Christian’s Journals

October 1, 2025

Starting to settle in

After being here for two months I've started to settle into a rhythm. It's interesting to see how quickly I've adapted to life here and made so many friends. I've started going to the gym here and have plans to hang out with friends almost every weekend. This past weekend I was in Stockholm with a few other exchange students for the Lidingöloppet. The Lidingöloppet is the world's biggest cross country race and has 15k and 30k. Me and one other exchange student participated in the 15k and finished in 1 hour and 27 minutes. I was quite happy with this because I had decided to not train for it. There were two other exchange students who ran except they did the 30k. I believe that they finished around 3 hours and 15 minutes. 

Earlier in the month I attended a rotary dinner and was able to meet some awesome people. It ended up where I might be able to take a short international trip with a rotary! It's not confirmed but if it does end up happening I will write more about it here. I also just went to my first Rotary meeting. I didn't understand everything but it was great meeting everyone and now I have plans to go play golf later this month! 

Over these past three weekends I've been traveling to Stockholm a lot. Three weeks ago I took a train up to Stockholm on Sunday, ran a 5k in the city, then did a photography trip with another exchange student. We walked around gamla stan and surrounding parts of the city for a few hours taking photos. We also ended up going to the Vasa Museum which was one of the more interesting things I did this month. Later in the year I definitely hope to go to more museums. I've already spent way too much money on train tickets to Stockholm haha. Two weeks ago I went up to Lidingö to hang out with another exchange student. We hung out on Saturday and then we (me and the three other students who would be running the race) did a 15k practice. Since we were on the Island we wanted to try and run the race course but we quickly got lost and ended up running who knows where for an hour and forty minutes. Finally, last weekend we had the race. The race was on saturday so we all came on friday to pick up our race numbers. On Saturday our start time was 10:20 so we decided to wake up at 8. The issue was that I failed to learn that we needed to be at the start line 20 minutes before we needed to actually start. After we dropped our bags it was 9:45. The other issue was that we didn't know that the start line wasn't near the bag drop and was actually 1.2k away. Pretty much we had 15 minutes to make a 20 minute walk. This left one solution which was running. We ended up running around halfway there until we saw people in our starting group walking. Apparently the extra 20 minutes was so that you could check in a jacket at the start line so it didn't really matter that we were a bit late. While we were running in the race a few of the other exchange students cheered us on and met us at the finish. After that we watched the 2 students doing the 30k start, then went to Stockholm to get some food. We ended up getting some amazing tacos then hung out for the rest of the night. I stayed the night at another friend's house then went home around 3pm the next day. 

Things here have also started to get colder. Almost everyday I bike to school and I've started to need a jacket over the fleece I'm wearing. Overnight it can get into the low forties. I'm really excited for winter to come because of all the activities that come with it. At my school apparently for PE class we get to do ice skating which I'm really looking forward to. I believe we also get to do a cold plunge in the lake. As for upcoming plans later this month I'll be going golfing with some members in my club. I've never been golfing before but I've wanted to for a while. Also, in a few weeks a few other exchange students will be coming to Strängnäs for a big market! Things here are going really well! Until next time