Sweden: Again?!

Hello and welcome to my blog. If you have forgotten, my name is Kelsey, and I have not met with any unlucky accidents or disappeared off the face of the earth...I promise. I am merely slacking off when it comes to this blog. Unforgivable, as my old soccer coach might say.

So, now I must tell you what I've been up too!

After Stockholm, Halloween arrived. That looked something like this:

My friend Anjuli and I were "masqueraders." She bought some fancy masks while in Italy, which we dressed up with lots of sparkly makeup and long black gloves. Pretty cool. Halloween was a lot of fun, consisting of: buying a pumpkin (for the astounding price of $10...64 kr.), going to Grivi (another student dorm) for a party, and finishing at Kroa for dancing. Kady's boyfriend, Luke, was visiting from the US, so it was fun to hang out with another American. Good times were had by all.

After Halloween happened, I found myself on yet ANOTHER trip to Sweden! This time I was looking at quite a different trip...to Northern Sweden, a small island on the High Coast called Ulvön. Some friends of my grandma's, Dick and Birgitta (themselves loyal blog readers), live there. Birgitta is Swedish and was born and raised on Ulvön, before moving to America and meeting Dick. They lived there until they retired--in Shelton, WA, for many years, where they were good friends of my grandma and grandpa--and have now lived for 10 years on the island. I met them last Easter when they were visiting the States, and became a big fan. They are the coolest.

Thus, I decided I must visit them on Ulvön. Travelling there was a bit interesting. There is only one ferry that goes to the island in the winter, and it leaves at 4 pm from the mainland. I needed to be there in time to catch it. This resulted in waking up at 3:30 am, catching a very early bus to Oslo, catching the Flytoget to the airport, catching a plane to Stockholm...waiting in Stockholm for a bit...and catching a 1:15 connecting flight to a town up north with a name I can neither pronounce nor spell. Ör-vik, we will call it for now, which is an abbreviation. Which also, I just realized, is the last name of one of my favorite high school English teachers. Interesting.

In any case, after overusing the verb "catching," I arrived in Ör-vik and was met at the little airport there by Dick and Birgitta. We caught the ferry and soon arrived at their house. It was dark when I got there, so I didn't know exactly what everything looked like. In the morning, however, I was very excited to find I was in the sweetest little "fishing village." Though the weather wasn't great while I was there, and though it was generally dark by 3 pm, we managed to get outside for a couple awesome walks. I will display these pictures in the next post.

All in all, the visit was kind of recuperating for me. I got to sit, listen to my iPod, finish some homework, finish a book, play the piano (!), and eat delicious meals. I also got to sleep in ridiculously late. It was the best. I didn't really want to leave, five days later.

Here come pictures!