Jag talar lite svenska...!

Hello again...or should I say "Hej!"?
It's really strange if you live in a country where you don't understand the language. At first I thought it was an interesting experience, but by now I'm quite annoyed, because it's not funny at all, if you don't understand a word (or, let's say, you don't understand any important words. Just basic smalltalk stuff like "how are you"). If I go somewhere, my first question is "Hej! Talar du engelska?" (Hi! Do you speak english?). Of course most people here speak english (quite well, too) but I really hope that I can speak at least some swedish soon. I try to remember all the swedish words I read somewhere (on the street, supermarket,...) but I forget most of them...I hope this will change soon.

Well, yesterday we had our first day of orientation - some interesting informations about the University, Sweden, Karlstad...and of course lots and lots of new people. All in all there are about 190 exchange students, most of them from Germany...some US-Americans, Canadians, Italians, also some people from Thailand and many many other countries. And - so far I've met 5 other Austrians. But I try NOT to stick together with german-speaking people, because I want to speak english (and swedish ;) ) and so far it really works well.
I've also met Jonathan, a Canadian guy - we had some contact before, through Facebook and met yesterday for the first time. He's really nice and he has a girlfriend in Gothenburg. He's a "free-mover", which means that he doesn't have the support of an exchange program, so he has to organize everything by himself, but I think he's doing fine so far.
So, as you can imagine, I met a lot of people, heard a lot of different names and spoke a lot. Gladly, I spoke in english, most of the time. In the evening we went to a student's Pub called "K6" and had some drinks (all the international students and some host students were invited to join). It was really nice, everyone was talking to everyone and I met some nice people from Sweden and Norway.

The people who live in my corridor are quite nice, too. More about them a bit later, when I know them better (I think you can't really judge someone after a few days...especially if everything is new and overwhelming).

Today we had a guided tour through the town and some swedish games, like "Brännboll" (it's similar to Baseball) and "Kubb" (a very strange game where you have to throw wooden sticks on other wooden sticks and...well, let's not get started with that). It was really funny, but now I'm really exhausted and tired.
By the way - the picture you can see above shows the Monument on the "Stora Torget" (Main Square) of Karlstad...but nobody here likes it and it was voted for the "ugliest place in Sweden" twice.

And - I'm really proud of that - I managed to make a bank account, finally. If anyone wants to give me some money - just ask for my account number ;)
So one more thing I can delete from my "Thing's to do" list. No news on the internet problem, though. I hope this will change soon.

So, that's it so far - I promise that I'll upload some pictures and make a flickr-diashow, but I forgot my camera yesterday, so I haven't taken a lot of photos yet (stupid me, I know ;) ).
Hej då!