Heißen Sie willkommen nach Deutschland!

To my audience:

I know you have all been worried sick about me, wondering if I ever did get a hold of STA Travel’s Customer Service and found a replacement flight.

Well, you can relax, because I have made it home safely, but I wouldn’t be too disappointed if you felt a bit sorry for me because my new travel accommodations were extremely worse than my old ones.

My original flight was supposed to leave at 11 a.m. from Stockholm’s Arlanda Airport, land in Philadelphia 8 or so hours later, from which I was to take a second plane that would land in Seattle 5 hours after takeoff. So the original trip would have taken around 18 hours altogether including driving to and from airports and waiting at the airports in between. That was bad enough. The replacement plan was much worse. I had to fly from Stockholm at 6:30 a.m., land in Frankfurt, Germany and wait there for 4 hours, then take another plan to Philadelphia, where I waited for an hour and a half, and then get on a third plane that took me to Seattle where I waited for an hour for my friends to pick me up. The overall trip was almost 29 hours long. It absolutely sucked. I would never wish this situation on anyone ever.

How do I figure? Well, you know how I love to lay out the details, so hang on tight because I am going to recap the whole thing to you.

My last night in Sweden was awful. Marcus and I slept on the sofa in his parents’ house because all the beds were occupied. I had a very hard time falling asleep for many reasons. 1) I was very upset that I was leaving very soon and didn’t want to waste my last few hours in Sweden sleeping. 2) My back was hurting very bad from sleeping on horrible surfaces and sofas are not the best for supporting back issues. 3) The sofa was too small and I was hanging off the edge. The point is, I had a terrible shallow sleep that lasted three hours if that, so I was the opposite of well rested when I embarked on my return home.

Marcus’ father woke us up at 4 a.m., and we were on the road at 4:30. That is when I start the timer. We arrived at the airport at 5. I was feeling sick from my lack of sleep, the dread of the journey, and reluctance to say goodbye to my best friend.

Marcus stood with me in line and made sure I understood my travel instructions and got my bag checked in okay. I felt really numb at this point, mostly because I was too exhausted to think straight, and everything just felt like a bad dream. Marcus was very groggy and delirious as well, and I feel like our goodbye was very bland. I feel like it should have been much more dramatic and emotional, but it wasn’t. It was “Bye, I love you, see you someday in the future”. Then he was gone. The instant he was out of sight, reality hit me like a wrecking ball and it was as if my eyes were dams that exploded, and the lakes they held crashed into the land around them. I didn’t have the capacity in my mind to deal with the pain I felt then, and I didn’t care that I probably looked like a fool standing all alone in an airport with streams of liquid anguish pouring down my cheeks. After all the goodbyes I had said throughout the last few days of my stay in Sweden, I realized that this was the final goodbye. The boring, insignificant goodbye that marked the end of a momentous time in my life.

I had a middle seat on the first plane. I sat in between two elderly gentlemen that didn’t even glace my way. It was a miserable couple of hours. I tried my best to sleep, but I am not very good at getting comfortable when in a sitting position.

Upon landing in Germany, I had four hours to waste before I could check into my gate to board the second flight. The Frankfurt airport was a royal pain in the behind to find my way around. The security check points were absolutely anal and there were many of them. It was way worse than the American airports. I became very good about pulling my belt off and ripping my laptop out of my backpack, though. Not something I really wanted to invest time into getting good at, but I didn’t really have a choice in this matter. I spent at least an hour finding my gate. I had to climb stairs and take a sky train to a separate terminal and climb down stairs and go through several security checkpoints before I made it to my gate. I arrived to my gate too early though and I was not allowed to go sit in the gate area until it was my official boarding time. That was annoying. I was very tired and grumpy, and all I wanted was to curl up in a ball on the floor and sleep.

So then I had about three hours to waste. I had my laptop with me, but it only had 12% battery life remaining. I had a European plug for my laptop, and so I searched the airport for an outlet, and I found two. Both of them were in use. So I walked in circles for a while, sat in a chair and listened to music, and wrote in my notebook. I was generally unhappy about all of it.

I was so happy to get on that second plane where I knew that at least I could relax and have a blanket for at least a little over eight hours. This was the least horrible out of the three flights. I attempted to position myself in a semi-comfortable fashion so I could nap a bit. I achieved something tolerable and took a nap. I woke up with a trail of crusty drool down the side of my face and a wet spot on the pillow I had my head on. My nose was stuffy and my throat hurt.

I managed to stir up a little small talk with the man sitting next to me on this flight. He was polite, and I was glad about that. I feel like unsocial and rude people are abundant on planes for some reason. He was actually interested to talk to. He told me that he is in the U.S. military and he drove trucks down in Iraq. He lives in Germany now with his Romanian wife and two very small sons. The conversation stayed fairly shallow until towards the end of the flight. The flight attendants passed out U.S. Customs documents that needed to be filled out, and I glanced over at his and noticed that his last name was “Riddick”. I pointed and said quite loudly, “No way!” He laughed and said he got that reaction a lot. After that, we fired up our personalities and started talking like we were old friends catching up. I learned a lot about Mr. Riddick. He likes peanut butter on his pancakes and his wife has tons of shoes that she stores in suitcases. He was really excited to eat American pizza because he hates the way Europeans make their pizza. He is from North Carolina and was on his way back to visit there.

It was nice to have someone to talk to. Someone like me does not do well keeping quiet for too long. It was also very nice to have someone to talk to while going through the annoying procedure of re-entering the United States and having to go through U.S. Customs and Border Patrol and having to re-check in all the luggage and have to go through the whole airport security crap for the millionth time.

Once I was in the U.S., something switched in my brain and I could feel that I was no longer in Europe, not only geographically, but also mentally. I hated that. The last flight was the worst. I wanted nothing more than to be held like a child and comforted because I felt so lonely and so lost.

I sat in a row of three seats on this plane, the seat in the middle was empty, I sat next the aisle, and a man sat next to the window. It was nice to have the middle seat empty so I could lean over and try to situate myself in a little more comfortable way than the previous positions I had tried. This is the flight where all my emotions came crashing down on me. I had my headphones on and I began to write things in my notebook. This is what was written:

Time is a demon
Impossible to out run
Every minute is a bullet
Every mile is a gun
The growing distance is the trigger
This plane a shaking finger
As the space between grows bigger
The deepest sadness lingers

Place I love left behind
To return to my
Reoccurring nightmares
When asked, I denied
When denied, I lied

I attached my heartstrings
To where we slept
As the plane flies, I am unraveling
Hold tight to the piece of your heart I’ve always kept

And also…

The moment you were out of sight, I caved in. Everything became blurry. How will I sleep tonight, how will I live? All this time spent piecing myself together, just to fall apart. Is it possible to rebuild a broken heart? Sweet country of my destiny, reveal yourself to me. I don’t want to remain hollow. Will fate ever intervene? The reality now is like poison and I will not swallow, but you don’t speak the same language emotionally as me and you don’t get what I mean. Perhaps I am much too foreign and you will never comprehend what it means when I walk your streets and sail your seas. What I mean when I sleep in your beds and hold your hands and press my body against your land. What I say when I sing on your stages and what I hear when I listen to your bands. What I feel when I dance on your floors and sit on your shores. I can never be satisfied, I’ll always need more. Wait for me, Sweden. I’m coming back to you. It won’t be long till then. Please stay true.

Landing in Seattle was relieving in a way because I knew that my aloneness would be extinguished by the friends that were meeting me there, and I was not disappointed. I encountered a pretty girl named Brianna running toward me like a crazy person, and I welcomed the sight with open arms. Not but a few feet behind her were my friends Paul and Grant. I was home at last.

It’s been a few days now, and so much has happened since my return. As much as I am glad to be home and in the arms of so many people that I love that love me here, I have left half of my heart in some little country across the ocean. It is ever so inconvenient to try to function as half a person, but for the time being, there is nothing I can do.

Hello, America. It’s been a while. Farewell, dear Sweden. I love you deeply and will return one day.

Already I have so many exciting things to document about my first days home, but that is material for another blog at another time.

I am ending this entry with suspense in the air. Be excited. Because I am exciting. .

Ground Control to Major Dumbass

I am a planner.

I enjoy having a good solid plan that I can work all the nitty-gritty details out early on in the process. This allows me to be able to sit back and relax while events can unfold in the order in which they were supposed to, right?

...Wrong.

Last I checked, I did not make any room in my schedule for a flight cancellation, but it seems to have happened anyway. Thus affirming that a fool-proof plan is a figment of imagination and is not possible to create.

Perhaps this is irony, pulling a fast one on me. After all, I have been complaining about how much I do not want to leave Sweden for the past couple of weeks. Not to mention the mess I was yesterday, crying in the arms of my friend and telling him that I wish so badly that I could stay and live here in Sweden. Yeah, yeah... careful what you wish for, I know.

I received the unsatisfactory news about an hour ago via email. It said the following:

"PLEASE CONTACT STA AS SOON AS POSSIBLE AS YOUR RETURN FLIGHT HAS BEEN CANCELLED AND WE NEED TO DICUSS OPTIONS FOR REACCOMIDATION. PLEASE CALL AT 1-800-777-0112.

THANK YOU"

All in caps. For the record, if you just canceled a flight I spent half a year working to get the money to pay for, I don't want to feel like the email you send informing me of it is yelling at me. And on top of it, I feel like a travel booking agency should know how to spell the words "accommodation", "canceled", and "discuss".

Perhaps I am being one of those insufferably anal people by complaining about the email quality. I mean, it is just a job to whoever sent that email, and they probably don't give a crap how I feel about them using all caps. But it still really sucks to wake up to such crappy news. And perhaps I wouldn't be so upset if I only had the email to be upset about. But that is not all. Oh yes, there is more.

Immediately, I called the number given in the yelling email. I was greeted by the ever-so-friendly and over enthusiastic voice of a recording. "Thank you for calling STA Travel, your call is very important to us, blah blah blah. Now listen to this awesomely cheesy music we stole from a porn soundtrack and listen to the same three advertisements over and over again for the better half of an hour until we feel like talking to you."

Honestly, I kid you not when I say the better half of an hour. I sat there for a good ten or fifteen minutes before I decided that it was going to be a while. I sliced some cheese and tomato and made myself a sandwich for breakfast, I used the restroom, and I browsed around facebook for a while (because I'm cool like that). The recording played for so long, I began to recite along with the advertisements and predict every change in the music. Finally, the call went through and I got an answer.

You can imagine how relieved I was to hear the voice of the customer service representative, so you must realize how absolutely disappointed I was to find out that Customer Service was actually closed for the night and she was merely on night duty in case of emergency. It was ever so heart breaking.

And that leaves me in my present state. I am lying in bed, completely stressed out but utterly helpless. It is almost 10 in the morning here in Sweden, and almost 1 in Washington State. Customer service is not open for about six more hours.

I should get up soon and pack my bags and get everything ready to go, but I am in a bad mood and I don't feel like it at the moment. I must be on a bus that will take me to Stockholm at 5 this evening, so I don't feel like I need to start packing yet. So I shall lie here and fume for a while, then perhaps I can find it within myself to carry on with my duties.

I have no idea how I just composed such an elaborate portrayal of how awful my morning has been, but I suppose that is the power of being pissed off.

Until further notice, over and out Planet Earth.

The Final Countdown

I am currently staying with my best friend in the whole wide world, Marcus Stenbeck, at the university he attends in Norrköping, Sweden. I accompanied him to a fancy themed dinner tonight where we proceeded to partake in a very traditional Swedish dinner called "Pea Soup and Punch". Pea Soup is self explanatory, and punch is a sweet hard liqueur that is served along side the soup. I don't much like peas, so my bowl of soup remained fairly full throughout the dinner. The punch, however, I could deal with. It tasted like a very sugary version of tequila. And those who know me know I love my tequila. Perhaps a little too much.

Anyhow... moving on.

I do believe I mentioned something about choreographing 'The Final Countdown'. Well, I did a pretty dang good job of it. I am hoping that I will get it on video so I can post it here for the world wide web to witness. Marcus and I became a dance team and did our best to dazzle our slightly intoxicated Swedish student audience with our sexy movements. It was absolutely brilliant, if I may say so myself. Marcus and I tried hard to capture the crazy dramatic dance moves of the 80's. That can be extremely tough sometimes. Take it from me, folks.

Oh yeah, did I mention we looked downright drop dead gorgeous?






I have been bouncing around emotionally all night. I am feeling the pressure of leaving already. I feel like this is my last weekend in Sweden, so I need to make the most of it. At the same time, I am doing that thing that many girls are experts at, which is sulking. I have found myself to be acting quite sober and even grumpy a few times tonight because I am upset that there are only a few days left of my wild Swedish adventure.

At the dinner tonight, every table was provided with some markers that were meant for writing or drawing on the paper table cloth underneath our dinnerware. I had a moment of sadness in the midst of all the partying, and decided to write my feelings out onto the tablecloth. Before I left the dinner party, I managed to tear out the piece of tablecloth that I had written on, and now I am going to share what I wrote on it.

My time has arrived.
The sound of laughter filters through my ears and becomes the sound of terrifying screams in my tortured skull.
Glasses full of cheer, chink together in celebration of my worst fears becoming real.
Fill my goblet with poison and I will disappear from this dreadful scene, I will forget your face and the places I've been.
Fading away, it has come to this.
Death poses an offer I cannot resist.
I cannot live in that town.
This truly is the Final Countdown.



There was a really awesome after-party that I went to post-dinner, and I enjoyed myself almost the whole time. There was one point where I accidentally approached someone I thought I knew that looked extremely like someone I knew, but was definitely NOT someone I knew at all. It would have been fine if I realized this before making a very friendly physical gesture, but I did not. Very unfortunate for me. I think most people can relate to that feeling. And also the feeling right after realizing what you have done, then trying to play it off cool, pretending like you really do know that person, and they are the idiot for not recognizing you.

All in all, it has been a good night. It is almost two in the morning, and I have been sipping on various alcoholic drinks since 7 p.m., so I shall apologize in advance for any errors.

I am still struggling with negative feelings because I know my eyes are going to create a flood when I have to leave on Wednesday morning. It is in my personality to anticipate things way too soon.

Dang it, I am sulking again.

The Alien Princess

So today, I got really bored.

I choreographed some moves to Europe's "Final Countdown".

Then I decided to make myself what I called an "Alien Princess". Inspired by David Bowie, I disappeared into the bathroom and transformed...

....Into this...













Being me is way too much fun sometimes. By too much, I mean an unhealthy amount.

The Taking of My Blogger Virginity

This very sentence I am typing right in this very moment with my very hands marks the end of my Blogging Virginity.

Exciting? Well, not in as much of a sexual sense as I wish it was. But, it is a sort of a mood enhancer. So far so good.

Moving on…

I am currently enjoying my last week of being halfway across the world from my current home, in Bellingham, Washington State. I have been away from my home for a week less than two months. I have been floating about the lovely little country of Sweden. I have been here once before, last year, but this year has been a completely different experience. I have managed to weasel my way into the hearts of some absolutely wonderful Swedes here, and they have returned the favor to me.

It is a strange feeling to behold, being away from home for this long. I don’t really miss being there as much as I feel I am expected to, but I suppose I shouldn’t feel like there is a level of appropriate or inappropriate amount of missing I should have towards my hometown. That’s just silly.

Last year, it was hard to leave here after just a month. This year, it feels like I am truly leaving a piece of myself here. Because of this treacherous dread of leaving this place, I know it will not be too long before I return.

I got to meet up with the people I grew fond of last year, including the Stenbeck Family, Jovva, Charlie, Victor, Ante, Pelle, Blom, Johan, and of course Martin and his family. This year, I have so many new awesome people to add to that list… Jonas, Mike, Mikael, The whole Karlstad Gang, Anders, Henrik, Teodor, the cool kids in Norrkoping, and a whole bunch of other awesome Swedes… I met so many amazing people here; I cannot even begin to attempt to list them all at once. But I am known to have an outstanding memory, so I will cherish every single one of them.

I will miss all of you…

I have had many amazing experiences here in Sweden. Here is a list depicting what some of those things were…

- I got to play an awesome show with my beloved band, Pretty in Punk, at Stockholm’s University.

- I got to go wakeboarding with Jovva, Charlie, and Simon at Vaxholm’s water ski club.

- I saw “The Dark Knight” in one of Stockholm’s cinemas with Carin and Marcus.

- I drove a minivan full of punk rockers, music equipment, loud music, and beer.

- I engorged myself with certain food items I cannot obtain in the states such as Marabou Mjölkchoklad, Kex Choklad, Cheez Ballz, and all sorts of really good cheese.

- I was forced to play Wii Mariokart… and I am now a lover of it.

- I became addicted to Dr. Mario.

- A very large toad peed on my hands. It’s a long story. Long and wet.

- I picked up a giant grasshopper and it attacked Jovva.

- I went with Marmar to his parents’ summer house and built an amazing fort for his adorable toddler niece and nephew.

- I made a birthday cake for a special dude that turned 24 this year.

- I attended Frasses Fixar Fest and made an absolute fool of myself. The best kind of fool, of course. The kind that you point and laugh at.

- I built a beer bong while in Norrkoping, so I could properly teach the university students how the American college kids party.

- Martin and I played in a studio and he recorded one of my acoustic piano songs, and he turned it into a Disney-like production. So awesome.

- I watched Neverstore and Millencolin at Gröna Lund with Marcus, Carin, Anders, Charlie, Victor, and Simon.

- I went on a date with Marmar to Garlic and Shots (a bar) in Stockholm and fell in love with the Bloodshot. I can never get enough. It’s like spicy pasta sauce with vodka in it. I love it.

That is all I can think of in this moment… but that is only a small chunk of the massive amount of adventures I have been partaking in while here in Sweden.

I do have a week left. The opportunities for awesomeness to occur are bountiful. I am sure I will have many things to add to that list before my time is up.

Stay tuned. This is the first of many entries to come. Entries that will unveil your eyes to the chaos that is the life of Bridgett M. Fox.

(Parental guidance suggested.)

Before ending this session, I would like to take a moment to thank Martin, whose fault it is that I am blogging. Every time we talk, he always has something to share with me that he learned while reading someone’s blog. He has many different blogs he checks up on from time to time, and I have found that it is not without reason. People are interesting. In some strange way, I feel like pinning my thoughts to the internet, and reading the thoughts of others, make me feel like I am more of this sticky web called humanity. I am not a shy person, and it is time I become involved.

So now, officially, I am so involved.