Ok, so we're alive...
Indeed, we have arrived, and we're OK.
So far, we've slept, gone out and changed money, gotten some groceries, slept some more, and come over to a coworkers house for dinner. In fact, we're at their house now, and we're borrowing their wireless connection, which is much better than the dialup phone card we have at our place.
However, I don't mean that to say that our guest apartment isn't nice; on the contrary, it's really pretty wonderful! Nice bedrooms, a lovely kitchen, a nice bathroom, really, everything nice! Of course, it's not ours, but we've been told we can stay there for a while while we look for a place.
The trip was, well, a long trip. It really can't be a terrific experience, as any of you who have taken long flights will understand, but as long trips go, it went well. Thanks to all of you who thought of us, as Steven did great! He went to sleep within 5 minutes of takeoff every flight, and slept for almost all the plane time. We didn't have any trouble with visas or luggage, other than the fact that we had to leave security every connection and go through the checks again to get our boarding pass (all our flights were on different airlines). Not to mention the strange airport situation at Stockholm; have any of you ever been there? Just strange trying to find the right line, and then the airline reps weren't even there until 90 minutes before the plane was scheduled to leave, etc. Anyway, we did eventually get to the right place, and then all our bags got here with us. All I can say is thank you for remembering us!
As far as our first impressions, I have to say that everything is more "Western" than I had expected. Our apartment really is nice, the grocery store was pretty similar to the ones we had in England (prices maybe just slightly higher than the US). So far, apart from being totally exhausted (Steven had some bad carrots for his first meal here and screamed most of last night), we're doing great. Couldn't ask for anything better.
Tomorrow, we're headed to a meeting with one of our coworkers, then the whole team is getting together for a chat. It looks like we'll have a couple of weeks before we have to start language learning (although just walking around is language exposure at this point), so that will be nice. Thanks for continuing to think of us as we begin the search for a place to live this week. Hopefully, we'll be able to post some pictures of our apartment and the town sometime next week.
