I was really nervous about going to Swedish class tonight. Aside from singing along with Swedish pop, and browsing a few pages of the novel I bought in Sweden, I haven’t spoken any Swedish since the beginning of August.

Before going to class tonight I did some revision which, to be honest, I found a little hard. And so when I turned up at class tonight, I was pretty anxious about how much I would remember.

But once we got started tonight a lot of it came flashing back. I think my pronunciation is still pretty good. And I wasn’t bad at putting sentences together either. Although I understood everything I had to read, I struggled a little with some of the comprehension exercises where you have to “fill in the space” or “say something back” based on the text you’ve read. But I never was very good at comprehension. I’ve always been much better “bigger picture” than on detail. But still I did okay.

Unlike last time I have no specific goal in mind, aside from a very vague goal of returning to Sweden in a couple of years, probably at around the same time.

It was also nice to see Marianne, and to relate some of my travel stories, and to hear about her travels for her son’s wedding.

And I “came out” at class. With a whole new bunch of faces I had absolutely no qualms in saying my interest in learning Swedish is because I like Swedish music and Swedish cinema. “And do you have a favourite pop group?”, Marianne asked. Everyone laughed, in a nice way, when I said “I love ABBA”. That was fun.

Amusingly I noticed a sign on the window of the cafe, noting the establishment of a new Swedish cinema group and two new Swedish community liaison people. Guess what their names are? Anna and Frida. I swear, it’s true…