Svenska Flicka

I think there are two very difficult things about having a blog. One is deciding on a name for it and the second is to keep up with writing entries. (The explanation of the name will come last in this entry).
I have seen many blogs that start with really long daily entries and end with short entries about nothing that are updated maybe once every three weeks. I think the reason for this is that people either find whatever they thought the world needed to know in the first place suddenly uninteresting or they realize that they don’t have an audience. I know that I can overcome this because
I know that living in a foreign country that I have dreamed about for years will never become uninteresting to me,
I know that my parents will read this everyday and
I don’t plan on writing this blog for anyone but myself.

I guess that third one sounds a bit selfish but it’s true. I’m writing this and I will continue to write so I won’t forget all the new things that happen to me. I feel like I need to tell everyone this now because I can tell you now that some of my entries will be long and maybe parts of it uninteresting. I’m not writing to make it interesting; I am just writing what happened next. (It takes a lot of pressure off to have an interesting day everyday as well).

My journey begins on the couch one night in an apartment in Champaign, Illinois in June 2010. I had always talked about studying abroad with my roommate, Kelsey Stocks and I had always said that I wanted to do so during the Spring semester of my junior year. It was Kelsey that had asked me the big question that night, “Aren’t you studying abroad or something next year?”

I have always been, as most college kids are, a huge procrastinator. So it wasn’t until maybe July that I finally decided to meet with a study abroad advisor.
The whole process through the Study Abroad Office or SAO was, in one word: painful.
When I met with the advisor, I had already picked out my program. I wanted to study in Lund, Sweden. Lund is in southern Sweden where there is nicer weather, it is closer to where my family lives and it much closer to mainland Europe so it is easier to travel. My advisor told me in the first 2 minutes of our meeting that I couldn’t go to Lund. Apparently she was canceling program due to lack of interest. Plus I wasn’t an engineer and it was mostly for engineering students. I was heartbroken.
The other 18 minutes of the meeting was spent telling me about how I should study abroad in Italy. Italy. Italy? Do you know that I don’t speak Italian? I like pizza and everything but have you seen me? I have blonde hair and speak Swedish!... and you want me to go to Italy? The last 30 seconds of our meeting the advisor remembered that I could go to Uppsala, Sweden...but it was very far north and cold and dark and she made it sound less than ideal.

So my choices were: the dark, snowy and cold Uppsala, Verona, Italy, or the only other interesting European destination without a language requirement, Aix-en-Provence in southern France. I needed to figure out what I wanted most from a program. I decided that goal was to see as much of Europe as possible. Since Italian wasn’t a language that seemed very important to me, I chose France. (And you thought it was Sweden).

I started filling out the application for France. I even took a French language class (alongside my Swedish language class) for one week until two things happened.
French is hard. Especially when Swedish seemed so easy to learn.
The university in France changed which classes they had available and none of them would transfer to anything all that important to my major.

So that left me with study abroad in what the advisor made sound like a black hole or don’t study abroad at all.

I did some research, talked to people who had actually been there (unlike my advisor) and decided that Uppsala was actually an awesome program. It just happened to be located pretty close to the Arctic Circle.

After a few months of some pointless meetings, loads of paperwork, deadlines and having residence visa rejection letter nightmares, I finally became accepted into Uppsala Universitet.

I also decided to do some traveling before my arrival in Uppsala.
From 12/29/10 until 01/10/11, I plan to visit Aaron in Paris, France.
From 01/10 until 01/14, I plan to visit Gothenburg, Sweden and visit my relatives and
From 01/14 until 06/04, I will be a student in Uppsala, Sweden.

My orientation for Uppsala starts on January 15th, but I plan to spend the night before in Stockholm with Taylor Marti and Ryan Knighton. They are both University of Illinois students who will also be going to Uppsala with me.


Now, I finally give my explanation for the name of this blog. The name was hard to choose. I wanted a name to explain all of the traveling I intend to do and also something that was very me.

Svenska flicka is Swedish for Swedish girl. It is the first Swedish phrase I ever learned and I learnt it at such an early age, I cannot even tell you when it was. I can tell you who taught it to me. It was my dad’s mother, Greta Jean Trautman. She was one of my most beloved relatives on this planet. She is a woman I share a middle name with and she is also the reason I ever even cared to learn Swedish. It is because of her that I chose to formally learn Swedish in college and therefore chose to spend nearly 6 months studying there.

When I was growing up, my Nana had many names for me. I finally told her when I was maybe 8 or 9 years old that I was “too old” for little kid nicknames. She finally agreed but only if I would agree to always be her svenska flicka. Finally, the last time I reminded her of this, she smiled at me and passed away only minutes later. She died in January 2010 at the young age of 92 and I never would have guessed that one year later, I would be dedicating an internet story to her about my travels in Sweden.