Here it is, one year of living in Sweden. Put on your ridiculously small party hats and fire those party poppers.
It's crept up after being a long way off. As the tone of a few recent posts have been a bit negative and whiny and dare I say, self pitying. So in order to mark the passing of the year, I thought I'd list the positives of my year here so far:
1. Our Daughter will be born at the end of October.
2. My Swedish has improved drastically. Sure it needs a hell of a lot of work, but I think I'm through the hard bit of learning the language. My written Swedish needs plenty of work, but that just takes time, and access to full time education. The proof of my progress, for me was that I sat through four hours of parent's education and another two of father's education at Lund hospital this week. I'm not going to claim I understood everything, but I think I got about 75 to 85% of what was being discussed. I can now also happily eavesdrop on people's telephone conversations on the bus now too. I'm sure I'll get sick of this quickly as it is a bane of modern life normally, but it's a nice indication of your language skills.
3. Necessity has made me realize that actually I really disliked being a project manager, and I am now actively seeking a return to the code face as a software developer again. Being responsible for other people in the work place is like herding cats, and therefore best avoided.
4. The day to day challenges have forced me to do things I would typically avoid or procrastinate over.
Haha I can relate to this, I have been in Sweden for 6 months now and my language is not very good. My girlfriend is trying to teach me but im feeling like i need to do some more studies. It is kind of a curse here as trying to practice is very hard once they realize you speak english... the patience runs a little thin when you both can just talk english. I kind of like the fact that I cannot understand people on public transport, saves me a lot of pain putting up with people you wish would just be quite.
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