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Last time I saw her

Fanny Sura5 April, 201723 June, 2017Leave a comment

Last year in April, I went to Sweden to surprise my mother who was coming home from a vacation where she had celebrated her 50th birthday. I was in Sweden for a week. On April 5th, we went to my grandmothers house. She had been at the hospital for a while and could finally come home that day. Grandma didn’t know that I was coming to Sweden, nobody except my dad knew. She was full of medication and was talking about all sort of weird stuff. Hilarious stories about her champagne parties when she was young. I just sat there next to her and held her hand, listened and laughed. Every time I came to see her the last few years, she was always happy, smiled and behaved like the grandma I know. I’ve never really seen the other side of her that my family and relatives talked about. I’ve seen her in pain, but not in the way I’ve been told she could show it. She wrote letters to me and told me about the pains in her body and how lonely she felt, but she never wanted to show it to me in person. So, I only remember her for the good times. I felt that this would be my last time I would see her. On the plane back to America I could not stop thinking about her. This feeling was so strong and I hated it, but at the same time this allowed me to work on my feelings of her being gone one day before it was reality and it made the actual passing in July easier for me.

It’s hard to be so far away from family and relatives. I haven’t seen most of my cousins in many years, I’ve never even met some of their children or partners. I miss my other grandmother a lot and I would love to spend more time with my aunts and their families. Emails, facebook or actual letters helps of course but it’s not bringing me closer to them. I don’t know when my next visit to Sweden will be, it may not even be this year. I feel bad for living so far away and that I don’t visit them more often. But, they are not visiting me either, so…
Now I know how it is to loose someone and how much I wish that I would have seen her more before she died. I constantly think about that I’m not spending enough time with my family and relatives, but there’s not much I can do about it. I live here. They live there. Flights are not free and travel takes time. I’ll see them when I see them.

fanny-mormor-aug2013 Picture from August 2013, right before my wedding

In Stamford

Walking without a destination

Fanny Sura3 April, 201723 June, 2017Leave a comment

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Last week when we finally had some nicer weather, I took Thor for a walk north west of our apartment. When I want to explore new areas, I start walking in one direction and see what happens. Today we all have a map on our phones, but when I first came to NYC I didn’t have a phone with internet, the phone could barely even text hahah, so I walked around Manhattan with a tiny map in my pocket. I love that and in many ways I hate carrying a phone on my explorations. Anyway,.. With the sun bright on my phone I didn’t really see much more than a green area on google maps in the end of the street we had ended up on, so I thought we could check out if it was a park we could enjoy. The street got cuter and cuter. Houses got bigger and bigger and more nature around them as we kept walking. Quiet, no cars and some birds singing. We came to the end and saw that two lots where blocking the green area. A woman with a dog came and I asked how I get to the park. Well, it was apparently a cemetery so I couldn’t go there. Oh well. The spot I was standing on there was peaceful enough. Cute little forest area with a stream. I was definitely not on Manhattan anymore:) Yesterday, all three of us walked on the same street. I think my husband agrees that it was very cute and there is a lot of nice houses there.

Thor and I went for a walk to downtown one day last week. No specific destination, just walk around and see what we find. The city center isn’t very big so it didn’t take us much time to walk around it all. It’s a cute little town and people are friendly. Of course they all love our smiling little fluffbutt. One thing my husband and I noticed the first time we visited Stamford though, is that stoplights Makes. No. Sense! You can stand there for a good ten minutes having cars from all sides just passing by (even when you press the button). It’s the same when you drive here. Forever red stoplight on all streets of the intersection. Drives us a bit crazy actually. But, Thor and I chose streets with less traffic for the most part. I found where the ballet and yoga studio is and there are plenty of bars that Jim and I can check out. On Saturday evening we went to an Irish pub that had a very European style. We sat next to a fireplace and the food was awesome. Yesterday, Jim and I walked down to the center to check out a furniture store and then we had a fantastic lunch at a tiny place that didn’t look like much but had real good Mexican food. So far, the food in Stamford is great. We walked around for a bit and found some more places we can try in the future and on the way home we got coffee at a place I got recommended the first time we visited this town. They for sure knows how to make coffee there!

There has been opportunities to enjoy our terrace too. Our apartment is facing the morning sun, but we are kinda in the corner and the sun is so high during the day, so right now, we have sun on our terrace until at least 4pm and in the summer I’m sure it will stay longer in the evening. Perfect! Now we just need some patio furniture so we can enjoy it for real:)

So far we like it here. We call it the suburbs even if it’s not that small of a city because of the mix of nature and the small and cute city center.

lorca-coffee-stamford-april2-2017 FandT-terrace-mar29-2017 thor-terrace-mar29-2017

In Stamford

Morning walk

Fanny Sura29 March, 201723 June, 2017Leave a comment

Picture from our first day in Stamford last week

It’s a nicer day today. It’s been raining and been cold, so Thor hasn’t really got any good walks in a few days and I feel bad for him. But this morning I put my sunglasses on and took T for a real walk. I think we might have found our morning walk. It took about 15-20 minutes in a faster walk and the last bit is an uphill (unless we walk the opposite way of course), a good walk for T before his breakfast.
Our neighborhood is cute. There are two churches right by our apartment, lots of grass areas, cute little houses, apartment buildings and it smells fresh:) We need to take T to the vet and get him protected from ticks and fleas so that we can go for more forest explorations too. Now when we have a car we can go on adventures and see more of the country. Not sure our little pom is the best hiking dog, haha, but it will be fun to bring him along.

In Uncategorized

Lots of shopping

Fanny Sura28 March, 201728 March, 2017Leave a comment

morning-march24-2017

I’ve been busy here in the new apartment. I wanted to get rid of boxes as soon as possible so I have been putting everything in piles in the room they belong. The boxes we have left are all under the stairs right now. It’s Jim’s computer stuff and he doesn’t have a desk yet.

We have been enjoying the “suburb” life. On our first day, we went grocery shopping, not much, just few breakfast things. I really felt like I walked in to the real American life. Living in New York is definitely not giving you the feeling that you are living in America. Everybody speaks different languages, you eat out at restaurants and bars from all over the world all the time and grocery stores are crappy and expensive. We went back to the same grocery store few days later and bought everything we needed. Shopping with a cart made us feel like grownups 🙂 The amount of stuff we got would have cost us the double in NYC. I also find a lot of organic and raw products here and everything is fresh! I’ve been feeling like a little kid on Christmas. Super excited about food:)

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On Saturday, we went to Ikea in New Haven, an hour north of our apartment. I love car trips! We found what we came there for, but two things we wanted to pick up in the end of the store was out of stock. So we decided to not bring any furniture home at all and order it online. Back home we saw that the shipping cost was way higher than we had first thought. So, Jim ordered a desk from some other place online and we have to find the other things we needed somewhere else. But we have some new things for our bigger kitchen, a new dresser, towels and of course I bought Swedish food and candy. Mostly candy:) They only had one kind of salty licorice and everything in the “pick-your-own” candy boxes was old and hard like rocks, but, it’s still candy, I like it. And they had my favorite cheese!!

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Sunday is the worst day to go shopping, but we ended up going to Costco then anyway. I have never ever heard of that you need a membership card to go shopping in a store. I thought Jim was joking first time he told me a month ago. You can’t shop there if you don’t have a card. It’s a huge store with everything. Jim bought wireless speakers and we bought lots of meat and coffee. Everything there comes in huge family packs and we don’t need a billion onions or five thousand shampoo bottles plus we bought everything we needed in our grocery store few days before.

Yesterday we went to Home Depot and got a carpet for our storage room, aka my dance/yoga room. It has been hard to find a rug or carpet in the size we want. This one is slightly too small but we also bought a bookcase to cover some of the space and for the rest I don’t care so much about. I think the room will turn out awesome after I have decorated in there:)

Wow, that was a long update about shopping, haha. And we haven’t even bought everything we need. We still need a sleeper sofa, bar stools, patio furniture and something for all of our shoes in the walk-in-closet. We are spending lots of money now, but we want to make this a home. The apartment is almost twice the size as our old one so of course we need more things. I will show you the apartment when we are getting closer to done.

In Uncategorized

a new building

Fanny Sura22 March, 201722 March, 2017Leave a comment

IMG_20170318_161239_250 Moving in to a brand new building is great in many ways. You’re the first one to use everything and noone has touched every single inch of your home before you (I am kinda a germaphobe, so I think of stuff like that). No weird smells, everything is clean, everything is new. It’s awesome!
But, on the minus side…you are the one using everything for the first time. You are the one that gets to check if everything works in the apartment, and some things unfortunately doesn’t. Like, I broke the curtain the first day (which is fixed already, I love how quick they are) and yesterday we tried the dishwasher twice, but there was no water coming in, so it didn’t work. But the guy came here a minute ago and fixed it in like two sec, so it’s all good now.
It’s not a big deal. We knew that it can be a bit risky to move in to a place we know nothing about, but mostly, it’s all great!

The snow on our terrace has almost melted now. Every time we went to see the apartment it was either heavy rain or too much snow so we couldn’t go out on the terrace. And when we moved in this weekend it was so much snow we couldn’t even open the door. But I have been out there to check it out a few times now. I love it. It’s huge! We don’t know what kind of furniture we want there yet though. We want a dinner table and some comfy chairs, but I have to say, it’s not easy to pick it out. Wood is nice, but after a few days of rain you’ll have to through them away since they gonna look bad. Jim wants some frosted glass table but I think it looks too much like a cafe. We’ll see what we can find. It’s fun to look for outdoor stuff:) I’m excited to buy some plants to decorate out there with too.