And so ends my first week! It's been a week that's felt like a lifetime and I really do feel like I've been here forever. One of the biggest shocks this week has been how homesick I've felt. I've never been away from my family for more than a few days and I truly thought it would be OK and that I'd miss them of course, but not this much. Even though we talk for about an hour every day over Skype, it's not the same. But it's something I'll have to deal with and try not to actively count the days until I can go home!
So the trick must be to try and enjoy this fabulous city I'm living in and Stockholm is certainly filled with amazing experiences, so I'd better go out and grab some of them! Today's activity was the modern art gallery, Moderna Museet and I've seen works by Warhol, Lichtenstein, Bacon, Duchamps, Rauschenberg, Kandinsky, Calder, Grosz and my absolute favourite, Pablo Picasso to name but a few. What an afternoon it was...as I let the art speak and began to get deeper into the brushstrokes, I remembered why I took an art history degree. I love modern art!!! Even Yoko Ono's slightly odd performance art was strangely compelling.
Today was a big day as I started work at Bonnier Förlagen and what a day it's been. I've met thousands, well ok hundreds, oh all right then quite a lot of people today and tried to speak Swedish (or the closest I can get to Swedish) all day. The Bonnier Förlagen building is about four buildings rolled into one and has as many different areas and styles as it has publishing houses (that's quite a lot), so I'll have to take my phone on a little photo trip one day and show you all the awesomeness that kept making my art history heart go mmmmmmm.....woooowwww....oooooooo!
Today's report is basically a little photo documentary of the area around my house. During my walk I discovered a few things about my neighbourhood, the main one being that Sunday is a big running day here in Hornstüll...everyone's doing it apart from the twenty people on Segways and the handful of old people, who've switched running for walking energetically with ski poles! The other thing I discovered is that the junkie/alcoholics who seemed to congregate by the 7-Eleven next to my apartment on Saturday night have totally disappeared...I guess the running people scared them off!
Today I met one of my great heroes and it was totally awesome!