First Day With My Host Family - Rylie S.

Today (Saturday, March 24th) was the first full day to spend time with the host family and other friends. For breakfast, I had some strawberry yogurt, my host (Smilla) had toast and her mom (Madeline) also had toast. Her dad (Tom) and her brother (Charlie) already had breakfast before us. There wasn't much to that really happened in the morning because everyone was still a little tired. Tom and Charlie went out and the rest of us stayed home.

Around 11 in the afternoon, we decided to drive to Täby Centrum (a mall) to go have some lunch. When we got there it was already crowded, most of the parking spaces were taken, but luckily we found a spot. We went to go have some dinner at Chili and Soy. There they serve noodles, soup and sushi. I ordered and California roll and a Tempura roll, they were both very good! We walked around after that to get the “food load” off and went to a library in Vallentuna, which is a town next to Täby Krykby. This library was called “Vallentuna Kulturhus Bibliotek”. Their checkout/drop-off system is very cool. To drop-off a book you just put it in this machine and they suck it up and in order to checkout a book, you go to another machine and place it in the scanner, use a library card and it doesn't stamp the book like they do in Hawaii, they print out a receipt, which I thought was really cool. We also visited a church, that was supposed to have plenty of paintings, but they weren't there. After that, we went back to the house.

Around 3 in the afternoon, Madeline dropped Smilla and I at the subway. We took the subway to meet up with Janelle, Pim (Janelle’s host), Sydni, and Lovisa (Sydni’s host). We then walked over to Fotografiska (a photography museum). The exhibition that were shown were pictures of various women over the years, clothing from the 1400-1600 (estimation), and African women. It was a very interesting experience and it makes wonder if we do have a photography museum in Hawaii, there must be. Lastly, we all had dinner at Gnarly Burger, we ordered burgers, nachos and ribs, they were really good. All 6 of us also really bonded and had a fun time. I learned a lot from today. First of all, the freedom that the kids have here is crazy, my parents wouldn't let me go out with friends for a long period of time and they probably wouldn't let me go and use public transportation at night. Another thing is that their money is very different from here. 1 USD is equivalent to 8.2 krona. Life here in Sweden is a lot more laid back, but at the same time energetic. Today was a very fun day and something that I'll always remember.