Never been so happy about being a number (and some other stuff)

I got my personnummer a few days ago. This is basically the most important thing one can get while living in Sweden. Without that, you cannot even get a family card from IKEA (not that I'd like to. the first and last time I visited IKEA, I ended up with the most immense headache ever). Now I can finally open a bank account a register for the SFI (Swedish for Immigrants) classes. Swedish classes are offered at the university as well, but I decided to go to the SFI ones because they're way more practically based and I get to know people outside from school. Also, I can finally apply for a Swedish home insurance. I'm obligated to have one actually, but seen the fact the landlord doesn't check it and getting a Dutch home insurance and then change it into a Swedish one once I get the personnummer was too complicated, I've been living without it for two months now. Don't tell anyone, even though I just publicly displayed it on the internet.

My upstairs neighbour is currently building something in his/her room. At least it sounds like it. I must confess that the building is pretty noisy. Sometimes there are a bunch of people simply having a laugh upstairs and I can hear everything. And I wonder if my upstairs neighbour has really heavy feet, or if the floor/my ceiling is just really noisy. I wonder if my downstairs neighbours hear exactly the same!? I start feeling guilty everytime I walk around or drop something on the floor. Especially when the last thing happens, I usually go like: ''Sorry, neighbours!''. Like that time when I took a shower at 6 in the morning and dropped the mop I always dry the floor with afterwards... That morning it actually took about 15 minutes to get warm water. I wonder if they simply don't want me to take a shower at 6 in the morning.

So what kind of random things happened in the past two weeks? Well, earlier this week I was paying a visit to the smaller grocery store here in Rosengård, which is basically the Arabic/Bosnian Lidl. They love Dutch stuff over there. I came across a package of cheese fully written in Dutch. It also stated it was 100% halal cheese, which made me wonder what exactly can be halal about cheese... A few weeks ago I found out that grocery store is even cheaper than the HUGE one right next to it. So first I go to the ''little'' shop and then walk over to the ''immense'' one which simply has a bigger assortment, so I buy everything over there I cannot find in the smaller one. At least the shops are almost right next to each other, so I don't have to cycle all the way over.
After awing at some Dutch halal cheese and actually buying some groceries, I headed over to the immense grocery store to buy a birthday card for a Polish friend of mine. The cards were extremely dull, so I stood there for about 15 minutes maybe. This lady next to me looked just as unimpressed as me and eventually started to talk to me without pausing. At some point I really had to interrupt with: ''Jag talar lite lite lite lite lite lite Svenska!'', which actually made her even more exited and she asked me if I was from England. Well, no, I had to disappoint her. She told me she was from Yugoslavia and her father had his 65th birthday. I was so proud about the fact I could understand all that. It was pretty much the only thing I understood. Even when she started to say really random English words, I still couldn't follow it. But she was so excited about our conversation that she couldn't stop slapping me with the birthday card she'd picked while continuing laughing. I hope the card ended up fine at her dad's birthday... So, that was my first violent encounter in Rosengård. I was impressed.

This week I discovered I have a ventilation system in my room. One that blows a shitload of cold air into my apartment. The technician came to take a look at it and I had to tell him how to remove it and all that, because he had never seen it before. Apparently I'm the only one in the whole flat who has it. I should feel special I guess, even though he told me it's the worse system he has ever seen. Then we just closed it all off with some tape and paper. I love this 21st century. Later this week, I found out my heating is included in the rent and then a Swede told me it's really normal in Sweden to have heating included in your rent. Sweden can't stop to amaze me. There's so much included when you rent an apartment. I didn't even had to buy the thing where you hang your jackets (don't know what it's called in English). In the Netherlands you don't even get a fridge when you rent an apartment, let alone the jacket-thing.

The past few weeks I joined almost all events from Utrikespolitiska Föreningen i Malmö (The Association of Foreign Affairs in Malmö). They have different themes every week and until now I went to the one about Afghanistan and immigration. On Tuesday they show a film or documentary and on Thursday there's a guest lecturer. There was a journalist talking about his pictures/experiences while in Afghanistan with the American and French army and then there was this woman from the Migrationboard talking about migration in Sweden. Next week the theme will be Iran. Most of the time it's really interesting. The first time I went there, I picked some random girls to sit with because I did not know anyone. Turned out they were Swedish and one of them lives in my flat. That evening I cycled a scary new route to my flat (too much cars) and visited her apartment, which was really nice, because the only apartment I've seen in this flat is my own. Her flat is smaller, has carpet (after talking to more people from my flat, it seems to be very rare that I have laminate), a balcony, faces the other side of the building and is on the 8th floor (I live on the 4th). So, almost everything was different.

Oh, so many other things happened the past two weeks. Let's try to be short. Short in my way...

We had an information meeting about exchange studies. Just settled in Sweden, most of us have to start thinking about their studies abroad already. When you want to go outside of Europe, you have to apply by October 15th. We won't go abroad before January 2014, so we have to apply so early. After some thinking, I decided to stay in Europe, which allows me to apply by March 15th, fortunately. My choice was mainly financially based, but the fact that none of the countries outside of Europe appealed to me helped as well. When staying within Europe, one gets an Erasmus scholarship. And I'll keep receiving my financial aid from the Dutch government. Considering that I'm not a big spender and want to go to Eastern Europe or Turkey means I'll be able to save so much money during my exchange. I'll just be going crazy with a country outside of Europe for my internship. At least then I'll be able to go anywhere, except the places the Swedish government labels as ''unsafe''.

I went to an exchange fair with people representing schools from all over the world, a volunteer fair that not only included volunteering organisations, but also student and sports clubs, and a meeting from the Global Café. The last one was for people to discuss topics and share their ideas. Something like that, I already forgot the main point because it was very sloppy and boring. I went to so many events this week that I almost forgot about some of them. On Thursday there was also the ''pub evening'' from the political student union (UF). After eating somewhere with the Swedish girls I previously met, we went over there to discover a very dull.. party. The ''pub'' turned out to be just a room in the building the student union is located and they weren't heading off to an actual pub. The Swedish girls left after some time because it really seemed like nothing exciting was going to happen soon. I decided to stay and after sitting and talking with a girl from my class for about 30 minutes, dying time because it was so boring, they started a political quiz and more people started to arrive. Eventually, I got home around 12 at night. It turned out to be a really fun night and I met some nice new people. A fun night with the most misleading start though.
Friday I went to an ''indoor barbecue'' here in the flat. No barbecue really, just some kind of salad food with bread and cheese. Swedes really like this salad stuff for a full meal. Fascinating, to say the least. It was really nice though, so I won't complain! And the event was a nice opportunity to meet some people from the flat, because everyone has his own apartment, so you only talk to people in the elevator and when doing your laundry, occasions like that. There was another party on Saturday and there was also something happening at the university, but I decided not to go because of study stress, basically :)

A few days ago we got 180 practice questions from one of our teachers. They're so hard I wonder if I'll be able to pass the exam we'll have at October 5th. And then we didn't even get the practice questions from our other teacher which cover totally different stuff than the other ones do. I'm already stressed out for a few days now and my head went so numb I haven't been studying as much as I'd like to. Next week is probably going to be hell, I can't wait until Friday when it'll all be over! And then hopefully I'll get an E, at least, which is definitely not a good grade, but at least then I'll pass.

Friday evening, at 17:48 to be exact, I'll be heading to my mum's place. It'll take me 3 hours and it costed me about 600 SEK (which is about 65 Euro, the trains are so extremely expensive in Sweden), but at least I'll leave Malmö for some days, which is nice for a change. Beautiful change of setting. My mum lives in a really nice area in the middle of nowhere. The village has a couple hundred inhabitants, I love the community. I haven't been there for nearly 2 months now, I wonder how my mum has cleaned up all the chaos the house was in when I left, haha. And I'll talk Dutch for the first time in weeks. There are actually quite many Dutch students at my school, about 20 or something, but I'm not in touch with anyone. I only know two of them, but we're not regularly in touch. I do notice that people from the same country really hang out with each other a lot. I don't have this urge at all, but it's not that I deliberately avoid them. I just don't understand why you'd hang out with people from your own country most of the time while you're having tons of opportunities to meet so many foreign people... 
When it comes to the language, I don't think my Dutch will become as worse as it became when I lived in Finland. Over there, the only Dutch person I knew lived 8 hours away from me and I spoke Dutch once every 4 months or so. Quite soon, I started to forget words and messed up grammar badly, it was really funny. By the time I returned to the Netherlands, 10 months after I'd left for Finland, I had a hard time memorizing quite some Dutch words and my grammar had become even worse. People thought I was just acting cool, but it was a serious problem, haha!

Conclusion after all this: I wonder when I'll write my first short blog post.