Louise Hansson’s Blog

Who am I?

I’m Louise Hansson an 18 year old girl who lives in Sweden. I attend secondary school here and will be graduating in -11. I love to watch movies, and that’s usually what I do whenever I have a spare moment in my life. I really love to dance and I have been doing cheerleading for about 4 years, but I recently retired from doing that. hehe. Reeses and Dr Pepper can pretty much make me feel better whenever I am feeling down so I make sure to ALWAYS have that at home.

When did you decide to go on an exchange and why?

I was actually in the US 2004 to visit my dad’s relativ who lives in the state of washington on the west coast. I absolutely loved it there and ever sence I came back home to sweden that summer I always wanted to go back and stay for a long time. So I nagged my mom about moving there with me. My mom could get a job and I could go to school and we would have the best life ever. But my mom didn’t seem so enthustiastic about my proposal to move so I ended up looking things over myself and found the exchangeprogram as a starter:) I had just turned 17 when I started getting really impatient to go back over there so in April 2008, on the due day, I signed up for an interview and I got accepted. Lucky me.

You went to USA. What made you chose USA?

The fact that I had been there before and everybody over there are super nice to foreigners. But I think that it also had to do with the fact that America is soooo cool! haha

What was your biggest fear before leaving?

What was your biggest fear before leaving? What do you think about it now when you have been there for 2 months? I had no fear. And had nothing to fear. I was just extremely excited to leave. It may sound wierd but I was looking forward to being away from my family for that long. I could finally feel like I did something independent without my mom or dad being involved.

Has it been hard to change language?

Not At All. It was rough in the beginning to understand all the ghetto-slang they used but after a few weeks I felt like I had learned their use of it and I could start using their slang myself. haha. It was probably the most fun i had over there. Messing around with the english language. and some people thought it was so funny how used it.

How was the school in USA different to the one in Sweden?

For me it was a BIG change. It was like goin from living on the street to all of a sudden owning a huge house. That big of a difference. First of, In High School there are four classes (Freshman class, sophomore class etc) nomatter how many students there are at the school. And in the swedish school. We might have 100 different classes. But only about 20 people in each class. While the High School classes have more than 100 people in one class. Hard to explain. But that made it harder to get a good contact with some of the student there because you only saw them everynow and then. And in the US the sports played a huge deal. The school spirit was the best part of it all. It was so incredible to see everybody get so involved whenever there was a big game going on. dressing up in the school colors and shouting out chants to get the adrenalin pumping. It was just so much better than out swedish school.