Recap over Fika: The Great Semester Abroad
My hands cling to a delicate cup of varm choklad (hot chocolate), the froth dissipating into soft white steam. The steam tickles my cheeks and I bring the cup to my face for more heat. I have been seated in Café Gast for quite some time, my favorite café with a cute sketch of a ghost on it. All my work is in the tote bag beside me: my laptop, a copy of Quicksand (Swedish crime fiction novel for a final paper), and my comparative policy notes. It’s the final stretch of my semester abroad in Stockholm, still so surreal for me to say.
Ask college freshman Grace, and she would never have imagined herself in Europe: dog sledding, ice bathing, running to catch a glimpse of the wavering northern lights before their airy silhouettes flitted away. The semester has passed in a similarly ephemeral manner, the time slipping out from under me like a stolen breath. And now, I have finally come into a few precious morsels of time to properly reflect before I leave - on all of the ferocious upward swoops of a semester abroad and the turbulence too.
Part 1 - Stockholm: My cozy, home base
It’s fascinating how nonchalant walking along the pastel buildings and Söderström river becomes (Stockholm is full of water everywhere!), and how easy it becomes to establish a routine route from home to school (Stockholm School of Economics). It makes me wonder how much lived history and architectural history of New York I missed while speed walking up long avenues to high school.
I stayed in a studio apartment in Bromma, decked out with a kitchen, a tv, and a double bed, and became my place of retreat after a long weekend of travel or social time with Swedish Program friends. It was also only a few stops away from city center. The train/ tunnelbana (also the first fairly intuitive Swedish word I learned) was a 10 minute walk away (or 7 mins by this artsy alleyway that my far more spatially aware friends discovered).
High: Crafting a Group of Friends like Family
One of my first core memories in Stockholm was a crowd of us going to a karaoke place and scream-singing Avicii’s Hey Brother at the top of our lungs! We bathed in red lights, and I amused myself by spending the night trying to hear a sliver of my own mezzo voice through the wall of tenor.
While I used to attribute the slow disappearance of large group activities for no particular occasion to people getting busier with age, my time in Sweden made me rethink this. It was easy to find co-conspirators for day outings and weekend trips, not because we weren’t busy with classes, but because everyone made time to explore together, partially because there was an impending return date home.
In hindsight, this karaoke outing was what kicked off a similarly cinematic semester; many of the people from this night became close friends of mine, classmates that I worked on Environmental Econ presentations with yes, but also got hot pot dinners with, went to see the cherry blossoms, Swedish operas and soccer games with. Perhaps most importantly, these were friends I could count on to wait for me during a particularly rough mountain biking session (our guide lost a subset of us twice) and could navigate awkward social dynamics with, because in a group of thirty, twenty-somethings going on school-organized trips, there are bound to be cliques that form.
High: My Swedish Contact Family - Finding my Reason to Return
I wish I could debunk the rumor of close Swedish friends being notoriously hard to make, but despite attending a university in the heart of Stockholm, I mostly spent time with other Europeans from my comparative policy class or Americans from my program.
Despite that, sometimes, you get lucky. I’m not sure how I was paired with such an open-minded, generous contact family, but I thank whoever at the Swedish Program was behind it vigorously. My contact Mom and two contact sisters (students by day and competitive cheerleaders by afternoon) are pictured above. After they introduced me to the optimistic genius of Hans Rosling and fed me the most tender steamed fish (thank goodness, it was not pickled; only the veggies on the side were), I introduced them to the matcha latte and brought them to my favorite Kungsträdgården ramen place.
I have so many fond memories amongst the thick forests and frozen lakes by their rural home, whizzing past trees on the back of Julia’s vespa; chatting in a bubbling hot tub after my first ice bath, watching Melodifestivalen (Sweden’s very out there Eurovision qualifying competition); and being filmed doing my first cartwheel (I had two extremely skilled teacher-sisters). Having gotten so close to them will always be a pull back to Stockholm!
Low: The Trap of the Semester of Yes
To be honest, there were moments of bumbling social anxiety. Sometimes, being abroad felt like a lurid freshman year, because I was putting myself in an environment where I knew no one again. The Swedish program even had an orientation, which recalled much of the same clumsy getting-to-know everyone energy.
High: Fika, Fika, Fika!
Pastel, cream filled Swedish Princess Cakes next to almond tarts next to spherical chocolate balls (called Chokladbollar) - there were genuinely so many new pastries to try! While in Stockholm, I indulged in quite a few afternoon tea breaks, known as Fika by the Swedes! Fika’s prevalence is clear to see by the 4-5 cafes within any two block radius in the city. Fun fact: Swedish Companies are required by law to provide a daily Fika break!
Cafe hopping became a highlight of my time abroad, serving as a designated space of calm to finish Swedish Crime Fiction novels for my class (we had a novel to finish every week, which in retrospect, was mad) and/or a casual place to get to know new people. In said cafes, I finally had the time to fall in love with reading again. In addition to Swedish favorites like Quicksand and The Abominable Snowman, I finished Yolk and a few Jenny Han novels that had been on my personal reading list (courtesy of a stomach bug from Barcelona). For the first time, I also had the flexibility for regular creative writing sessions with Alice, a French graduate student enrolled in SSE’s writing program. It was so lovely to have a friend to bounce short story ideas off of outside of a class, which made getting stuck feel so much less overwhelming!
Part 2 - Flying Across Europe
Because what would a European study abroad be without some proper inter-European exploration?
High: Getting Out of My Comfort Zone in the Arctic Circle
Before this trip, would you believe that I was deathly afraid of dogs? I am so proud of all the things I tried in the Arctic: Snowshoeing, attempting to light fires in the snow, cross country skiing, running after the Sami deer, and Dog Sledding (more approachable because they were on leashes that they sometimes even tripped over because of how eager they were to run that extra half mile in the snow)! And I surprisingly enjoyed all of them, even to the point that I began to crave outdoorsy fun afterwards. I can still recall my lungs furiously expanding with cool air to keep up with every snow filled step of mine, and me thinking, have my lung cavities always been that big? How lucky am I to be so young and healthy to partake? On the flip side, I also remember coming home physically exhausted.
The views were just as memorable. I will never forget how impressive the snowy peaks were and… drumroll please… finally catching a glimpse of the shifting Northern Lights!
High: Assembling a Scrapbook of Crazy Travel Stories
Beyond program group trips, I was also able to visit Berlin, Vienna, Paris, London, Amsterdam, Barcelona, and Visby (Southern Tip of Sweden), quite the whirlwind of weekend trips! Each of these trips really deserve their own blog post to properly detail their significance to me, but for the purposes of giving a high level overview, I have recorded the sharpest highlights and lowlights, stories that I will tell my grandchildren to remind them how cool their grandma is.
Highlights: 
Braving a Windstorm in Berlin: (April, Tony, and I) arriving in Berlin during a windstorm to a mass shutdown of public transit and car services, which led to fascinating conversations in a taxi with a teacher who grew up in East Berlin!
The Epic London Food Tour: the one where we (Lauren and I) demolished a Full English only to remember we had an Afternoon Tea (cakes and sandwiches) appointment immediately after! Also the one where a middle school friend and I met a South African Indian stranger in Tayyabs (hands down best lamb stew I’ve ever had) who proceeded to talk environmental policy and share his ras malai dessert with us!
Hysteria at Platform 9 & 3/4: shrieking at so many mice at kings cross station (including one that I swear jumped up the escalator steps), not realizing that they remove the train cart at 8 pm, and then finally falling into laughing fits of hysteria
Cave in Visby: Exploring a limestone cave with the man who discovered it as a teenager!
The Stellar Salsa club in Barcelona: Warm off of Sangria, we (Lauren, Kellen, and I) stumbled into a random salsa club, where we learned the salsa basic and then danced with some sweet old men.
The steps of the Sacré-Cœur Basilica (a white cathedral atop a hill): meeting up here with Harvard friends to watch the sun set across the Paris skyline, where a nice boy told me I was pretty and then ran off.
The 10 Euro Viennese Opera
Lowlights:
Pitiful Paella: Stumbling into an awful tourist trap of a paella place near the pier. Let me tell you, it was hard rice and frozen old seafood. I’m also pretty sure this was the source of my week long subsequent fever and indigestion!
My Phone Swiped in Barcelona: It was stolen from my fanny pack in blind daylight and I was stuck phoneless for the next month! … the struggle waiting for international postage and without google maps was real!
Not so “Beginner Friendly” Mountain Biking: Our mountain biking instructor didn’t even realize when he had left three students behind on the unpaved biking trail! We were left alone again even after deliberately asking him to slow down. Luckily, the three of us were able to navigate back ourselves.
Loneliness in Amsterdam
The Great Panic in Paris: rushing to get to the airport in time for my 6 am flight and having run out of service!
Other funny stories/cool experiences: My jacket being flown from Stockholm to Visby, trying my first floating sauna and dry and wet saunas, visiting 221B Baker St (a dream come true as a Sherlock fan!), exploring an ice hotel and ice bar, trying my first Max’s milk shake with my host sister, and attending 3 services in 3 different London churches in one day!
Part 3 - Getting my Steps In
I started writing this reflection post in Stockholm but am ending it nearly 4000 miles away back home. How difficult it has been to consolidate this semester long fever dream into a single post!
Taking my first steps out of the states felt much like a child from a health conscious family finding out where the chocolate is hidden for the first time (speaking of which, European chocolate is indeed superior; you can really taste the quality of the milk), in the way I barreled to experience as many European cities as I could. There was always the lingering feeling that I might not have the opportunity to come back, that the cabinet might be locked next time. It became almost a sport in itself, trying to learn, taste, see another sight in the shrinking time left in Europe. Of course, even European chocolate in excess can be dangerous.
The largest souvenir I gained was the confidence to be able to start a life completely anew if I so choose. Amongst new people, a new hefty, new culture, and new cities with new public transportation systems to figure out (all better but also more expensive than the mta). With it, I’ve also packed my discovery of Swedish Crime Fiction (chocked full of social commentary), love for fika, Swedish thrift finds (because I’ll always choose a thrift store over an H&M), and instagram handles/ addresses/ ticket records of adventures with new friends in my overweight check in bag.
Step Counter:
343 Steps to the top of St. Stephen's Cathedral (Vienna)
284 steps up the Arc de Triomphe (Paris)
Snowy steps up Nordic ski slopes
