My Halloween weekend.

  Sundsvall, Midnight Sun Coast, Sweden
Monday, November 3, 2008

We had our first snow in Sundsvall about 4 days ago! it was beautiful, it started in the middle of me walking home from town and it was like a magical movie scene! Last thursday was the start of the festivities for the Halloween weekend in Sundsvall! An american girl here named Willie hosted an evening for all the international students and she had a pumpkin carving contest and bobbing for apples. Brooke and I worked on a pumpkin together where we had cute ears on it and i did the eyes!

i was the masked zorro for that night, my room mate had the mask around her aparment so i just grabbed that. Brooke and i were not the winners of the contest but we had sooo much fun taking out all the pumkin guts and seeds. there was some other international student who were like what the heck are they doing, and even one german girl wanted to do it with brooke and i, but once she saw how messy it was she bailed on the idea.  Jana requested we bring her the insides of the pumpkin so she and i could make some pumpkin bread. So my actual halloween evening on friday consisted of an evening of baking with my good friend jana. She and i were all ready to make the bread and then realized that she had no yeast, so i came prepared with a recipe for pumpkin cookies. Then we needed vanilla extract for the cookies, but i guess swedish people don't use it cause i could not find any vanilla extract in the store. (after looking for half an hour, i forget how much harder it is to find something when it's not in english. :)  So we improvised with our cookies and did what we could. they came out as a very gooey tecture but we were pretty proud of ourselves for what we were able to compromise with. The recipe asked for chocolate chips, but they didn't have any dark chocolate chips for jana's lactose allergy, so we bought a dark chocolate bar and smashed it up for chocolate chips! we felt so creative! We both are enjoying the cookies in the stores called pepparkaka! it's a lot like a ginger snap but very very thin and crunchy. It's delicious to eat with tea! Saturday night was the school halloween dance party. I was a flight attendant for that evening. I bought the dress at the local second hand store and the rest i kind of just through together. We are busy working on our Movie for our narrative forms of media class. This and Swedish language is what i'll be working on for the next 3 weeks.
Elections are tomorrow and the local tv station just called me about meeting with me today to talk to me about it.  They will film me while asking questions about being an american in sundsvall during elections. that'll be interesting, because i don't talk about politics at all. I'm proud of the fact that i did vote this year though, i think it was more exciting for me because i can see how much of a privelage it is for me to have a say in the midst of a foreign country.  It's just been hard for the past few months, because nearly every swedish person i have met has asked me about my political views and then yell at me about how much they dislike America and what they have done and i am so excited for it to be over and a new president to be chosen. 
Yesterday I booked my plane tickets and train tickets to Rome and Paris. I will be traveling to Rome on December 10th and then go to Paris after that on the 13th. I'll fly from Paris back to Stockholm on the 17th and then fly back to Seattle on the 18th. I can't beleive time is flying by so fast. I am planning my Thanksgiving Dinner here, because it's not celebrated here, i'm going to plan a dinner for all my friends and show them how we do it in America. It was -6 degrees C last night and all the sidewalks were frozen with ice, it was quite tricky walking around in high heels on.