On Thursday we left on a 2-hour boat trip through the Sweden Archipelago, a group of 10,000 islands, rocks, and "skerries" (not sure what those are) off the eastern coast of Sweden. We traveled to one of the furthest islands, Finnhamn. Since the winter has been mild, all the trees still have their leaves and it reminded everyone of the coast of Maine. We got to the island and dropped our stuff off in the hostel we would be staying at. It was an extremely nice hostel, with wooden floors and medium sized rooms with large windows.
Throughout the day, we had short meetings with the directors, going over the program rules and policies. The meetings didn't take up a lot of the day, so we had a lot of time to explore the island and sit around and talk to each other. One of the meeting directors, Elen, taught us a traditional game "kubb", which involves 5 people per team throwing wooden sticks at wooden blocks at the opposite side. It is a lot more fun than it sounds, and we all got very involved. There were chefs at the hostel who prepared us 3 traditional Swedish meals, including (of course) Swedish meatballs. The typical breakfast here is yogurt and granola, usually with lingonberry juice.
I'm hoping to travel around a lot more. Some of us want to travel to Estonia, only because it's fairly close and apparently an interesting country. Also, I'm planning on going to Copenhagen and also northern Sweden.
