Small town idyll

In an attempt to get some visitors to the place where I am living right now I will publish some pictures of the surroundings to start with. Pictures of the town will come later.

If you take a boat out for an hour, you can have a perfect rock by the water to yourself for swimming and sunbathing on one of the islands.

The harbour.

The most famous feature of Kristinehamn; the huge Picasso sculpture

Life in the Small Town

One of my friends said that the stories I tell from the small town where I am living right now is just as exotic as the stories I told from Manila or Harare or any of the other places I have been, and I somehow think she is right. Life here is just so different! And that although I grew up in the country side.
There is also an extreme difference between my work life and life outside the work. I work in a highly international atmosphere. None of my colleagues come from this town but all moved here. Most of them have worked abroad, many for UN in Geneva, New York or Rome or on missions in Sudan, Congo or Pakistan. We are sending missions and planning projects in Afghanistan, Iraq, Liberia, Ukraine and many other places. So in the office, you might sometime forget you are in Kristinehamn. But then you go out and you are brutally confronted with reality.
Today some of us went out for a couple of drinks after work and that in itself (going out for drinks on a Tuesday) is not the thing people do in the small town, so we were pretty much alone in the bar, but that’s ok, we had a good time. On the way home I saw some guys playing with an old Volvo, racing three rounds around the roundabout with smoking, shrieking and rubber-smelling wheels. You don’t see that in the city! I also met a young kid enjoying himself by throwing a big plastic bottle of soda in the air and letting it fall down on the asphalt until it exploded. So that is how to amuse oneself here…
I think I will have to find a way how to cope with life here. There are some really nice colleagues living here, but most of them have an apartment and maybe also a partner somewhere else as Stockholm or Gothenburg and go there every weekend. So either I should try to find out what to do here or just see to that I don’t have to stay here so much.

My Social Handicap

I have just realised I must be suffering from a rather different, but severe kind of social handicap; I just can not say no to fun social gatherings! Today, after having been away for a couple of days, I really felt it would be so nice to just go home after work and try to sort out some of all the things that are piling up at home, make some of those phone calls, write those mails etc. And then when one of my colleagues sent an e-mail about going out for a couple of drinks after work I just felt that there was no way I would join…. I did not even feel like having a drink as I had been partying quite some during the weekend.
Yeah, right! Of course I went there! Of course it was very nice and I enjoyed it, but it is so strange that I just cannot!!

A new life?!

It feels as if it was ages since I last wrote anything for my blog. I have been busy changing jobs and location. I have now moved to the townlet of Kristinehamn and started working at the international department of the SRSA, Swedish Rescue Services Agency. Before I got here I was busy making my mind up, as I had another offer that was quite tempting, and even got better after a while. So I was in the somewhat absurd position to choose whether to move to Kristinehamn or Dhaka. I still feel satisfied with my decision!

This far life in the small town seems ok. The town is by the water and is a nice summer town. I have just two minutes to a beach from my apartment and the office as well. That is another good thing about small towns; everything is close. It is quite pretty, although very quiet, almost a bit dead and I wonder what it will be like in the winter…. But what the heck, I don’t have to spend all my time here!

The job seems great!! Today we had a day of social activities at the office and I got to learn mine searching and see some nasty bombs and mines as well as some very heavy machines to get rid of them; got to see a mobile emergency hospital; do some GPS-caching and do some wall climbing. Great fun! Ok, that is of course not my normal work. I am in the strategic section and will work with strategies and policies, but it is cool to have an exciting employer. Something different from the work with migration matters! I think it will be great!