Valkommen Til Sverige

I am writing now from Sweden which is the way it should be. So enough talk about Hawaii. It’s time to start the real blog. I am now on a three year journey to become a Swedish Sloth. It’s nice to have a mission. I will need to learn the language, the customs, and the culture. And then learn to sleep through them.

The flights over here, all three of them, were pretty bearable. It was a six hour flight to Seattle followed the next day by a 9 hour flight to Copenhaagen and then a 1 hour flight to Stockholm.

In Seattle we rented a car for $26.00 and stayed at a hotel for $37.50. You gotta love America for cheap stuff. The woman at the rental place was a stout lesbian with carefully trimmed facial hair. She gave me the heebie-jeebies but she gave us a free car upgrade and told us that the hotel we had chosen was not safe because there was a cop shooting there recently. The conventional wisdom is that if cops are getting smoked they will be less likely to rush over there if a problem. Linda said not to worry because she found the place on hotels.com. The hotel was fine, an oasis of calm in the skankster’s paradise that is Sea-Tac. Thanks for freaking me out for nothing, Advantage Rent-a-Car attendant.

The next we collected our bags from storage and stopped at the Broadway Grill for a nice breakfast before stopping to pick up our mail at the Post Office, and heading to the airport. It suddenly occurred to me that everything I owned was in my two suitcases and my carry on bag. My most prized possession was my Dell laptop, which I am tapping away on now at the breakfast table. I LOVE IT! It shocks me that for $850 you can get such a great machine like this…. 14” screen, CD burner, DVD player, and wireless internet. Awesome little writing machine.

When we arrived at the airport we were afraid we would be overweight and have to pay a lot of charges. Our bags were like Double Stuffed Oreos. Why? Every couple has strange habits. One of Linda and my strange habits is that we have a family of stuffed animals which we play with. Our family has 10 members now, but I won’t go into that now. I’ll save that for a slow day. But all those animals take up a lot of space in our bags. We had to throw away perfectly good clothes to make room for our “kids,” who have names like Fishy, Ootay, and Pengo.

At the airport Linda announced that we had enough time to get drunk before the plane left. We drank for 3 hours and managed to spend $80. I just got a new credit card so I decided to break it in. A month previous, I laughingly applied for a new credit card right before we left for a Platinum credit card with an American Flag design on it. By the time I got back to Seattle it was in the mail. I got approved for a $4,000 limit. My credit must be getting better. I have been paying my bills and stuff. Awesome. Now I can get drunk another 39 times with the card. More if I make some payments.

On the flight to Stockholm, we lost 12 hours of lives, which means Stockholm is currently 12 hours ahead of Hawaii. You would think that would make for some wicked jetlag, but so far it has been very very mild. I may have a slight cold but that’s really the only physical discomfort I have been suffering.

My mental suffering has been a little more profound. I took to drinking from nervousness about the move for pretty much the last week of Honolulu. I have moved to Europe to go to school many times before so actually being in Europe is nothing new to me. What bothers me is of course is emigrating from America back to Europe. Still, I am sure I will get over it. In a month’s time it will be no big dealio.