Happy (northern summer) solstice, everyone!

[DFW]

12. I was never that far north in Norway.

The train ride from Stockholm to Kiruna already seemed to take forever, and I just couldn’t face four more hours to Narvik. At the time, I hadn’t started studying Swedish yet, so I felt a little odd, even though most people knew English rather well. But that just made me feel worse. I started college that fall, and immediately enrolled in a Swedish course. My professor was from Uppsala, and was a brilliant teacher. She spoke only Swedish from day one, and took care at first to only use Swedish words that resembled English words. Luckily, that meant almost half of them. It turned out that if your native language is English, Swedish is incredibly easy to learn if you have a competent teacher. After one year of college Swedish, I returned to Sweden and never had to use English there again. I never made it as far north as Kiruna again. My professor said they spoke a weird dialect of Swedish up there, not even getting into Finnish or the language of the Somer people (the Lapplanders). But I didn’t know the language yet, so I never knew what to listen for when I was there.