a vending machine:)

So we ran around some small German town during our 30 minute stop looking for food. Luckily we found some Chinese Buffet which was able to satisfy all our respective dietary restrictions. So we filled up some take away containers and ran back to the train station, and finally, we were on our way back to Munich.

We had originally planned to hit up Oktoberfest again Thursday night after getting back from the castle, but that was when we thought we were going to get back around 7 pm. We didn’t get back until after 10, but we tried anyway. As we were walking to the fairgrounds, we noticed there were many, many drunk people heading towards us, away from the fairgrounds. Turns out Oktoberfest ends at 11 pm, and it was almost 11 pm. So we didn’t get to go to Oktoberfest that night, but we did see what few people get to see- the close of a night at Oktoberfest sober. It was pretty amusing. We were pretty exhausted from the frustrating day anyways, so we went back and just decided to watch a little German TV. This pretty much sums German TV up:

After we got bored with boob/word search game, we found a little tofu guy (Note: We are just guessing it was tofu, other guesses include a loaf of bread, what's your guess?) that didn’t make any sense to us (it is all in German, which turns out, we don’t speak):

So the day didn’t go as planned at all, but somehow we still managed to have fun with it. And that kids, is the real lesson here.

Rally Time

We had already seen Oktoberfest in the evening, but we had yet to see it in the morning, and after our losses the day before, we knew we had to rally big time. Oh, and how.

So we headed over to the beer tents and got our first beer before noon:

The tent was a lot less crowded, but it wasn’t as lively either, since the band doesn’t start till later. So we had to make our own entertainment. I had remembered to bring the playing cards with me, and so I suggested we play the easiest drinking game ever, “Screw the Dealer.” So we started playing, much to the amusement of the Italians to our left and our right (we were later told that this was “Italian Week”). Jason turned out to be the Dealer and got a little ahead of us and got laughed at a lot:

The next game we invited the 2 Italians to our right, Marco and Diego (whose names alone were doing nothing to reduce the Italian stereotypes) to play with us. They embraced our American stereotypes as well.

After a couple of beers, we felt we had now sufficiently seen Oktoberfest, so we headed off to see the city. I definitely don’t recommend sight-seeing after a couple of beers, but we had already committed to this, so there we were. The old part of Munich is pretty cute. We walked up a large tower to get a good view of the city:

The rest of the afternoon was a blur (for me) as we did a lot of walking before we had to catch a train by 6 to get to Frankfurt. I think I was hungover by the time we got to the train station, which is a weird feeling.

Last and Certainly Least, Frankfurt

It’s not that I didn’t like Frankfurt, I actually did like it, it just kind of paled in comparison to all the cool stuff we had just done. The city is a mix of old and new, except that the old is pretty new because the city got hit real heard during WWII. So they recreated “old town” so it kind of has a fake feel to it.

We kept to our usual m.o. and just kind of wandered around the city. We caught a beautiful sunset at the top of Main Tower:

After the sunset we went to find authentic German food. Unfortunately for Kathleen authentic German food is in no possible way vegan. And on top of that, authentic German places don’t speak English and we don’t speak German, so when we tried to ask if Kathleen if she could bring outside (vegan friendly) food in, our waiter could only say enough English to yell, “Well I cant help you lady!” and run away. Eventually another waiter came over and brought Blake, Jason and I the meat and dairy we were craving, and then Kathleen had the best falafel of her life after our dinner, so all was well.

Blake and I had to catch a super early flight the next morning (Ryan Air gets us again with their low, low prices but inconvenient airports!) so we just reflected on our awesome trip in silence on Saturday night. Or packed and hung out like normal people, your pick.