Pure Pain

Now I'm not complaining, and I don't want you to get the wrong idea. But for a moment, let's just be entirely frank and admit the obvious: trying to fit in at a party in a foreign country where you don't know the language is PURE PAIN.

Imagine this: you are going to a dinner party among your friends and acquaintances. You are happy to have a chance to get out and see your friends, meet people. However, you are forced to wear a skin-tight electric purple lamé bodysuit that shows EVERYTHING (This goes for you too, guys. Purple lamé). For good measure, let's say it also has a weird flap in the back that keeps falling down exposing your butt. Something like that. Now imagine that you can't make a big deal of it. You can't talk all night about how you were forced to wear a purple lamé bodysuit with a weird flap in the back that sometimes shows your butt. Instead, you just have to act like it's the most natural thing in the world, and make small talk all night, and try not to notice that people are looking at you funny and inching away from you. And for politeness sake, you have to stay for at least a few hours.

That's what I would say is the equivalent of trying to hang out at a party with the linguistic skills of a two-year-old.

As you may have guessed, I was at a very nice party last night, one of those dinner parties where there are about fifteen people. It was at my friend Sara's; she and her boyfriend have a lovely apartment, decorated in the retro style that you see often in Stockholm, that take this look all the way:






















That sort of thing.
I speak Swedish well enough at this point to just do it, just not disrupt everyone else's ease and good feeling by forcing them to switch over into English. But I'm telling you: it's pure pain. I'm committed to it, because I know it's the only thing that will make me get better, but honestly, I hate it!