My Swedish must be getting better, because people don’t instantly switch into English anymore. In fact, a couple people have kept on speaking Swedish to me even after they found out I was American, which is pretty cool. I am starting to actually understand people; for a long time I could talk but I couldn’t understand a word that was said to me. Then, I got to the point where I could pick out enough key words to maybe guess at what people were saying. This time I can actually understand complete sentences, as long as there are no strange or long words in them. One word I don’t know and my mojo is totally thrown off; the whole sentance sounds like gibberish.

My stepbrother Carl is here with his girlfriend Ariel, so we are having an early Christmas today with them, and then my sister and her fiancee are coming up in a couple days for “real” christmas. Carl and Ariel are vegetarians, so my stepfather is cooking a totally veg Christmas dinner for them tonight. This morning he was leafing through the cookbok, saying things like, “what is a Christmas dinner without meat? I all my life I have never heard of such a thing.” It’s nice though that he’s actually catering to them instead of just making them fend for themselves.