Global Tales from Two Young Travelers

Leaving Sweden

By Emily Reisch and Jon Minor

Our five months studying in Sweden have come to an end. As usual with traveling, the time seems to have flown by so quickly.

It’s such a mix of emotions leaving a place you’ve lived. We’re excited to go traveling, but we hate to leave behind our home here. It was very hard to say good-bye to our roommates and friends.

Living abroad is one of the greatest experiences we have ever had. It has given us the opportunity to experience many other cultures simultaneously while being a part of a multicultural group.

To embark on this journey required we step out of everything we know. It was difficult to leave behind our friends and family, knowing how long our travels would be.

After living in Sweden for over five months, we have developed a normal routine. We have made close friends and adapted our living style to complement an entirely different society. Just as things have begun to seem like home, we must leave again. We are again faced with the challenge of leaving everything we know.

We won’t be able to try speaking Swedish to anyone but each other any more. We’ll miss our mobile phones, the short distances that allow us to bike anywhere we need to go, and checking our email every day.

The excitement of going traveling and knowing we will be seeing our friends and family in South Dakota soon help balance the feelings of leaving.

The weather has finally been hot. We were only able take advantage of the beach right by our house once to soak up the sun.
One of our Swedish friends wanted to take us to his summer home and show us his hometown. Having seasonal homes, or even having the time off to use one, is almost unimaginable to us, but most Swedes have summer cottages on the coast or on a lake. They are guaranteed five weeks of paid holiday, but most actually get six.

We’re going to miss the midsummer celebrations. Midsummer, in the end of June when the sun only sets for a couple of hours, seems to be the holiday that Swedes live for. We’ve heard many stories about all of the celebrations, which everyone everywhere turns out for, and how great it is.

On the other hand, Sweden has been quite expensive for us. With the value of the dollar falling for the past few months, leaving Sweden couldn’t have come at a better time.

Our travels around Europe will place us in many foreign cultures and we will be forced to adapt again. In relation to the dollar value, our finances will hold out much longer in Eastern Europe where most of our travels will be.

The tentative travel route we currently have will take us to Italy, Greece, Bulgaria, Romania and Slovakia. We will also visit some of our new friends in Hungary, Poland, Holland and Belgium. Of course, plans could change due to almost anything unexpected. Our previous travels have taught us that you can never count on anything, such as finding a place to sleep to being stuck somewhere due to a train strike.

It’s an adventure carrying only the bare necessities with you. We each have a pack that weighs about 30 pounds containing everything that we’ll need in the next six weeks. Our journal and photos will hold the memories of our trip.

We’d had many short trips the past month in Sweden, which we’ll share with you in the next few weeks. We won’t be carrying our laptop with us, so we’ll tell you about the rest of our adventures through Europe in the weeks after our return to the States.