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.