New job

Many exciting things are happening these days. To begin with, there are semlor every where. A semla is a kind of cake that Swedes eat in this season. It's a sweet wheat bun stuffed with marzipan and topped with cream. It's extremely tasty and lights up the january darkness. I've also started working in Gothenburg. I'm working as a translator for this company for about 4 weeks, and when I'm done with that, I'll go to Japan and stay in their department in Tokyo, doing basically the same thing. I'm translating quite complicated texts from japanese to english and english to japanese concerning a lot of technology. That's the hardest part, that I wouldn't understand the texts even if they were in Swedish. But I do my best, and it's actually really fun to translate. When I'm translating, the time passes so fast. I suppose it is because of the fact that while translating, I have to focus entirely on vocabulary, grammar etc. and I can't start thinking about something else while doing it. It makes me lose sense of what time it is, and after struggling with a paragraph or two I can suddenly realise that 2 hours have passed. Furthermore, I learn so much Japanese. Actually, this work is rather like sitting down 8 hours a day studying Japanese - exactly what I should do! Perfect. And, my co-workers are very nice as well. There's one guy, Gunnar, who is a tea expert. He is in charge of the tea cupboard in the fika room where he stashes fancy loose tea that he purchased for the company's money. As an effect of this, everybody always drink tea. No coffee, only very good tea. Besides from working and sleeping I'm baking a lot. Yesterday was my mum's birthday, so me and my sister Stina made a black and raspberry lemon drizzle cake. Today I made creme brulee. If everything goes as planned (and lets hope to God that it does) I will go to Japan in 3 and a half weeks. That's sooo much time! I really want to go there now. Today. But, at least my work in Gothenburg is fun, I have nice colleagues, the view from my office over the harbour is pretty nice and I learn a lot of Japanese. So it could have been so much worse. I'll try to focus on that.

Skating in 2009

New years eve has passed, and now there are no nice holidays left to look forward to. But soon, the spring will come. To confirm that, I today planted my persimmon seeds that I brought (probably illeagally) from Japan. I just hope they will start growing before I leave for Japan again. Yesterday me and my father went ice skating on the canal. We met like 30 other happy skaters with expensive equipment who passed us in 100 km/h. The skates that we (and them) are using are neither the normal hockey ones, nor the ones that the pirouette ice skaters use. Ours are used for going long distance. My feet hurt though, so we only took something like a 5 kilometre ride. It was nice, but my ankles hurt today...Over to the New years party. I spent new years at my sister's place in Stockholm, which was nice. We had nice food and nice desert. The desert consisted of a popular dish called Marängswiss (Meringue smoosh). You make it from meringues, ice cream, chocolate sauce and whipped cream. It's not very healthy, but it's very tasty. I was very tired all night though, and after playing guitar hero until midnight I tried to go to bed several times, but was woken up by the other guests who claimed that I was boring. They were probably right. Anyhow, I will start working on thursday, which I am looking forward to with a mix of feelings. I am afraid of failing completely but also I think it will be interesting. I just have to wait and see.