Back in Siena

Hey everyone now I’m back in Siena and have been here for a few days. Everything is working out well except from the fact that I didn’t pass the driving test yesterday afternoon. If the exam hadn’t been so absurd I might have been really sad about not passing it but I just can’t morn this and I’ll tell you why. Yesterday morning I was practising with the driving instructor and everything went really good, he was actually quite nice this time (which he is absolutely not most times) and was joking (and bitching a bit like he always does) but in the end he was happy about my driving. So in the afternoon I went back to the driving school and we went to this place where we were to pick up the examiner. After half an hour this lady comes out and sits in the back seat. Right away when she understands that I’m not Italian she starts talking about me in third person with my driving school instructor who was sitting in the front seat “so she’s from Sweden? oh, that’s in the European Union so she won’t be needing any permit to stay then” and just went on an on. After some time I started driving because she told me so and after maybe three minutes she says out loud “oh my God this girl is just soooooo insecure” and I’m like thinking “what? what does she mean? the driving or my looks or what the heck?”. Somehow I managed not to care about this comment or the other ones “you know it wouldn’t hurt if you looked in the back mirror every now and then girl” but I stayed quite calm and didn’t miss any of her directions and didn’t do anything out of the ordinary. After ten minutes she’s like “why don’t you stop right here, I’ve seen enough!” and after I’ve stopped the car she says to my instructor “Come one, she doesn’t know how to use the clutch and pushes it down to early, can you imagine what would happened if a person like her got a panic attack in the car and just flipped out?”. I just couldn’t believe what I was hearing!!!!! There we were in the car, she had been bitching about in the back seat all the time and still I stayed calm and didn’t do anything wrong and she’s talking about me maybe panicking and not even giving me the chance to park or to do the U-turn that’s supposed to be a part of the test! After reading this maybe you understand why I cannot be sad after such an unaccepted behaviour and such a pathetic examiner. When me and the instructor was driving back to the city he said to me that he thought she had been too severe and that I don’t need to take any more classes just do the exam over again. What he meant was of course that we would hope to get a normal examiner the next time. However, taking the exam in Sweden does feels like a pretty good alternative right now.

More holiday

There has been a paused in the updating of the blog for a number of reasons, Stefano came to Gävle and we went travelling around a bit and after that we headed straight back to Italy and all this moving around has just kept me from writing down anything. However as you can tell from the pictures we spent a week-end in Stockholm where we checked out the royal castle Drottningholm, the huge outdoor zoo Skansen and went on a few boat trips. We had a great time in Stockholm especially the first day when the weather was warm and sunny. I also got positively surprised by the behaviour of the “08”:s (as Swedes call the people who live in Stockholm) since they were extremely nice to us! The second day when the rain was literally pouring down a man in a souvenir shop gave us an umbrella just because he felt sorry for us (!) and in the evening we me a man on the street who was coming out of a café who offered us biscuits for free that hadn’t been sold during the day. Not to talk about how very helpful and positive everyone was at the hostel and at every other place that we visited.

Kräftskiva at Lilian's place

Welcome to Gävle!

Sweden - Italy 2-2

Back home everything is juuuust the way it has always been! But as I was strolling around downtown the other day I started to compare Sweden to Italy which is quite an amusing thing to do :) Well, Sweden started off pretty promising after many meetings with nice people who are actually working in the service business (italian people working at bars are too busy to smile and sometimes even to say hello). Then Italy rapidly stroke back and scored even as I noticed that Swedes are extremely sleepy and uninterested in the world and what's happening abroad. So far the scores are 1-1!!!! Italy scored another point in the "caring for strangers league" as noone downtown cared about a woman who as sitting on a bench crying for herself and considering that that would never happened in Italy without anyone approaching that person I could just accept the new scores as 1-2. Sweden then surprisingly stroke back in the "honesty league" as the waitress wouldn't say how well-tasty the food was at the restaurant (she probably didn't think it was that delicious) - and I found myself staring at the final scores: 2-2. So my final desition remains: even :)