Round-the-world tickets are booked and paid for. Need to get Australian visas (no problem), travel insurance (just need to order and pay), figure out baggage restrictions, start digging into some travel books and then start to figure out what we actually want to do in Thailand and Australia. We know what we want to do in Hawaii - some hiking, mostly beaches!
Miranda visited the wonderful travel section at the Stockholm public library. Now it's time to do our homework. Bad timing though, I'm really starting to get into Män som Hatar Kvinnor (Men who Hate Women), better known by the US title The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, and I really don't want to put that book down. It's especially exciting because even though Miranda has been reading Swedish novels for over a year now, this is my first attempt, and I know that I'm missing a lot of details, but it's no problem to stick with the plot, and it's quite rewarding to realize just how much of the language I actually know.
It's kind of funny - I was ashamed of my Swedish until we went to Germany in March. Then I realized that I was able to communicate in Germany with an active vocabulary of 25 words that I've retained from my studies long ago. I figured if I could get by with so little knowledge of a language, the thousands of words I knew in Swedish had to be good for something. I'm still hesitant to speak Swedish if I know the conversation topics will move outside of my comfort zone quickly, but I've spoken more Swedish in the last six weeks than I had in the previous three years combined. Wish I had stumbled upon this realization years ago.
This post ended up a lot longer than I intended (like usual). It's 11:00 on a Friday night and I have a lot of work to do tonight and tomorrow. I just don't want to do it, so here I am typing away. The distraction is horrible, especially considering we need to do a 20 mile run and about six loads of laundry tomorrow, so working isn't going to get any easier. Bummer.
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