Me and My Flag. (A Children's Book)

Hi. My name is Lissa, and I live in a country named Germany, but I visited my friend in a country named Sweden!

I took a plane to go visit my friend, Felicia, in Sweden, and it was very exciting!

Sweden was new and pretty, but there was still some snow! One night, me and my Swedish friends put on very pretty dresses for a special dinner, and on our way to the restaurant we found….

A beautiful sky-blue and sunny-yellow flag! Do you know this flag? This is the Swedish flag.

We bought the flag and started having a lot of adventures around Stockholm, Sweden.

I went to a lot of cool places with my flag and learned tons of cool history, and sometimes we took funny photos too.

Me and Felicia had tons of fun in Sweden, especially with my flag.

Now, I am back in Germany, but I still have my flag and want to go Felicia visit again! I am proud to call myself a little Swedish and say: “Jag heter Lissa” instead of “Ich heiße Lissa” or “My name is Lissa.”

The End.

Today, I sat in the car and watched out the window at the Autobahn. I watched the roads curve in between mountains. When you drove around a bend, you would find yourself driving on a bridge over a town nestled in a valley. I was used to this kind of drive for when I went south of Aachen to my host-grandparents’ and cousins’ houses. In contrast to the drive south of Aachen, there are the roads to the east and the north that I know well too. Last Wednesday morning, even though it was still pitch-black outside the windows when my host-dad and I left at 6:00AM, I still knew the flat green fields we were driving past with hills in the background. By the time the sun rose, I didn’t recognize the landscape as much because we were driving in a new northward direction for me. There were a different kind of trees outside the windows, and a new Dutch-like landscape rolled by. I was on my way to a small airport to fly to Stockholm. I have been dreaming about going to Stockholm since we dropped Felicia off at the airport last June…

I sat in the front seat and told everyone how I wanted to go visit Felicia in Sweden when I was in Germany. Tori immediately gave me a reality check of how I “wouldn’t be able to travel as much as [I] would like to,” and it will be very unlikely. Instead, my answer was: “It will be the cheapest to visit her when I am in Germany than it will ever been again in my life. I am going to figure out a way.” Tori just shrugged her shoulders, knowing I would see for myself once I got to Germany…

I sat in the airport, happily, remembering that from the previous summer and laughing at Tori in my head. I did it. I walked across the tarmac after not checking any bags (that’s what you get when your flight costs less than $50 roundtrip), and a sense of independence rushed over me. I was going to Sweden!

I found myself three hours later sitting on Felicia’s bed and just listening to her talk about our week’s plans in awe. She was blonde again, which had surprised me when she scared me at the bus stop. Her motorcycle boots and red velvet leggings didn’t fit my memory of the girl I knew, but the black bow in her hair assured me it was the same one. Oh, how much I had missed her! After a quick tour of their apartment, which amazingly cool and urban (I was mesmerized by her shower of all things), I was staring outside her bedroom window where I could see the main shopping street in Stockholm just one block down. I don’t know how she did it. I don’t know how she went to Prosper, Texas where everything is miles away, and a person relies on others for transport after growing up, literally, in the middle of downtown Stockholm. Stockholm is a city of 750,000 people, which is less than Köln’s million, but they seem to have so much more to offer.

(My first moments with Felicia as she showed me Stockholm)

My following week in Stockholm was beautiful. Wednesday night after I came, me and Felicia didn’t do much besides for pick up cookies and pulled out season 2 of Gossip Girl, so she would have to stare at that temptation to get her homework done. Thursday morning, I got up and was very excited to go to school, but it was all in Swedish so the majority of my understanding came down to a piece of paper with important Swedish words that Felicia had made for me. The Math teacher graciously welcomed me, a boy came up and thought I was new student thanks to his friends’ April Fool’s joke, and I looked through Felicia’s books in class and searched for those similar word that I could understand thanks to German. Thursday night, me and Felicia pulled out all of the glitter and sequined covered clothes in her closet, which was a lot, and got ready for a birthday party! I selected a black, high-waisted skirt with Felicia’s black sequined vest and my pink tank top, a combination that I wasn’t sure if I was brave enough to wear outside the house. We met up with a friend of Felicia's and took a subway out of the city where the snow was still on the ground, the water was still frozen, and the houses looked more like pictures from a book. Inside Elvira’s, the birthday girl’s, house, everything was completely and totally white with the lightest birch on the floors so every other color seemed to pop against the background. The windows lining the house showed a view below that no photo could do it justice. While I looked at all the girls showing up, I leaned over to Felicia and whispered: “One of my German friends told me about how she always thinks of Swedes as so fashionable and so beautiful. I am sitting here and looking at you guys and the word ‘glamorous’ keeps popping in my head. This is like a movie and completely glamorous.” Felicia laughed and pointed it out that this was a 18^th birthday party, and they don’t normally have champagne glasses in their hands either. It was a great night.

(I recognize that I can’t tell about everything in such detail, so I’m going to try to hurry it up from here on out)

Friday morning, we woke up then Felicia, her dad, and I made our way to the airport. Sweden had blessed us with some sun, so I could see all of its glory out of a little 4-person plane that Felicia’s dad could fly. It was my personal tour of Stockholm and the greater Sweden. We saw everything from the sky: the castle, Felicia’s house, the landmarks, and the vastness of 20,000 islands stretching out to form such an archipelago. No tour from a bus down on the ground could have shown that or how the ice was slowly melting now and the tracks where it was or had been thick enough for cars to drive across.  Driving out to the reaches of Sweden’s border almost in Finland, Felicia pulled diet coke and cinnamon buns out of a bag her dad had brought. How perfect! Later back on the ground, we prettied ourselves up for a nice Good Friday dinner at a famous hotel down in the harbor. On our way to the restaurant is where my lovely children’s book begins; we found a Swedish flag that was a fitting gift for the American. Dinner was great, and our eyes were bigger than our stomachs as we saw the amazing buffet. I took this as my opportunity to try caviar and herring, both of which weren’t my taste; however, the dessert buffet was. Felicia, her sisters (Carolina and Viktoria), and I all loaded up our plates and cleaned them off as quickly as possible.

Saturday, Felicia and I took my flag around the city for it’s first official tour of Stockholm with the American. She showed me the beautiful “Old Town,” and my flag bounced happily out of my purse. The bright orange colors of the buildings were something I had never expected in Stockholm, but they shined brilliantly in the afternoon sun. I posed for photos with my flag around the city, the castle, the harbor, near the museums, on our way to McDonalds for ice cream, and in a store. At the castle, an older woman came up to us and asked why we were carrying the flag, thinking we were both just random Swedish teenagers with a flag. Felicia had to explain the mix up in Swedish, but she would start speaking English. I was rubbing off on her. : ) The woman started talking to me in English and surprised me by asking if I was “brain washed” too. She was referring to how we said the pledge of allegiance with hands over our hearts. Is that brain washed? All in all, it was quite a successful day.

Sunday was Easter, but we woke up and continued on my tour of Sweden to see the inside of the castle and couple other museums. To explain the history Viktoria joined us, but we were all confused as we walked to the castle and they were doing a huge ceremony. The soldiers had huge guns and were brandishing knives. Yes, I am aware of the American military and their guns, but it was uncomfortable for me to see the soldier not let a hand off his gun, even though there was no one of importance there. Weird. We saw the castle, still decorated with styles from the 17^th century, and Felicia and Viktoria told me a little about Swedish history where the words “queen” and “king” stood out funny to me. We visited the treasury and a museum of the crown underneath the castle, which were all really interesting. I didn’t think about it much, but it was Easter. A day normally began with church and Easter hug hunts. Instead, we continued our day with eating yummy cake and a coffee shop, buying jeans, and then going to the gym to work off some of the candy we had been eating. The gym open on Easter? Nothing was weird about that. Felicia’s mom and her sister were leaving early the next morning to have a mother-daughter trip in Paris, so we said our goodbyes but not before eating a wonderful Easter dinner and finishing it off with ice cream and tons of “thank yous.”

(Stupid BlogSpot won't let me turn the photo...)

Monday, we woke up to a thin layer of snow in Stockholm, so our plans of visiting an outdoor zoo/museum were scrapped for a day of baking instead. Felicia pulled out the ingredients for traditional Swedish cinnamon and vanilla buns, and I happily helped wherever I could. Over three hours later, there were over fifty warm buns on the counters even though a good deal of the dough was eaten in the baking process. After painting our nails too, Felicia, Viktoria, and I got ready and went to the movies to see “Remember Me.” Even after Viktoria told me all about the movie and I saw the trailer, the ending still came as a shock to me. I would recommend you see it, so I can’t ruin it too much, but it was still my first time sitting in a movie theater with a movie in English in almost 8 months. (Sweden has only 9 million people, so most American movies and TV shows are played here in English, versus in Germany where synchronizing and dubbing voices is a huge industry)

Tuesday was recognized as my last full day in Sweden, which would have been a lot sadder if Viktoria hadn’t gotten up early and made amazing pancakes, covered in strawberries. We gobbled them up despite their beauty. Then Felicia put the question out there: “What do you want to do on your last day?” This meant meeting her friend at the Stockholm city library then going out for ice cream and sitting on the King’s Garden, collecting my last souvenirs from Stockholm, buying chocolate and picking out candy to take back to Germany, checking out the stores, and taking the requested photos of Felicia’s shower for my mom. We finished the night off with movies in Felicia’s room like we had been accustomed to and then Sushi for dinner.

Sleeping in Felicia’s water bed, I was going to miss that. Seeing the water around me as I walk over bridges, I was going to miss that. Talking in English and it not being my problem when people had issues with the language, I was going to miss that too. Hanging out with Felicia even if we were only watching Gossip Girl, I was definitely going to miss that. I miss it already. Coming back to Germany, I pulled my bags back down to my room and immediately put the Swedish flag up on my wall, that was a part of Sweden that I didn’t want to forget. In my blood, I am a quarter Swedish and a quarter German which both have proved a pretty big importance to me.

So, thanks for holding on and reading everything if you did. Congratulations! That’s my experience of Sweden in a nutshell.