Craving connection

People are good. 

Humans are inherantly social creatures, and we crave connection. 

The last two days were incredibly hard, and yet, so were my first few days after I moved to Cleveland earlier this summer.  The disconnection I had there in Cleveland was one of my own choice, the conscious choice to live without wifi at home.  After living at Xavier for four years, and never being without that connection to the internet, it was a big shock to me to rediscover the connection I had been missing. 

So instead of watching silly videos on my laptop evening, I read on my front porch and when I heard my neighbor come outside with her dog, I would go and chat. 

My lack of a digital connection helped me meet people at church and moved me to do things on my own: go to a restaurant alone, go for a walk to get ice cream, go to a festival where I didn’t know anyone. 

Here, in Sweden, it was a different kind of isolation.  Despite being connected digitally to everyone back home, I am not in the same time zone, and communication is… interesting.  But I’ve found myself a very kind host who is patient with me, and I’ve met so many kind T-bana ticket workers who will answer my questions. (Most swedish people know english, but they don't think they speak it very well and don't want to look bad, so they get a little shy and won't say too much.)

Today I met with the SveDem research team, and it was fantastic!  I first met Emma, who gave me a tour of where I’ll be working for the next six weeks, and she introduced me to Pavla, who told me a little bit about her research and then said, let’s go and talk over coffee which is called “fika” in swedish. They said that “fika” was the one think I HAD to learn in swedish. 

I am still figuring out Sweden’s public transportation, so instead of taking the bus towards Skarpnäck I went the other way and took it all the way to the other end of the bus line to Norsborg. :P  I was rather confused when I was the only one left on the bus… I thought that another bus was going to have to take me back the other way, it turns out that it was just a longer stop and the same bus was going back the other way! I didn’t have to pay twice, the bus driver probably thought I was crazy, or just another tourist.

My days are slowly filling up, and I’m eager to start making connections through SveDem.