Apartment: Check!

This is a proud day: It's a day when we can happily check one thing off our long Project Sweden checklist. Our trip turned out to be very successful and now we are proud renters of an apartment in Sweden!

We now have a roof over our heads: we did the impossible and found an apartment in Lund!

There were many naysayers and quite a few people advised us not to waste time looking for housing in Lund and turn to it's neighbourhood instead. In the end it was listening to my reader's advice that did it for us - if it weren't for Chris who advised us to post an ad of our own we might still be browsing blocket.se... Thanks Chris!

My first Swedish pint.

The trip was a success even when judged as a holiday. We made many ticks on our to-do list! We gave couchsurfing a go and had a great experience, we visited the Systembolaget, checked out the prices and cried. We even went for a pint to Café Ariman, where I got to try a Swedish brew (Falcon).

The most exciting part of the trip was of course meeting you, the readers. The socialization component of our vacation worked out great, we met with someone each day. On the first day we hung out with our Swedish CouchSurfing hosts and their friends, on the second we've met an Australian couple that moved to Lund and doesn't mind sharing advice and on day three we've met with a Swedish twitter user who showed us where the pub was. We were busy!

Unfortunately there were a few things we didn't/couldn't try: We couldn't find a Tunnbrödsrulle in Lund, nor did we get a chance to try Swedish meatballs in a restaurant. We postponed the Max burger until the actual move and finally we couldn't bring our Frisbees with us, so we didn't take a look at Lund's Disc golf course. But we are confident we will do all of those things once we're settled in Lund.

Just when we thought that our trip is coming to an end, it got extended. Our plane from Copenhagen was so late we missed our connecting flight in Frankfurt... But it wasn't all bad and we ended up getting a free stay at a hotel, including a dinner and a proper hotel breakfast! Even though the delay somewhat interfered with out plans, we tried to make the best of it. I even got to try a new German dark beer!

All in all we had a great trip. We feel we've done the touristy stuff and some of the serious stuff, so we will be able to focus comes August. Special thanks goes to everyone who took the time out of their busy schedules to meet with us and show us around. Hope to see you all soon!

Related articles

• Enter phase: Apartment hunt (helpmemovetosweden.com)
• Our Lund checklist (helpmemovetosweden.com)
• CouchSufing report card (helpmemovetosweden.com)

CouchSufing report card

After a few months of blogging for helpmemovetosweden.com I finally get to say this:

Hello from Sweden!

We are in Lund, we have successfully rented the apartment and we have spent our first night at our CouchSurfing hosts. I know many of you are interested in CouchSurfing so I've decided I take a few minutes to write about our experience.

Let's get something out of the way first: We loved it! If you are thinking about trying it, try it already! Right, now that that's taken care of, you can hear our story.

We agreed with our host, Erik, that we can come straight to his place after we arrive to Lund. He was kind enough to let us drop our bags and leave them there while we go around and wonder around town and run our errands. We warned him that we will be bringing a lot of luggage, but he insisted it's not a problem. So we didn't hold back: We filled the biggest bags we could get our hands on with as much stuff as the airline allowed us to carry.

In the evening Erik had a surprise for us. He knew we are looking to meet people in Lund so he invited some friends over for drinks. We had a great evening talking about Swedes and what to look forward to in Sweden while sharing a couple of bottles of wine. We had a blast and it was exactly what he have hoped to get from the experience: We met a friendly, open and local people to share an evening with. We have high hopes that we can stay in touch and meet again after we've moved to Sweden.

We brought a bottle of Slovenian wine for our hosts as a thank you gesture. Hopefully they were as happy with us as we were with them!

I realize our experience may have been expectationally positive. Nevertheless I think you should know that only friendly and open people will sign up for hosting strangers from the internet, so you're bound to make friends. Give it a go, and let me know how it goes!

No giant leaps, but progress is being made

I haven't blogged in a while and that might have made you think nothing new happened or even, dare I say it, that we have given up on our project. The truth is that the last couple of weeks have been a bit quiet. We have made progress on almost every front, but nothing really significant happened. I will try to condense all our news in this blog post and hopefully write something really interesting next week.

We are making a lot of plans for our upcoming visit of Lund. You can expect a full blog post about our plans later on, but we are looking for ideas to add to our to-do list. We are very excited about our
apartment, we can't wait to see it in person. We expect everything to be as good as it is on the pictures the kind landlord sent us!

Care to add anything to our Lund to-do list? Please let me know about all the wacky stuff there is to do!

A while ago I wrote about CouchSurfing where I wondered if the service is popular in Lund. I can now report, that I have successfully found a host for both my significant other and myself. We aren't hoping to save money by using CouchSurfing, we are in it to meet someone interesting. Ideally our hosts will turn out to be among the first friends we make in Lund. You can expect a blog post just about CouchSurfing after we return from our trip.

I have news regarding my Swedish as well. For the last 10 weeks I have been attending classes in a language school and yesterday was our last meeting and as you would expect it included a written exam. I'm proud to say I passed, but just barely with 57 %. I'd like to applaud my superb teacher Brigita for her hard work! Now it's my turn to practice and practice some more, thus putting it all to good use.

Igår jag passerade introduktion till svensk. Nu jag behöver bara träna och sedan öva lite mer!

My last grade at UNI,
with a perfect mark mind you :)

Speaking of academic achievements, just last week I have passed my last exam at University of Ljubljana. Now the only thing left to do regarding my Masters degree is the final thesis.

Everything above is important, but the most significant news of the week is probably this: We have set our wedding date! I'm not going to share it, since we are striving for a private wedding with just the two of us and two witnesses, but I'm happy to tell you that we will get married in Slovenia, before setting off for Sweden.

As you can see, the last couple of days have been busy with small things. But when you enumerate them all you can see it's actually a bunch of important stuff finally done for good. Hopefully I will have more significant stuff to write about, but until then: have a blast!