Christian’s Journals

January 31, 2026

The New Year

January has been quite the fun month! I went to a new years eve party with one of my friends' host family friends. I originally had no plans for New Years but the day before I was invited to this so I was quite excited. We ended up playing a few games and lots of socializing and meeting new people.

Having the snow here has been quite magical. One night after hanging out with some friends I was walking home. It was around 1am so no one was out. Since I live in a small town I was able to walk down the middle of the road. As I was walking home I decided to stop by the old town. There are plenty of lights around the town so I was able to see everything and when I got to the old town it was extremely beautiful. They have these really old red houses and seeing them with these large snowflakes slowly floating down felt a bit like a fairytale. The houses were quite close together so there was no wind and it was absolutely silent. It is definitely going to be one of my favorite memories from Strängnäs.

Another fun activity we did was play this game called Jet lagged! What it is is this game kind of like hide in seek but in a whole city. The team that is looking has an assortment of questions that the can ask to find the other team. It's a bit more complicated than that but for the sake of the story that covers it. The first team took a train and hid while us; the other team looked for them. It took us around two hours to find them. Unfortunately while we were looking for them there was a Jeremy Fragrance meet up that we were unable to attend. After that the team's roles switched and we hid. We hid in this building maybe 200m from T-Centralen and the other team actually didn't end up finding us. A few of the people had to go home for dinner so the game had to end. We started at around 10am and played for the whole day but we were only able to do two rounds. After that we said goodbye to one of our good friends who was returning to Australia quite soon after. Since the Australian school year is from jan to dec they have their exchanges from jan to dec as well. 

Being on exchange has been such a  wild experience. I've met people I would have never known about, did things that I didn't even know were options, and had so much fun. I think everyone, at least sometime in their life, should spend an extended time abroad. People always say that you should travel to discover yourself but I never understood that until now. I know see that it comes from completely detaching yourself from everything you've grown up with and you're used to. At this point you learn so much about yourself by trying new things without the pressure to do what everyone knows you for.