kitchen

that we have a new apartment in the new city in the new country seems like a wonder. to call the rental market in the greater stockholm area a disaster would be an understatement. if you want to rent an apartment in sweden you have to either queue for a couple of years (in stockholm and uppsala that would be 10-15 years for a decent place to live in) or rent "second hand". that means that you rent from somebody who rents, but doesn't need their apartment for a couple of months or a bit more.



we were unlucky and got to experience the worst part of the housing situation first hand: the stress on the rental market benefits frauds like nothing else. not only did we lose a lot of money, we also went through a couple of more than stressful weeks looking for a solution. knowing that i'll be homeless in a week's time was one of the worst feelings i have experienced so far. thankfully, vackra-kläder-joanna offered us her old apartment in the south of stockholm and let us live there during november. joanna, you are an angel!



now we rent a wonderful apartment (second hand for 1,5 years) with a huge kitchen (the pictures show some details) and lovely neighbours, and i have started looking for a job. i take one step at a time, and rather slowly as well. there are not that many positions out there at the moment. until the end of the month i get unemployment benefits from norway, but we'll manage well even if i don't find work immediately. things start to look brighter - and the sun shines a little longer each day.

green box

not only do we have new apartment in a new city (uppsala) in a new country (sweden), we also started a new life concerning what we eat: we ordered a "green box". which means that every wednesday we get a large box with ecologically grown veggies and fruit delivered right to our door. it greatly reduces the schlep-factor in grocery shopping, is not much more expensive than buying regular vegetables at a supermarket, the quality is higher and we even get information about where our happy apples grew up.



so far we have only tested it for one week, but i'm really happy about it. we get three different sorts of fruit and six sorts of veggies (whereof usually at least one kind of sallad) and i try to come up with fun recipes to use them. i would say that each week there will probably be at least one fruit or vegetable that i usually wouldn't buy or have never bought until now. definitely challenging!



another good thing is that come summer we'll try out the completely swedish box - not only organically but even completely locally grown. i have to admit that with all the beets and roots during winter it is just not as attractive for us right now. we really don't like beets. at all.

for those of you living in sweden, we order lilla mixlådan from ekolådan. i'm sure there are similar offers in germany and lots of other countries. check it out!

edit: in germany you can google "grüne kiste" to find out if there is a service like this close to where you live. i also did a quick search for "vegetable subscription" and there seem to be a couple of programs in the states as well as in great britain.

new city, new apartment, new life

everything is kind of new. even though we already moved in the beginning of last november, i feel like we only moved here just at new year.

a new country, new city, new apartment, new life.



the last half year has drained me completely, i lost all my energy and initiative, and the last thing i felt like was blogging. even though i formulated ideas for blogposts at least three or four times a week, i just couldn't sit down and write, much less for the world to read.

but now. i started a new blog (which i will link to in due time) but really want to blow life into this old one again. the new one will be more work and less life. this is more life and less work. at least that's the general idea.