London eyes on Swedish Interiors & other stuff

Welcome to my first blog.

I’m not one for writing to much although I have kept a diary for the last couple of years and I must admit it feels good to clear the head.

On this blog I’ll write about the differences between Swedish / English Interior Design (my second passion), my wife being my first. My life here compared to my life in London and my experiences of learning the Swedish language.

So how did I come to be here?…Pure Swedish love. My wife is Swedish and I met her in Camden Town (London) 8 years ago. We married a few years ago and moved here last Christmas.

So far all is good. I’ve been studying SFI (Swedish for invandare) in Malmo for the past 8 months. Now I’m not a language person and the thought of learning a language, scares me. I’m not naturally gifted in this department and anything that does stick between my ears (which isn’t much) I’ve gotta work hard at, some people (like my wife) only have to look at a language and are able to speak it fluently.

Today for example, I was doing some Swedish homework, I had a paragraph to write about a film I saw earlier in the week, it took me ages to write and I felt so dumb and thought what the hell am I doing….whilst pulling my hair out! In the next room my wife was on the phone to work, speaking 3 languages fluently…some people have all the gift!

The other day in class, I caught myself drifting and thinking about my old life in London.
There I was quite successful. I had my own Interiors / furniture business. I had lots of friends. Most of them wanting to move out of London for a quite life. That’s the problem with London now, the Londoners are all moving out…a dying breed…and then I took myself back into class and the comparison couldn’t have been much different…two totally different lives.

Do I like my new life?

Yes I do, I love the challenge and of course it’s different to what I’m used to and when I’m down I pull myself back and remind myself that I’m lucky to have the opportunity to learn a new culture and language. At the moment I’m relying on English to much which is holding back my progress in Swedish. Everyone speaks English, which is great, but its not gonna help improve my Swedish.

I’ve had loads of advice from well meaning friends they say ‘speak only Swedish with your wife’…well if that happened we would be divorced by now….so I don’t think that’s good advice and anyway it would be so boring for her if I kept asking her name or where she lives, oh yeh she lives with me.

Before I finish, I wanna give you an example of how challenging my life can be some times. After taking a shower the other day I lathered my body in ‘body moisturizer’ it went on better than expected and thought this is good stuff. The following day, again in the shower, I saw the same bottle but in the shower cubicle and then it twigged I’d used shower crème instead of body moisturizer. I had lathered my body in shower crème!!  Bloody Swedish instructions.

Life can be hard!! But I suppose that’s the challenge. Until next time.

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Tags: my new life

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 20th, 2009 at 7:05 pm and is filed under Life. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.