Going to Stockholm was something that I was really excited for, after one year of not living at home. I imagined Stockholm to be similar to Hamburg and therefore, hoped to feel like

home. Upon arrival I was pleasantly surprised, the center of Stockholm looks like a traditional Austrian town built around water in the center. Well at leased the water part, the way the people dressed, the kind of food we ate and the rainy weather reminded me of home. However, after a couple of weeks, this feeling changed drastically. We started our classes at the local high school and were happy to interact with the local students and learn about them. However, the Swedish people that we encountered the were fairly hostile towards us, the huge group of students that randomly started occupying their study areas and classrooms and did not seem to want to interact with us. After a while, we
got to know some of the other exchange students, who confirme
d to us the hostility of the Swedish students.  Furthermore, as soon as the sun set in Stockholm, all the shops would close and there wouldn’t be anyone outside in the streets. Living two minutes away from a shopping center made this extremely weird. Additionally, as this might not have been that strange at the beginning of the term when the sun would only set at 8 pm, it became entirely strange when the sun would disappear by 3:3
0 pm. It felt like we lived in a well preserved ghost town. Also, having only 5 hours of sunlight a day somehow made this term dark and slightly depressing. Yet, the trip up north made up for the monotonous stay in the ghost town. Going to Kiruna, a mining town in the north of Sweden, offered some of the most amazing sights I have ever encountered in my life. We went dog-sledding, snowmobile riding, on a Sami (indigenous people who inhabit northern Sweden, Norway, and Russia) tour, and an overnight at a camp where you could see the northern lights. It made me personally really happy to see a winter
wonderland the first time in a couple of years, but at the same time it made me think, as in Stockholm the people told us that a couple of years back, that Stockholm would usually be covered in snow at the time of year that we were there. However, due to climate change, it is mostly rainy and cloudy
throughout autumn and winter. Let’s hope that this will resolve back to normal shortly.