My first Swedish Intercultural experience

Today, on the advent of the due date for our team project delivery, when almost everyone in class is busy working and writing their parts of the 40 page paper due bu each group, the professor for our next course, Intercultural Communication, organised an Intercultural Lunch for our class and one of her Swedish classes.

About 15 of us decided to go , to honour the efforst put in by the Swedish class to prepare the food for this lunch. I have been in Sweden for close to 3 months and because my class is 100% international , I have had very limited interaction with Swedish students in my age group and as a result a very derivative view of the Swedes, their behaviour and their way of life.

This was my first organised opportunity to interact with Swedes and not just Swedes but Swedes who are in my age bracket and also study at the same university as myself. They prepared a banquet made of traditional or commonly found dishes on Swedish dinner tables such as the renowned "köttbullar" or swedish meatballs, potatoes, salmon, red beet salad, swedish bread, sausages, a dish made of fish and potato called Johanssen's something, herring and much more for dessert and drink such as Julmust, and strawberry cake.

In addition to the spread prepared for us the company was also very enjoyable. All of the students sat with us and were very freidly, talkative and made genuine efforts to get to know us better and talk with us about what we liked, observed and thought about all things Swedish.

It most definitely was one of the highlights for me in terms of my experiences in Sweden thus far. I am looking forward to a few more like this.