Sometimes it is the people in our lives that are the adventures!

I should have stayed on the train.

One stop before I got off of the train, two young men got on.  They were sharply dressed with very nice looking nameplates and when they sat down across from me I though I saw the word “Jesuits” on their nameplates.  I leaned forward and asked quietly if they were indeed Jesuits (cause you never know…) and they nodded back at me.  I smiled broadly and said that I graduated from a Jesuit college. 

They asked where I was from and I said the US, to which they responded that they were both from the US! California and Georgia, I believe?

I responded that I was from Ohio, and one said, “Oh, I lived in Ohio when I was younger!”

I asked where, to which he replied “Medina!”  

"No way, I’ve got cousins there and I lived in Cleveland!"

Such a small world!  I should have asked where they were going, what they were doing here, how they liked Sweden, where they were in their Formation, and I should have stayed on the train and gone past my stop – there is always a train back to my stop.  They would have been really fantastic to get to know, I’m sure of it.

Let me tell you why I didn’t stay on the train.  I had a 9am meeting in downtown Stockholm, I work in a suburb called Huddinge most of the time.  Then I had another meeting around 10 in another part of downtown (a walk back to T-Centralen and another train ride three stops away).  When I arrived at the stop for my second meeting I asked for directions and was sent in the wrong direction… thank goodness for my iPhone’s GPS! Then I found the right street, but the address my contact had given me didn’t seem to exist.  I was supposed to go to Linstedtsvägen 8, but there was no such place, there was Linstedtsvägen 7 and Linstedtsvägen 9, but no 8…

Needless to say, you can now consider me a junior expert of the campus of the Tekniska Högskolan (MIT's cousin in Stockholm).  I walked around that beautiful campus for a good solid hour and THEN found the library and a map of said campus and a student gave me directions to another building labeled 8… it wasn’t the right one.  Nor was the third building labeled 8 on the map.  (I didn’t make it to that meeting.)

I was meeting someone for lunch, so I couldn’t stay and couldn’t figure out how to call my contact on my phone, so I’ll hope she is forgiving and can meet me another day.  

I then took the train back to T-Centralen and went three stops down another line to meet someone for lunch.  Beets are huge here.  Mom, Dad: I’m sorry for not eating them when I was little, they really are good!

After lunch, I took the train to Medborgarplasten and walked from that T stop to the next one, stopping in numerous little shops and boutiques along the way.  The Swedes have perfected the use of yellow paint on their buildings; there are so many pleasant shades of yellow that give the buildings a very friendly look. 

So, naturally after all of this walking, I was exhausted. So I got off the train.

During my hike in a Swedish forest yesterday I realized that my adventure here will not only include the places I see or the research I conduct.  It will include the people I've met here too.  

The researchers I've met, the host family I'm staying with, the friends I make. 

Sometimes it is the people in our lives are the adventures! 

Who will we meet? How will they change our lives? How can we know unless we ask?

Hej då från Sverige!